Practical Application of the Decision-Making Grid (DMG) for Supporting Maintenance Strategy Decisions in a Small Hydroelectric Power Plant (SHPP)

Although access to electricity significatively improves life quality, almost one in every eight human beings do not have access to electricity in the world. Parallelly to the urgent necessity of providing electricity for a huge number of people, there is the equally urgent necessity of reducing global warming and climate change. These two necessities are translated into a huge necessity of expanding the offer of green and clean electricity. Among the possibilities, hydropower can provide multiple services (e.g., freshwater management, climate mitigation, etc.). However, the maintenance of hydroelectric generation still presents challenges to be overcome, especially the small hydroelectric power plant (SHPP), which has more constrained resources. Given this context, the current chapter proposes an innovative and practical method for optimizing maintenance planning and continuous maintenance improvement, based on a decision-making grid (DMG) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a novel method for this kind of application. It was applied to an SHPP in Brazil. The results empirically validated common perceptions of the maintenance responsibilities but also enabled widening the view and discussing maintenance strategies beyond common sense. For example, showing that it is better to adopt a corrective strategy for communication systems. Through the results, the proposed method proved to be useful and practical for the company’s management once it is simple, fast, and easy. The proposed method can be easily replicated to the other SHPP worldwide for achieving better maintenance strategic decisions. Based on the investigation limitations (lack of maintenance data standardizations), further directions are discussed.