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Are You Ready for the Windy Season?
Stage 1: Activate Your Dormant Data

Are You Ready for the Windy Season?

Stage 1: Activate your dormant data

Stage 2: Prioritising Essential Maintenance

Stage 3: Get Your Wind Assets Fit for the Future

Unplanned downtime during the windy season can be disastrous. After all, it’s the optimal seasonal period for wind generation. It’s therefore in your interest to schedule maintenance during the off-season.

This series will help ensure you retain peak performance throughout the windy season, and ultimately make wind work for you.

Maintenance costs are the stark reality of running a wind farm.

At some point, a component will become misaligned, develop a fracture, or break outright, resulting in lost energy potential or even a catastrophic failure. And of course, unplanned downtime during the windy season can be disastrous – slashing generation capacity, thereby harming owner/operators’ bottom line.

Getting your wind assets’ data in order is therefore the first step on the journey to seasonal readiness. This includes data on the health and performance of your wind turbines.

The Challenges of Data Access

A lack of access to operational data is the key challenge for many owner/operators. This is for a number of reasons, including a result of a lack of internal expertise, an OEMs’ reticence to share operational data, and aging onboard condition monitoring hardware.

Firstly, a well-documented skills shortage means that experienced wind turbine engineers are hard to come by – especially offshore wind farm maintenance. It’s therefore costly to recruit internally.

Furthermore, owner/operators in full-wrap agreements with OEMs may find it difficult to acquire the necessary data – with OEMs being notoriously cautious about sharing data on their turbines.

The global wind O&M market is predicted to grow from $28.12bn in 2021 to as much as $53bn by 2030.

Meanwhile, aging wind sites may not be benefitting from wind turbine condition monitoring strategies, such as predictive maintenance, which are now maturing. In fact, the global wind O&M (operations and maintenance) market is predicted to grow from $28.12bn in 2021 to as much as $53bn by 2030!

The Trouble with Poor Data

Simply put, a lack of data equates to a lack of visibility.

This typically results in owner/operators resorting to time-based maintenance, testing, and fixing turbine components based on their age rather than their condition.

There are two key problems with this approach:

Problem 1
Firstly, you could be spending money on components and technologies that don’t need replacing. Perhaps they’re aging, but they could have another 2 years left of optimal performance. Without the relevant data, it’s impossible to know.
Problem 2
Likewise, prioritising maintenance on a component that doesn’t require fixing, could mean that your team overlooks serious issues with other parts of your wind turbines.

Why Get Your Data in Order? (Situational/Lifecycle)

Mergers & Acquisition Preparation

Between 2020 to 2021, the total value of M&A deals in the renewables sector almost tripled.

Ahead of any potential M&A activity, it’s therefore recommended that owners/operators have as much data available for wind fleets. This is because it delivers confidence to potential buyers and adds value to assets, much like a car with a full service history.

Crucially, it can also shorten lengthy due diligence processes, freeing up capital for the seller.

So, ahead of the coming windy season, it’s certainly in your interest to compile a full data trail of your fleet.

End of Warranty Claims

At some point, your full-wrap agreement with your turbines’ OEM will come to an end. This leads to a choice – sign up for a post-warranty service agreement, self-manage your fleet, or take a hybrid approach and work with a 3rd party.

If the decision is taken to either self-manage or adopt a hybrid model, then it’s vital for an owner/operator to know the ongoing condition of their asset in the long term. Even if there is no change of service strategy, selecting the correct end of warranty campaign provides a lot of reliability and performance reassurance for stakeholders going forward.

Typical end of warranty inspections (such as gearbox endoscopies) are quite limited in scope, often failing to identify potential early-stage damage or provide any information about the rate of damage progression. This makes it challenging to claim any damage on warranty before the OEM agreement ends.

However, a vibration monitoring expert can retrospectively date faults going back as far as 18 months. This will help with any end of warranty negotiations with the OEM, leading to far more amenable results.

Types of Available Data

SCADA

SCADA data (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) exists on all wind turbines.

From component temperatures to yaw & pitch, SCADA data is how OEMs monitor your assets, ensuring that they’re performing in their most basic functions.

Vibration

Vibration data drills deeper into the architectural composition of your turbine.

Modern advanced sensing tools are also capable of capturing vibration data beyond the drivetrain, giving owner/operators a richer knowledge of their assets.

Visual

Visual inspection is designed to gather data on components that aren’t monitored by online systems (such as turbine blades).

Inspections are an important means to discern physical defects that could develop into a greater fault over time.

Next steps

Once reliable data is in place, any issues or faults can be prioritised according to criticality.