Case Study: How Venti can help Offshore Wind Operators optimise their wind farms
Overview.
For a wind farm of 10 x 10MW turbines, an ROI of 1800% is achievable with Venti.
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“The average failure rate for an offshore wind turbine levels out at approximately 10 failures per turbine per year by a wind farm’s third operational year” – (Carroll, J., McDonald, A., & McMillan, D. (2016))
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Offshore wind already provides a significant percentage of electricity for many countries, and this percentage continues to grow.
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Having started off constructing wind farms in shallower waters, industry is now expanding into deeper waters. This is largely down to the technological advances in offshore wind, particularly floating offshore wind.
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Whether maintenance is being done to wind turbines in shallow or deep water, an inherent safety risk exists and needs to be controlled. The most effective way of reducing this safety risk is to reduce the number of crew visits to the wind turbine. Improved monitoring of wind farms and identifying potential turbine issues early is a solution that can be used to achieve that crew visit reduction.
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In addition to safety, it is always of interest to reduce the cost of operations and maintenance. Considering vessel, labour, material, and loss of production, repairs and replacements can be expensive.
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Intelligent Plant have developed a number of applications that can be accessed via the Industrial App Store. When combined into one solution, it provides the necessary tools for high quality monitoring of assets.
We call this solution Venti.
What is Venti?
With Venti, operators gain access to a wide range of tools for in depth monitoring of their wind farms. These tools include visualisation and analysis tools for looking into your real-time and historical process data and alarm and event data. As well as connectors to third party solutions such as Power BI and Jupyter Hub, so you can utilise your data within them.
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The failure rate per year of some turbine components can be high and it can be expected that a number of components will need repairing or replacing during the long-life time of a wind turbine. Venti can be used to highlight deviations from normal that can indicate that a failure has occurred. Or if a component is not running as expected it, then early indication of this potential failure can give an operator time to get the necessary resources for making the repair as part of a planned shutdown.
Failure rate per year for key turbine components (Carroll, J., McDonald, A., & McMillan, D. (2016))
Use Cases.
Venti can be utilised for analysing and visualising real-time data in various way:
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Condition Monitoring: Apply condition monitoring to your wind farm to spot problems early. This allows for planned downtime, resulting in minor repairs rather than major ones. Work can be scheduled during periods of lower wind, minimising the impact on overall production output.
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Optimised Reporting: Generate weekly reports for head office and site management with ease. Venti provides access to real-time data, enabling the creation of insightful reports that can help optimise wind farm operations.
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Reduce number of Manual Jobs: Utilise real-time data to perform more checks onshore, reducing the need for offshore trips. This improves safety and efficiency by minimising manual tasks.
Example dashboard that can be created with Venti
Conclusion.
Venti is highly valuable solution for offshore wind operators. With a large number of tools available for users to access, detailed monitoring of assets can be achieved. By monitoring real-time data of a wind farm, operators can expect a positive return on safety, uptime, and production.
References.
Carroll, J., McDonald, A., & McMillan, D. (2016). Failure Rate, Repair Time and Unscheduled O&M Cost Analysis of Offshore Wind Turbines. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.