Understanding how to decide on how to address issues on your site
Many of our customers ask us how we recommend implementing Fixes on their site, but the short answer is – it depends!
If you are doing some maintenance work on a turbine and sending someone out anyway, then it might be a good idea to see if the portal has flagged any issues for that turbine. In that case, review the turbine tab and see if there are any open issues:
Alternatively, perhaps you’d like to do a performance / reliability campaign to focus on gaining back energy. In that case, it would make sense to take a look at your “Checks” tab and review the issues that would give the most return on investment for the time spent to try to address it:
Also, from this view, you may just want to fix some “low-hanging fruit” issues that are relatively easy to fix, for example a parameter adjustment. The AEP gain may not be significant, but you will know that your turbines are now operating closer to the desired configuration.
Of course, if it’s a high-wind season and the team would like to limit impact to operations then issues can always be deferred until a more convenient time to be addressed.
While these are different approaches that can be used, when it comes down to it, the best approach is to understand what impacts the farm’s revenue. That means, it often makes sense to focus on correcting availability concerns before addressing performance and other reliability issues. The beauty of WindESCo’s platform is that it relates all issues back to easily comparable elements: increasing MWh and how much of a financial impact that has for the operator.