Challenge
A rapidly expanding company with the goal to increase CAFD and aggressively lower O&M costs needs a smart approach to application of predictive technology
Engineering and Consultancy, Software and Analytics
Partnering with Pattern Energy on predictive analytics and engineering.
- 4 years, 25 projects monitoring, SCADA, warranty, consulting
- End of warranty approach deployed to 405 wind turbines
Customer
Pattern Energy is one of the world’s largest privately owned developers and operators of wind, solar, transmission, and energy storage projects. Its operational portfolio includes more than 30 renewable energy facilities that use proven, best-in-class technology with an operating capacity of nearly 6,000 MW across North America. Pattern Energy is guided by a long-term commitment to serve customers, protect the environment, and strengthen communities.
Products
Benefits
ONYX engineering and predictive technology applies the right focus to reducing O&M costs across different phases of the project lifecycle. Pattern used ONYX predictive analytics to assess the health of 405 turbines coming out of warranty. A data-driven approach with fleetMONITOR drives a lower cost and highly effective end of warranty inspection campaign.
Solution
ONYX engineering and predictive technology applies the right focus to reducing O&M costs across different phases of the project lifecycle. Pattern used ONYX predictive analytics to assess the health of 405 turbines coming out of warranty. A data-driven approach with fleetMONITOR drives a lower cost and highly effective EOW campaign.
Over 4 years and 20 projects, Pattern has been supported by ONYX Insight for challenging engineering problems, transitioning assets through end of warranty and in monitoring the health of their turbines with advanced predictive analytics. ONYX Insight supports Pattern’s ongoing drive to lower O&M cost, with impacts on downtime, repair costs, warranty claims and quality assurance.
Drivetrain Engineering
ONYX Insight provides Pattern with resources to supplement their strong in-house engineering group. This provides specialist skills as well as a valuable independent view. In a recent project, ONYX Insight supported the development of an on-site teardown procedure for pitch bearings and performed failure root cause analysis.
Through careful investigations, the primary failure mode was identified along with corrective actions. With the new disassembly procedure, Pattern can now perform on-site investigations, providing valuable insights.
Similarly, to reduce OPEX cost of an unplanned failure, Pattern sought to implement innovative uptower repair procedures offered by an ISP. With ONYX engineers also uptower providing QA/QC and then confirming the repair quality by vibration analysis, Pattern were able to rest easy and introduce a new and lower cost repair practice.
Predictive Analytics
Since 2014, ONYX Insight have been providing Pattern predictive analytics blended with the wind turbine engineering knowledge to drive the data to practical conclusions. One project was timed with a large part of their operating fleet, over 400 turbines, approaching end of warranty.
ONYX were able to use the vibration data from the installed condition monitoring system to “see” into the drivetrain and build a shortlist of turbines for inspection, aiming to capture all the incidences of main bearing spalling, high-speed bearing cracks and other warrantable drivetrain damage. This provided the knowledge of what turbines to inspect to gather image-based evidence for claims.
Most recently, Pattern has awarded ONYX with a long-term monitoring contract for the Grand Renewables Wind Farm. ONYX have connected the existing CMS hardware to their own multi-brand cloud-based predictive platform, fleetMONITOR and are providing a daily wind turbine condition monitoring service. With 6-18 months’ warning as typical ONYX lead times on developing bearing damage patterns, they are able to plan far in advance and reduce costs in many ways: combine repair activity, competitively bid, reduce downtime and avoid collateral or catastrophic damage.
Value Generation: OPEX Cost Reduction
OPEX cost reduction is a big part of the equation allowing renewable energy to come to par and then be more affordable than other types of power generation. “By combining their predictive analytics solution with their engineering expertise, ONYX empowers our goal of reducing our OPEX costs, and we value this long-term relationship.” – Ben Rice, Senior Manager at Pattern Energy.
Reduce OPEX across your wind fleet.
Find out how predictive analytics and engineering support can lower your repair costs, extend asset life, and maximise end-of-warranty outcomes.