Why is dissolved gas analysis critical for transformer condition monitoring?

DGA is critical because it provides early visibility into internal electrical and thermal faults that cannot be seen externally. It supports condition based maintenance, reduces unplanned outages, and helps prioritize repairs and load management decisions. DGA trends can reveal developing hot spots, insulation breakdown, or incipient arcing long before catastrophic failure. Utilities rely on it to protect high value assets, reduce risk to the grid, and plan outages and replacements with better certainty.