Time to sweat your wind generation assets

Nigel Sylvester, Sales Director for Energy, System Dynamics, tells us why that company is focusing on asset management solutions for wind generation.

Wind remains the cornerstone of renewables generation in Ireland and the UK. However, wind farm operators are increasingly having to focus on efficiency in addition to the expansion of capacity.

The problems that operators are encountering include decreasing margins due to the additional maintenance costs of turbines coming out of warranty, higher than expected costs of offshore operations, turbines performing at less than manufacturer specification, and the costs incurred as a result of under generation against trading forecasts.

These pressures on operating margins are all key drivers of a new focus on operational efficiency and asset yield.

In this pursuit for efficiency wind farm operators are delving into two separate but related areas: performance analysis and maintenance planning.

Performance analysis

Wind turbines generate huge volumes of data, which if interpreted in a meaningful way give a rich vein of performance analytics to aid commercial decision-making. In particular, performance analytics can help operators understand whether their turbines are meeting manufacturer specifications, and if not, answer the question: “Is the underperformance due to endemic faults in turbine components?”

In this case, the operator is equipped with the data to ensure that remedial actions are incorporated into an efficient maintenance plan and that the costs of remediation are recovered from turbine OEMs. Furthermore, under-performance is often due in part to external factors such as variations in meteorological conditions.

For most operators, the difficulty lies in the interpretation of the data. In an attempt to resolve this, they deploy additional manpower to manually manipulate and analyse the data. Obviously the costs associated with this are significant, and the risk of human error can lead to misinterpretation of the data.

System Dynamics provides a scientific, automated solution which takes the manual effort out of this operational analysis. Our solution automatically processes SCADA and other data from turbine components on a near real-time basis. The data is interpreted to create dashboard views of key performance information. This information provides Operations Managers with up-to-date analysis of critical information such as power curve analysis, component alarms and outage frequency by component.

Of course, this analysis is highly complex. We have invested several man-years in building statistical models to interpret whether a shortfall in yield is due to a factor such as blade condition, wake effect, air density, component failures, or even operator failure (for example in delays in bringing turbines back on-line after an outage).

Aside from the savings in manual effort, our dashboards facilitate informed decisions based on accurate near real-time data analysis. A key element of our solution is that we model every turbine independently, rather than the aggregate of the entire wind farm. This turbine by turbine approach yields significant dividends in the next stage of the journey to efficiency, where we start to plan both remedial and predictive maintenance.

Maintenance planning

Clearly when any assets are taken out of production for maintenance, there is an accumulation of lost output and by default foregone revenue. Wind farm operators need to ensure that maintenance tasks (and resulting turbine downtime) are scheduled and completed with the least impact on generation.

This requires maintenance crews and spare parts to be on-site and available in a timely manner to commence the maintenance. The crews need to have capability to update maintenance job queues remotely as they complete their tasks and to escalate issues when appropriate. As they complete one order, they need information as to their next task and to be able to communicate their progress in this regard.

As in all energy related maintenance, adherence to health and safety protocols is critical. Wind farm operators must ensure that risk assessments are completed before work commences and that all crew members are certified to carry out those works.

System Dynamics provides a maintenance planning and work management solution that can be deployed stand-alone or fully integrated to the performance analysis tools and their underlying suite of turbine sensors and associated data streams. Using Maximo, IBM’s Enterprise Asset Management software, our solution automates the generation of maintenance work orders. Operators can balance and route their teams to ensure the most efficient and productive use of their maintenance capacity. The solution allows for the adjustment of work schedules for emergency outages, and provides an integrated framework for managing all health and safety requirements in respect of the deployment of engineers.

A key component of our solution is a mobile application that can be deployed on a variety of mobile platforms including Android and Apple IOS devices. These applications allow engineers to accept work orders, to reschedule or reallocate tasks, and to close tasks so that central teams can bring turbines back into production without delay.

Furthermore, our solution is available either on premise, or in the cloud as a SaaS solution, to allow operators to focus on running wind farms instead of concerning themselves with the maintenance of IT systems. Overall, our solution results in reduced maintenance costs, improved reliability and increased output per turbine.

About System Dynamics

System Dynamics is a leading Irish consultancy with offices in Dublin, London and Edinburgh. We use our domain and technical expertise to solve business issues for our clients, with whom we enjoy a strong and valued reputation. We are recognised in our target markets for our differentiated offerings delivered by excellent people, behaviours and processes.

We have a vibrant Energy Practice with over 50 consultants, from which we deliver solutions for asset management, performance management, energy trading and risk management and PMO outsource solutions across energy generation, transmission and distribution.

For more information, please contact:
Nigel Sylvester
Sales Director
System Dynamics
Whitaker Court
Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2
Tel: +353 1 483 0300
Email: nigel.sylvester@systemdynamics.ie
Web: www.systemdynamics.ie