2025 was one of the most active years in Delta-X Research's conference and engagement history, and viewed from the industry's perspective, a year in which several trends that had been building for years reached visible inflection points. Online DGA monitoring moved from pilot to programme. Alternative fluid interpretation became a standard programme question rather than a specialist topic. And the combination of ageing infrastructure and constrained capital budgets drove sustained demand for the kind of quantitative fleet risk ranking that R-DGA methodology provides.
The Conference Year
February: Life of Transformer, Booth #400. The year opened with the Life of Transformer conference, where the specialist audience of transformer life extension professionals reinforced a consistent message: fleet prioritisation with documented evidence is the critical tool for capital planning in a replacement-constrained environment. Conversations centred on how CSEV and HF metrics [1] translate into defensible maintenance and replacement decisions that can be communicated to regulators and finance leadership.
March: TechCon NA (Booth #2514) and the Doble Clients Conference. Two of the most technically substantive events in the calendar within the same two-week period. TechCon NA's NETA testing professional audience brought practical questions about online and offline data integration and rate-of-change alerting. The Doble conference produced the kind of in-depth methodological discussions that the specialist audience supports, including detailed engagement on the statistical foundations of R-DGA and its relationship to IEEE C57.104-2019 [2].
October: CIGRE Canada, September 29 – October 2. The Canadian perspective on transformer asset management, shaped by remote geography, climate extremes, and deeply ageing infrastructure, was the focus of the autumn conference engagement. The failure cost implications of unplanned outages at remote northern substations [3] made the case for rigorous monitoring particularly compelling.
January: Monitor Watch Webinar. The year's first technical event was also one of the most well-attended: a webinar on online DGA monitoring with Monitor Watch that drew utility engineers and asset managers from across North America. The questions reflected real-world implementation experience, including sensor integration, data management workflows, rate-of-change alerting, and combined lab/online analysis, rather than exploratory interest. The community's engagement with online monitoring has matured.
Technical Themes That Defined 2025
Online Monitoring Reaches Operational Scale
The most significant shift observable across 2025's industry discussions was the transition in how utilities think about online DGA monitoring. The question in 2020–2022 was "should we consider it?" By 2025, the question was "how do we scale it effectively, manage the data, and integrate it with our existing programme?"
CIGRE TB 630 [4] frames this transition well: the technical case for online monitoring on high-consequence assets is established; the operational question is implementation at scale. Monitor Watch's architecture, applying the same R-DGA framework to both laboratory and online data under a single analytical platform, is directly responsive to the integration challenge that deployment at scale creates.
Alternative Fluid DGA Interpretation Goes Mainstream
The growth of ester-filled transformer deployments has made DGA interpretation for non-mineral oil a programme question for most major utilities. For many, 2025 was the year when enough ester units were in service to create systematic data management problems: ester DGA results being evaluated against mineral oil thresholds from IEEE C57.104 [2], producing systematic false alerts on CO and CO₂ that consumed engineering time without delivering actionable information.
CIGRE TB 771 [5] is the primary reference for resolving this problem. It provides fluid-specific interpretation frameworks for natural ester, synthetic ester, and other alternative fluids that allow DGA programmes to treat ester and mineral oil transformers appropriately within the same analytical platform. TOA accommodates fluid type as a database field, applying the correct framework for each transformer.
Fleet Ageing Pressure Intensifies Demand for Quantitative Risk Ranking
The age profile of the North American transmission transformer fleet continues to be the defining structural challenge for asset management. CIGRE TB 812 [3] documents the failure rate distribution across age cohorts; the data shows that a large fraction of the current transmission fleet sits in the age range where failure probability increases most rapidly.
The operational consequence is sustained and growing demand for DGA analytical methods that produce quantitative, fleet-level risk rankings rather than individual threshold exceedance lists: population-normalised severity rankings that allow defensible prioritisation of replacement and maintenance investment. This is the core value proposition of R-DGA methodology [1], and 2025 saw it articulated and validated in more utility contexts than any previous year.
Standards Activity
IEEE Transformers Committee working groups continued revision activity on C57.104 and related standards. CIGRE Study Committee A2 advanced work on transformer reliability data and DGA interpretation methodology. Jim Dukarm's participation in CIGRE working group activities ensures that developments at the international standards level are reflected in ongoing TOA methodology development.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The themes that defined 2025 carry forward into 2026 with increasing urgency. Infrastructure ageing continues without pause; the energy transition accelerates the loading demands on existing equipment; and the combination of extended lead times and constrained capital budgets means that rigorous condition-based maintenance is not optional; it is the mechanism by which utilities manage growing risk with finite resources.
Delta-X Research heads into 2026 with a full conference schedule: PowerTest 26 in February, TechAdvantage 2026 in March, the Doble Clients Conference in March, the NWPPA E&O Conference in March, Energy Technology Live in the UK in March, and the IEEE Rural Electric Power Conference in April. Watch the blog for posts from each event.
For product information on TOA and Monitor Watch, visit their respective pages. To discuss your DGA programme heading into 2026, contact us.
References & Further Reading
- [1]Dukarm, J.J., Draper, D., Arakelian, V.K., “Improving the Reliability of Dissolved Gas Analysis” IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine, 2012.
- [2]IEEE C57.104-2019, “IEEE Guide for the Interpretation of Gases Generated in Mineral Oil-Immersed Transformers” IEEE, 2019.
- [3]CIGRE Working Group A2.49, “Transformer Reliability Survey” CIGRE Technical Brochure 812, 2020.
- [4]CIGRE Working Group A2.44, “On-line Monitoring of Transformers: The Choice of Monitoring Systems” CIGRE Technical Brochure 630, 2015.
- [5]CIGRE Working Group A2.43, “DGA in Non-Mineral Oils and Load Tap Changers and Improved DGA Diagnosis Criteria” CIGRE Technical Brochure 771, 2019.
Delta-X Research develops Transformer Oil Analyst™ (TOA), the market-leading tool for managing and interpreting insulating fluid test data for high-voltage apparatus. Founded in 1992 and based in Victoria, BC, Canada, the team applies Reliability-based DGA methodology to help utilities worldwide assess transformer health and prioritise fleet maintenance decisions.
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Delta-X Research at the IEEE Rural Electric Power Conference 2026
Sean Casey is representing Delta-X Research at the IEEE Rural Electric Power Conference, connecting with rural and municipal utility engineers on how Reliability-based DGA helps smaller utility operations manage transformer health analytics, identify early fault indicators, and prioritise fleet maintenance with limited internal resources.