Questions/Answers

At the dawn of the 21st century, Thailand is facing several problems issues; poverty, disease, inequality, climate change, and so on. Thai people are suffering from lacking sufficient and good quality basic needs, especially in rural areas. In the past few decades, there is high inequality of life quality between people in big cities and rural cities. Thus, people in rural areas have less opportunity to earn good well-being. The core objective is to develop the well-being of present and future generations sustainably through cooperation between people, public enterprises, and technology. Real-time machine learning innovation with cloud sourcing is the best answer for the analysis power distribution system and maintenance process to ensure continuity power delivery. Furthermore, this project was maintaining economic and socially healthy for people in both an urban and rural area in Thailand. Clearly, electrification is a necessity to grow economic, improve social's wellness, reduce migration, and improve medicine. Thus, our ultimate aim is continuity electrification with security, reliability, and good quality by improving resilient infrastructure through integration maintenance innovations in regions. In summary, this project focuses on applying data analytics and artificial intelligence to reinforce the maintenance process of electrical power system infrastructure. The outcome shows that and meets with a context in this region.

The project aligns in promoting digital transformation in the public sector category since this project was helping the integration of innovations which was designed to support electrical equip maintenance. Besides, this project is developed using big data analytics, multiple database systems, and artificial intelligence applications in a power system. Furthermore, the project has a positive impact on continuous electrical supplying and blackout or outage minimization. Our focus area is electricity customers in Thailand and nearby countries.

This project conforms to the SDG goal 9, to be more specific on target 9.1, which is related to the industry, innovation, and infrastructure aspect. This project improves the reliability, security, and sustainable of the electrical power system infrastructure. Both urban and rural areas equally gain the reliability of the electricity to develop the economy, society, education, and medication. This also increases the opportunities for the distribution of income and promotes small enterprises all over the country. This project also supports small enterprises to enter the international market. Moreover, this helps in reducing the inequity in the region. This links to the SDGs8, which promotes employment and economic growth. Besides, this project will change the mindset of people who only used to consume energy into the people who makes benefit to society by creating the electrical learning center in the area throughout the country. Apart from that, to make the people participate in this project, the volunteer is needed for taking care of the electrical power system, which is the people's own and public properties.

Energy access in a rural area is fundamental to the economic and social aspects of sustainable development in developing countries. A majority of Thai people relies on farming and agricultural process, which is a specific part to push local income and the country's GDP. Moreover, increasing an employment rate in rural area drag down migration rate, as a result of the reduction in social inequality. Besides, public health care is entirely operated. So, this project could play a key role in reinforcing energy infrastructure, which could improve the economic and social aspects, as seen in the attached summary report.

In general, the government and the public sector collected numerous information separately. Hence, they have faced difficulty while they were analyzing, used, and utilized this information as a result of detention in their operation and service. These lead to declination in economic and social growth rate through deployed public and government policies. In fact, the use of technology in Big Data and AI for internal operations in the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) made a significant change in creating an efficient and rational decision since it provides comprehensive, analyzed, and sufficient information to operators and maintenance crews. Thus, the electrification in both urban and rural areas becomes more stabilized and reliable as a result of the high growth of small and micro-community enterprises. With this project, the corporation between local government administrators, public agencies, and PEA increases sources of digital information for those organizations. With a more significant number of data, the government sector’s employees, general people, and PEA can work robustly and rationally. As a result of effort in reducing the inequity and increases the development of electrical power system support and support the expanded economic growth to the region following the SDGs.

In the past, there was a believe that maintenance is a job for men. The woman was not appropriated to that such duty. Furthermore, this project can break the rule by support sufficient analyzed information. Besides, a woman engineer can involve maintenance jobs, planning, root cause analysis, and even making a decision. Moreover, stabilized energy deliver service could prevent migration to the urban cities. Not only a man, a woman could find a job in a rural area, but also aged people. In concluding, this project improves gender equality and elders’ well-being.

This project contributes 20 million households, including the industry, education, community enterprises, and the medical sector, to have reliable electricity consumption. The outage reduced by 35.91 percent. Besides, the main industry of the people in the area or community enterprise needs electricity for transforming the agricultural product equal to the electricity consumption in the big cities. This also makes the sufficiently providing the electricity in the hospital where it is essential to the bedridden. Moreover, after establishing the electrical learning center, over 5,000 persons have passed the training on the electrical power system, including the youth, vocational certificate students, diploma students, staff, teachers, and community leaders all over the country. These people will contribute to the PEA staff to look after, report the outage risk, and effectively solving the problem before affecting the general public.

The operation of this project emphasizes the benefit of the general public by gathering the executive, specialist, and public sectors to contribute to the development of the maintenance of the power distribution system. Firstly, start with the data collection from PEA in terms of technical, money, the number of people who are affected in each cycle, and the information of bedridden and hospital in each area and keep as the same database. This project will reliably maintain and maximize the power distribution system. After that, provide the knowledge to the government staff, community leader, and the general public to promote the knowledgeable volunteer to look after the electrical power system to be more secure. Besides, the follow-up and evaluation of the developed project through the working group is necessary for the sustainable development of the project. Furthermore, the important feeder can be especially specified such as hospital, bedridden, and even in emergency events such as Tham Luang cave rescue in July 2018. Tham Luang cave is in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand. Twelve members of the soccer team was trapped inside the cave due to heavy rain and flooding. In this case, PEA is a part of international corporation along with hundreds of volunteers, military specialists and corporate experts from more than 20 countries. The electricity distribution and reserved power system are very crucial behind this success to make the continuation of electricity distribution and no outage issue during the rescue mission.

The main obstacle to this project is the difference in geography condition and the high amount of electrical systems. Since the length of 328,421 kilometers, the operation of this project is slow. Thus, AI is developed to arrange the priority of the distribution system; for example, to prioritize the area which has an urgent problem and need the immediately maintenance to avoid the outage. Apart from the technology used by PEA staff, the assistance from the public in the area is needed to specify the certain error to PEA.

The energy stability was analysed in region or country scale. However, this project considers as a tools of health index estimation for small areas; both urban and rural areas. The AI applications is a key role of health index estimation, which represent risk of outage and number of affected customers. This is the reduction of the inequity of electricity performance in each region. The project also fulfills the policy of the government in terms of developing the economy and society by distribution the economic into the rural area.

This project is novelty utility scale maintenance platform which originally develop first in the region. However, the project was inspired by existed innovation projects, data analytic concepts, and AI tools. Furthermore, cloud sourcing technique motivate the project to cooperate with public and external organizations in order to assist the our operation and maintenance.

Since the project was lunched, here is an examples of knowledge transfer activities. This project was tested in Chai Nat and Chonburi province in 2016. In 2017, the result of this project was extended to the PEA stations all over the country. The establishment of the electrical learning center which has the contribution from the general public was firstly located at Tha Maka district, Kanchanaburi province. As of now, there are 25 electrical learning centers throughout the country. Apart from that, PEA has applied the learning center for Electricite du Cambodge (EDC) and Bhutan Power Corporation Limited (BPC) and annually specified the program topic chosen by EDC and BPC. Furthermore, PEA also provides training and counsel in maintenance, solving the electrical system, and technology in several aspects in the energy business to Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar for a long period.

Before the national deployment, this project has successfully deployed on the provincial scale mentioned in 7.a. Moreover, it can transfer electrical power system knowledge to the outsider by establishing many local learning centers which aim to cover all areas in the future. Also, a local volunteer network is created for system maintenance and power outage prevention nationwide. Finally, the electrical system of government is one of the factors for power outage prevention. If there is a lack of proper maintenance and knowledge, it will lead to an increase in the power outage rate. So, the project objective expands to cover the government’s power systems, which will provide knowledge support to the government officers.

From a whole budget approved by the project committee, the project allocated more than two billion bahts for the electrical power distribution system maintenance for the stability of the system. Another eleven million bahts are spent to establish local learning centers for providing a better understanding of electric appliance usage and electrical power system maintenance. It results in rural people and project volunteers having the proper knowledge to support and inform technicians about the power system before the power outage.

All PEA staffs have their high earnestness and responsibility to achieve the organization missions. Moreover, due to a large working area, PEA has created a clear project work plan for technology development that identified the purposed technologies, i.e., Big Data Analytic and AI. It is to ensure that the project deployment is stable and sustainable. Furthermore, the clear work plan allows us to create an efficient and stable maintenance plan that supports and covers economic, infrastructure development, and social integration in both urban and rural areas. Last but not least, this achievement can inspire the nearby countries.

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This project has received several awards from PEA Conference & Innovation held by PEA. Moreover, there is an internal committee which evaluate the result of the project using the performance and efficiency of system maintenance. In which, the indicator as in the organization strategy is the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) to assess the reduction of a power outage. Moreover, the State Enterprise Policy Office is an external institution that determines the SAIFI value for verifying and controlling the evaluation of PEA.

Using SAIFI to assess the energy stability improvement provides statistic information on power outage, which indicates whether the rate of power outage increases or decreases. It is not only used for nationwide but also local scale to ensure the power system improvement in the rural areas. Overall, it found that the electricity becomes more stable compared to the previous years, which the rate of power outage has decreased by 35.91% and showing a sign of decrease in the future. It results in allowing rural industries to work better and ensuring the life security of bedridden patients in several hospitals.

The mission of this project is to provide a stable and comprehensive electricity supply to everyone, i.e., people in remote areas, industrial sectors, and hospitals. All the time, this project has adopted innovation, transferred knowledge, and established the volunteer network, which reduces the rate of a power outage by 35.91% worth. Base on 1 academic article, it can be reduced outage cost at least 0.6 million Thai Baht (around 20,000 USD) for a large hotel, commercial building, and factory per year. In the case of a household, the electrical system in the rural area becomes more stable, and relief people are suffering from a power outage for more than 300,000 people comparing between 2019 and 2018. In fact, the average economical outage cost reduced by 13,000 million THB (~430 million USD) or 810 THB (~26 USD) per household. With the positive outcomes, PEA will not stop and keep developing a stable and sustainable power system for people.

There are many stakeholders in the institution involving in this project. The project team members are from many departments for plan and project setting. Each member has their own responsibility; however, they work together and share their opinions for the project decision. In the project, many divisions support each other; for example, technology division, which develops software and AI, provides electrical power system health information for a field team. At the same time, the field team goes on fields for communicating and educating people about the power system that forms a local volunteer team. Finally, for creating a sustainable mechanism for this project, this project member includes institution directors and specialists from many departments for project monitoring and evaluation. Furthermore, the project was involved with local administration activities which provide well-being to people. Example are, maintenance streetlight projects which could reduce accident in street and make drivers more comfortable during the nighttime. In addition, underground power system was taken placed in major cities which assists from municipal organization. The maintenance part of these underground project has been taken care by this project.

For establishing a stable electrical power system, this project tries to encourage any stakeholders to participate in the project. For example, both project teams and local officers come together to work on this project. The project members are assigned to educate people about the electrical system, and local officers facilitate people for electrical supporting. Moreover, with public participation, people can inform any situation that could lead to a power outage in which there are more than 5,500 participators in this project. With this mechanism, it can change public awareness on the power system that they feel the sense of belonging to the system. With high heedfulness of public awareness of the electrical system, it can create a stable system and be protective against failure.

From the project deployment, it not only improves government work processes and workflow through technology but also creates a mean to connect with the public sector. This project also proves that with stakeholder engagement and participation, it can achieve higher outcomes when comparing to without any collaboration. We will continue this project with our maintenance planning; pilot project at Chai Nat and Chonburi provinces, phrase 1: 24 learning centers and phrase 2: whole country. Now we drive this project on phrase 2 and will be driving into phrase 3 which are promoting to other power system utility in South East Asia countries. The sense of belonging to the power system can increase the sustainability and stability of the system nationwide. Last but not least, it increases the brand reputation of PEA as the institution is more accessible and successful.