Three key benefits:
- Underperformance identified automatically using WindGEMINI’s intuitive Pattern of Production module
- 30% underperformance in one 2 MW turbine rectified to full capacity
- Lost production worth $10,000 per month prevented
The customer challenge
Wind turbines suffer performance problems from time to time. Although they are available and generating energy, there can be underlying issues which mean a turbine isn’t performing as it should. But in today’s utility scale wind farms, even big problems can be difficult to spot when monitoring the performance of hundreds of turbines.
It takes skilled engineers to monitor turbine behaviour and spot underperformance when it happens.
DNV worked with the owner of a large, multinational portfolio of wind and solar power plants. On this occasion, the output of a 2 MW turbine had fallen by around 30%. It was one of more than a hundred turbines at a site, and the drop in performance hadn’t been identified by the operations team.
DNV’s solution
WindGEMINI, DNV’s online digital twin was used to monitor turbine performance in real-time and identify unusual behaviour.
Once deployed on the customer’s wind farm portfolio, it automatically identified the drop in production and warned the operator of the fault.
The operator informed the site team, who were able to quickly trace the problem to a pitch controller error. This was promptly rectified, and production was successfully returned to normal.
Benefits to the customer
The lost production from this single fault was worth around $10,000 per month and would have been more than $100,000 a year if left undetected. By constantly and automatically monitoring every turbine in a wind farm portfolio, WindGEMINI is a cost-effective way of identifying turbine performance issues. This frees up analysts to spend their time on the even more challenging tasks of diagnosing and fixing the problems once they have been found.