What are the benefits of getting actionable data into the hands of the people who can actually fix problems? This is probably the hottest topic when it comes to taking a decision about whether adopting an Asset Management Platform or not.
To solve it, Energia – Irish energy company headquartered in Dublin decided to test BaxEnergy’s Energy Studio Pro® and AssetStack® to monitor and control its wind portfolio.
The complete project includes the integration of 360 MW coming from 17 wind farms. During the first phase, BaxEnergy will integrate 5 wind farms for a total of almost 200 MW.
The perks of having one SCADA
As it occurs to most IPPs, Energia too operates with different manufacturers and proprietary SCADAs to manage all their wind assets. Yet, in order to optimize the production and maintenance, they choose to turn to a comprehensive software solution for clean energy asset management and O&M.
With scale, system heterogeneity can often become a major source of frustration for operators, engineers and analysts. Beyond spending time learning how to work with the subtleties of each system, personnel often have to split attention across a lot of monitoring screens to detect outages, taking multi-tasking to a whole new level.
The solution, to be hosted on prem, will provide secure and robust data collection architecture, extended data modelling and harmonization across all OEMs, real-time SCADA visualization, custom KPI calculation such as availability and efficiency, and reporting across all power plants.
The Asset Management Platform will also provide data completeness, data quality reports and delivering data trends view and virtualized historical data with external storage.
This will allow Energia to visualize equipment such as switchgears, protection and meters them in an electrical schema, or single-line diagram animated with real-time data.
Energy Studio Pro® will allow Energia to integrate with substation equipment such as switchgears, protection and meters visualizing them in an electrical schema, or single-line diagram animated with real-time data. Using this workflow technology, Energia will be able to define their own control loop, carry out automatic power regulation, monitor conditions and comply with regulations on power limitations.
Benefits and Recaptured losses
What does it all mean in terms of benefits?
It means that Energy Studio Pro® will ensure the recapture of 1-3% of energy losses by minimizing maintenance costs and maximizing energy production.
In fact, on the one hand ESP® and AssetStack® will help monitor signals from generation units, correlate signals to predict anomalies and failures, receive automatic notifications and set up workflows; and on the other they will allow Energia to literally keep a constant eye on performance and on working units so to react quickly to reduce production losses.