„Safe and reliable operation always comes first.”

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Mr. Lála, as head of the Transformers Department, you know the assets like the back of your hand. How important to you is regular maintenance of the systems and what intervals do you consider appropriate?

Equip­ment main­te­nance is cru­cial for us, espe­cial­ly to ensure the safe and reli­able oper­a­tion of the trans­mis­sion grid equip­ment. The main­te­nance inter­vals are deter­mined by ČEPS’s Pre­ven­tive Main­te­nance Code, which is based on the equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers’ man­u­als and also reflects oth­er require­ments of ČEPS’s spe­cial­ists.

Some operators consider extending the maintenance intervals or performing the maintenance themselves. What is your philosophy on this?

There is of course a finan­cial aspect to sys­tem main­te­nance, but ensur­ing safe and reli­able oper­a­tion sim­ply comes first. In gen­er­al, our main­te­nance strat­e­gy is geared towards knowl­edge of the system’s con­di­tion and thus, above all, towards sophis­ti­cat­ed and high-qual­i­ty sys­tem diag­nos­tics. We car­ry out main­te­nance tasks with our own per­son­nel, but here too we con­cen­trate on demand­ing and high­ly spe­cial­ized activ­i­ties. In the area of pow­er trans­form­ers, we have our own main­te­nance group, which car­ries out around 50 per­cent of main­te­nance of this type.

How long have MR’s service staff been servicing your systems and how satisfied are you with the results?

We have had a ser­vice con­tract direct­ly with MR since 2017. Pre­vi­ous­ly, we had already used ser­vice com­pa­nies with MR cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to car­ry out main­te­nance on MR sys­tems, in par­tic­u­lar trans­form­ers with on-load tap-chang­ers. How­ev­er, work­ing direct­ly with MR now ensures the best pos­si­ble ser­vice qual­i­ty for these sys­tems and the avail­abil­i­ty of orig­i­nal spare parts. We are sat­is­fied with the results of our coop­er­a­tion with MR and intend to con­tin­ue it.