How to avoid unscheduled downtime
1 March 2025
Investing in effective maintenance and energy resilience strategies can make a big difference to business productivity. Massimo Muzzì from ABB Electrification outlines how companies can avoid costly downtime, while optimising efficiency and reducing their energy bills.
All businesses fear unscheduled downtime, whether it’s a halt in production, power brownouts, or a data centre going offline. Such downtime impacts revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation. An unreliable system is inherently inefficient, and vice versa. Fortunately, improving the efficiency of electrical assets often requires minimal effort and investment, leading to better resilience, productivity and energy security.
The real-world costs of a failure can be far higher than just the cost of an hour’s interruption to perform a minor repair. Briefly halting a food & beverage facility can mean a day’s lost revenues, while lines are reset and sterilised before production can resume. Allowing a blast furnace to cool for emergency repairs can take days, followed by several more as it heats back up for production to continue.
Identifying the root cause
An ABB survey of over 3,200 plant maintenance decision-makers in 2023 found that unplanned downtime costs an average of €147,000 per hour, with 69% of industrial businesses experiencing outages at least once a month. Despite this, many companies still rely on reactive maintenance since electrical systems can show few signs of impending failure. Operations managers may ignore deteriorating assets, waiting until issues escalate.
Replacing a blown circuit breaker is a temporary fix unless underlying problems are addressed. Predictive asset management can significantly enhance reliability by identifying root causes, reducing time spent on minor repairs, and lowering the risk of serious failures. This approach can decrease maintenance time and downtime by 30%, achieving a 40% reduction in OpEx costs compared to traditional time-based maintenance strategies.
Embracing proactive maintenance
Reactive maintenance becomes problematic as electrical distribution systems grow in complexity. More interdependent components across factories, refineries or hospital campuses create more points of potential failure. This issue is exacerbated by ageing electrical infrastructures, increasing the likelihood of costly unplanned stoppages. The reliance on continuous reliability of electrical systems is further heightened by the adoption of digital technologies for automation and monitoring.
Digitalisation enables businesses to adopt a proactive approach to maintain efficiency and performance. Condition-based maintenance strategies monitor individual components over time, using advances in AI and machine learning to analyse operational data. This allows for the early detection of signs indicating a device’s imminent failure.
Implementing a predictive maintenance strategy is challenging, especially for plants with legacy equipment alongside modern technologies. Replacing all assets can be costly, but retrofitting offers a viable option. Upgrading non-digital circuit breakers to intelligent, digitally-enabled models linked to an ABB monitoring system can enhance energy capacity by up to 20% and reduce operational costs by up to 30%.
For example, ENGIE, a leading energy supplier in Europe, chose to retrofit its switchgear systems. By replacing conventional components with ABB’s vacuum circuit breakers, ENGIE improved safety, performance and energy efficiency, and reduced total ownership costs.
Similarly, Kemijoki Oy, a key player in Finland’s carbon-neutral electricity system, needed to upgrade ageing circuit breakers for reliability and to meet sustainability and safety standards. A complete overhaul wasn’t feasible, so ABB provided a type-tested, customised, SF6-free retrofit solution, minimising costs and downtime while ensuring ongoing plant operations and supporting the country’s energy security.
Boosting energy security
The link between maintenance of critical electrical infrastructure and uptime is clear, especially as organisations increasingly rely on these systems for business continuity. Rising energy prices and geopolitical uncertainties challenge energy security across sectors. In response, businesses are investing more in renewable power sources, such as wind turbines and solar arrays, allowing them to generate clean electricity independently.
These local power sources can be integrated into microgrids – self-contained electrical networks serving areas like business parks, data centres and hospitals. Microgrids can reduce or eliminate reliance on utility companies, ensuring independent energy supply during severe weather or emergencies, thus avoiding unplanned downtime.
The stability of microgrids is often enhanced by Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), which provide immediate backup power and absorb excess energy from renewable sources. This flattens demand peaks and reduces stress on electrical components. Additionally, BESS decreases reliance on diesel or gas-powered generators, lowering carbon emissions and mitigating the impact of volatile fossil fuel costs. Surplus energy stored in a BESS can even be sold back to the grid, offering businesses a supplementary revenue stream.
Modernisation and upgrades
According to our 2023 survey, many companies struggle with managing multiple energy sources, including renewables. For instance, 40% of data centre respondents cited protecting the integrity of their power supply as their biggest challenge. Downtime is unacceptable in facilities like data centres and power plants, making timely maintenance crucial for uninterrupted operations.
Finding suitable windows for equipment upgrades or replacements is also challenging. Adopting a progressive approach to modernising electrical assets can mitigate downtime risks while extending equipment life by years or even decades. Upgrades can lower operating costs and enhance sustainability.
Mälarenergi, one of Sweden’s largest cogeneration plants, connects 98% of properties in Västerås to the district heating network. To achieve net zero fossil carbon emissions, they partnered with ABB to modernise 16 switchgear units. By replacing ageing circuit breakers with modern Emax2 models that include Ekip Hi-Touch relay protection and energy metering, they ensured full protection while incorporating technologies that reduce energy consumption.
This upgrade not only extends the lifespan of critical infrastructure but also minimises the carbon footprint associated with manufacturing new systems, including transportation emissions. Upgrading has a significantly lower carbon impact than complete replacements, making it an environmentally friendly option.
ABB has successfully helped customers extend asset lifetimes through this approach, enabling some to reduce operating costs by up to a third. While many businesses wish to adopt a proactive maintenance strategy, it often proves challenging. Incremental retrofits and upgrades can effectively reduce downtime risks, improve performance and lower carbon emissions.
Massimo Muzzì: Head of strategy, business development and sustainability at ABB Electrification
