How to Improve Wind Plant Performance with High Resolution Data

If you want to grow your wind plant’s revenue, you won’t be able to do it through O&M savings alone—improving wind turbine power performance, and therefore annual energy production (AEP) is vital.

At WindESCo, we’ve toiled long and hard developing algorithms to analyze high resolution wind turbine data to find the underlying causes of underperformance, enabling customers to fix the issues with their turbines, and ultimately improve wind plant AEP.

Conventional wind energy analytics use 10-minute statistical data. While this can be sufficient for knowing whether or not a long term, gross underperformance is occurring, it’s often not enough to explain why.

What makes WindESCo different? 

We look directly at high frequency data, which provides nearly 3x more time resolution than 10-minute statistical data. This allows us to find — and more importantly, explain— suboptimal behavior and anomalies whose signatures can only be seen at this fine timescale. High frequency data makes fixing the issue easier, because it shows why a turbine is underperforming.

What are you missing?

Working with high frequency data allows us to look at both the detailed behavior of the wind turbine controller to transient wind conditions, but also the transient response in power performance. This vital information is overlooked in the 10-minute statistical data.

More than a dashboard

Many solutions in the wind energy analytics space offer generalized views and interpretations of coarse 10-minute statistics. Our algorithms apply 16 specific and detailed checks to your high frequency SCADA, generating valuable knowledge about the performance of your assets that others miss. Most importantly, the explanatory power of our results helps fix your turbines as quickly as possible. Other solutions leave you to investigate on your own, which is a daunting and expensive task alone.

A simple fix

Hard-to-detect underperformance issues can add up over time. Through high frequency data analysis, we can provide new insight on how to improve AEP. In many cases, fixes for these conditions can be simple controller parameter adjustments that do not require a trip up-tower. 

Know what you’ve gained

Once adjustments are made to affected turbines, our analytics can quickly verify the issues have been resolved. Next, we apply our DNV-approved methodology to validate that the modified turbines are producing more energy than before.

At WindESCo, we help our customers find and fix wind farm issues and anomalies to gain 2-5% improvement in AEP. Depending on the size of the farm, this could mean millions of dollars in extra revenue. Additionally, our technology can provide payback within 12 months with ROIs of 7:1 over 3-5 years.

Talk to us. If you want to improve annual energy performance and the overall value of your fleet, get in touch. We will help you find a solution.