The largest North Sea offshore wind farm runs its assets with an integrated platform under Energy Studio Pro®
Situated 140 kilometers from Emden in the middle of the North Sea, Global Tech I is one of the largest German offshore wind farms and most distant from the coastline in the whole Europe. With its 80 wind turbines in waters of 40 meters depth, the company operates an installed capacity of 400 MW, supplying renewable energy for 445,000 households. Since 2015 Global Tech I is monitoring the wind farm with Energy Studio Pro®, ensuring a smoothly performance of the assets. At full operational power, the North Sea wind farm is able to generate about 1.4 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity each year.
The challenge
It is really challenging to efficiently operate a power plant without an independent and direct access to the data. This was the biggest challenge for Global Tech I: Gathering trusted data via individual SCADA Systems is a complex and time consuming process. Our operators spent considerable part of their working day into carrying out data manually explains Alexander Löhndorf, Project Manager at Global Tech I Offshore Wind GmbH. Since Global Tech I had to deal with several OEMs for wind turbines, measurement and substation equipment, often simple fault conditions remained undetected and the alarm codes were not timely received or misleading in terms of the true reason of the fault.
The decision
Due to the number of different systems involved in daily activities, we needed a Top Level SCADA System, providing a central overview of the entire operations to improve availability and productivity while optimizing maintenance processes and preventing any damages says Alexander Löhndorf who remarks: We were looking for an integrated platform that would free our technicians from learning multiple OEMs systems’ procedures and so truly focusing on doing their job.
Furthermore, Alexander Löhndorf moves on by adding: With Energy Studio Pro®, BaxEnergy was able to provide a solution to our specific requirements, thanks to its extensive domain knowledge and experience in building IT solutions for wind monitoring and control.
The solution
Global Tech I is using Energy Studio Pro® to unify under a single comprehensive system all the data originating from different subsystems. From a unique interface, the company’s operators can easily perform advanced analysis by combining real-time and historical data flow as well as accurately monitoring the status of all devices, from wind turbines to meteorological stations, radar data and so on. As remarks Alexander Löhndorf, For us, the main value of Energy Studio Pro® relies on the openness of the system and the capability to define our own KPIs, alarms and reports in order to promptly intervene if the power plants are not performing well.
The result
Energy Studio Pro® helps Global Tech I reaching a higher level of precision – at all stage of action – that is unmatchable using different SCADA systems.
BaxEnergy provides us an integrated solution which allow us to reduce reaction time and technicians’ on-site interventions as well as increasing safety
points out Alexander Löhndorf who highlights the plan of the company to implement further modules via Energy Studio Pro® in the very near future.
