A benefit for the wind industry: How digitalisation can save time and money

We break down the benefits of digitalisation for the wind industry and how it can help avoid damage and reduce cost.

Being able to predict a failure months ahead is especially useful for offshore wind, as components cannot be easily replaced. (Credit: Inkoly/Shutterstock.com)

As wind farms grow in size and number, the need for accurate data on turbine performance has become increasingly pressing – maintenance operations can be costly both in terms of time and money, particularly when dealing with offshore farms. Implementing digitalisation can help to pinpoint damage ahead of time and avoid unnecessary site visits, while also reducing overall operations costs. Nicholas Kenny speaks with Bruce Hall, CEO at ONYX InSight, and Jonas Corné, CEO at Greenbyte, to break down the benefits of digitalisation for the wind industry.

As a relatively young industry, at least in comparison with the fossil fuel titans that dominated energy production for decades, wind power still has a lot of room to improve on its operations and productivity.

Turbines grow ever larger and more powerful, recyclable versions of their components are developed to reduce their carbon footprint, and the cost of development, installation and operation continues to go down. It’s a good time, really, to work in wind.

In order to maximise efficiency, however, there is one path that is still largely in its nascency within the industry, though more and more companies are gradually waking up to its potential – digitalisation.

Wind farm operators with effective digital strategies, particularly with regards to offshore sites – typically harder to reach than their onshore counterparts – will be able to remotely monitor and assess asset health and performance, enabling operators to optimise maintenance efforts and the time in which their turbines are operational. All of this, in turn, will serve to improve energy production and profitability.

“It sounds rather simplistic, but it’s about making the wind industry more efficient. As subsidies are withdrawn wind has to stand on its own two feet. This means delivering lower LCOE [levelised cost of energy] through greater efficiencies,” explains Bruce Hall, CEO of ONYX InSight, a leader in engineering and software solutions for predictive analytics.

While wind has finally surpassed gas and oil as an economic source of electricity, according to figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency, and the LCOE has become even more competitive after recent gas and oil shortages in the second half of 2021, there remains considerable space for the industry to increase its efficiencies through digitalisation.

Now, those efficiencies are not solely going to be down to increasing automation and digitalisation of the wind industry. “We are a small cog in a very big machine,” Hall says. But while coal and gas and other fossil fuel alternatives have had more than 100 years to perfect their ways of operation and production, wind is still relatively new, which means that it boasts far greater potential in this area.

In particular, as subsidies are withdrawn from the wind industry, the need for digitalisation is only growing. “Wind turbines are no longer operating under a subsidy regime where you have fixed revenues linked to each megawatt hour that’s produced,” says Jonas Corné, CEO at Greenbyte, another leading predictive analytics company for the wind industry.

The environment that the industry currently finds itself in contains a lot more volatility with regards to electricity pricing, which in turn creates more complexity around optimising the assets involved.

Hall likens the concept of maintenance strategies to that of a car. You operate it for a given period of time and then you bring in time-based preventative maintenance, which in the car’s case is regularly scheduled check-ups with a mechanic – rather than the alternative, which is to wait until your car breaks down.

The only issue, for both cars and for wind turbines, is that the asset is out of operation during that preventative maintenance. For energy generation, it could also involve replacing parts that don’t need replacing, just to fit in with a certain timetable.

That’s the advantage of digitalisation – using data that allows you to know exactly when to implement predictive maintenance, rather than relying on an estimation. For the wind industry, the benefits are clear for following the most advanced predictive maintenance principles.

Wind turbines can be outfitted with a wide variety of sensors that can take data from various components within the turbine. Companies like ONYX InSight and Greenbyte then analyse that data and use their findings to empower customers to make smarter decisions when managing their assets.

Hall lists two main advantages in this area – the first is that, by predicting a failure months ahead of time, you can plan your maintenance more effectively and reduced costs – for example, by pre-buying replacement parts at the best rate or by pre-booking cranes or vessels required for maintenance interventions.

This enables operators to ensure that an asset does not go out of operation during a time when it can’t be easily replaced. This offers obvious benefits to offshore wind, which can be challenging to reach quickly in times of emergency.

The second advantage is that is enables operators to save money by minimising lost production. If an asset is taken out of production, it can’t generate electricity. Naturally, it would be preferable to avoid any breakdowns during a region’s windy season and to catch any failures before they happen during the low-wind season, when most maintenance work is done, such as gearbox replacement or assessing blade condition and pitching.

Similarly, avoiding unnecessary site visits brings with it financial savings of its own, reducing labour hours, vessel hiring costs and further reducing the time assets spend out of production.

Modern turbine sensors provide key insight

What kind of data is used to make these decisions, then? Well, modern turbines are built with a wide variety of sensors installed, and one of the key types involved tracks vibration data.

Each turbine will have a range of sensors measuring the level of vibration of the major components within it, which is then used to judge their respective health and what actions should be taken to address any underperforming parts. For example, if sensors show high vibration levels in the turbine shaft, it could indicate that the shaft has run too far out of place and needs to be realigned.

“If you notice that you have a gearbox that’s not working very well, perhaps it makes sense to actually derate the turbine to run it at a lower capacity,” notes Corné.

Operators can then send a maintenance team to replace the low-functioning part in question before it breaks down and potentially compromises other parts of the turbine. “When something breaks down, it can also cause a bunch of secondary failures – other components that are nearby. You really want to avoid that.”

Even something as simple as weather forecasting can provide invaluable data to operators. “In wind, it’s very important to have data on what the future is going to look like for the next couple of days,” says Corné.

“When you do maintenance on a wind farm, you want to make sure that you do it on days when it’s not windy and you don’t have a bunch of waves, so you can actually get the vessels out to the wind farm.”

After all, hiring vessels to transport maintenance crew to offshore wind sites can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars per year, not to mention the time that is put into organising such work.

Barriers to overcome in the digitalisation of the wind industry

While digitalisation offers many advantages, it also faces challenges of its own. It’s one thing to collect the data at a turbine, but in order to optimise its performance, operators need to be willing to gather the different data streams in one central location so that conclusions can be drawn from the complete data set.

“That is not something that I have seen companies doing very well,” Corné acknowledges. “It’s often the case that data is siloed, it’s not accessible, and therefore you cannot draw conclusions.”

Siloed data is the biggest obstacle to operational efficiency in the wind industry, according to an ONYX Insight industry survey from September 2021 – with 62% of wind industry stakeholders considering data integration to be a significant barrier to digital advancement. Data silos mean lost value – removing them, Corné believes, would be “a game changer” for the industry.

“If that does not happen, the rest of the digitalisation work will be impossible,” he warns. “Because the data is the underlying factor upon which all of the other digitalisation elements will have to build upon.”

For example, sensors can examine oil within the turbine, allowing operators to inspect the wear metals within it like copper or steel and from there know where that wear is coming from. The levels at which those wear metals are present, and whether that number is increasing or decreasing, can tell you more.

And when combined with vibrational data, or indeed, any of the other sources of data that predictive analysts can use, this can provide a far more authoritative conclusion.

That could be used to judge whether the extra wear on a turbine is due to turbulence, or a failing component, or merely its location in relation to other turbines on a wind farm. Of course, this can only happen if data is shared and integrated with other data silos, providing greater understanding to the operator.

However, many manufacturers and operators are hesitant to transition to a non-siloed approach, for a variety of reasons. “They’ll give you aggregated data about the way a machine is running, because they’re concerned about maybe giving away intellectual rights,” Hall explains. “It makes some manufacturers defensive about data sharing.”

This hesitancy is understandable – most companies would think twice before sharing sensitive IP for fear that it they would be ceding control or giving away too much understanding about how their assets operate.

And, of course, this would also open them up to greater risk of being targeted for cyberattacks – a problem that many industries are grappling with today. While digitalisation offers many benefits, operators should also consider the potential risk and ensure that they take the necessary precautions.

“Imagine you were able to shut down a wind farm – just look at what happened to Colonial Pipeline,” Hall says, referring to the April 2021 cyberattack that took down the largest fuel pipeline in the US and led to shortages across the country’s east coast.

Colonial paid the hackers, an affiliate of Russia-linked cybercrime group DarkSide, a ransom in the region of $4.4m shortly after the hack. “That doesn’t mean we can’t [digitalise the industry],” Hall adds, “but we have to be much more careful about how we do it. And that’s to do with the maturing of the wind industry.”

And as the industry matures and advances, some developments will serve to drive home the need for digitalisation even further. The ever-increasing size of wind turbines and their resulting output, from GE’s 14MW Haliade-X prototype in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to Vestas’ planned 15MW that will go up next year, or MingYang’s upcoming 16MW behemoth, are promising steps forward for the wind industry, but present problems of their own.

Only four years ago, in 2017, the maximum capacity for an offshore turbine was 8MW. As more and more power production is concentrated on larger turbines, reducing the number of platforms required in an area, any potential loss in operation time comes at a much higher cost.

“You’ve got a much more expensive asset that you need to keep eyes on,” Hall notes. “If you lose one of these bigger turbines, the cost of maintenance is a lot higher. To mitigate this, [operators] will use digitalisation and sensors much more carefully than they’ve done in the past.”

Attitudes change as the benefits of digitalisation are understood

Both Hall and Corné agree, however, that this attitude of hesitancy is starting to change, as more and more operators come to understand the benefits that a non-siloed, digitalised operation can offer.

“A few years ago, I would have said that OEMs were very protective of the data,” Corné notes. “But now that’s opening up – there is a sense that the industry needs to collaborate. So, I think it’s a very, very positive direction that the industry is going in.”

One of the main contributing factors to this change is that people are coming in from other industries that have already implemented digitalisation on a wide scale, who have the skills and understanding to feel comfortable integrating the data.

That’s helping to shift the opinion of the industry in digitalisation’s favour, and increasingly operators have come to accept and embrace the technology, which will help the industry hone its efficiencies for the future and the challenges ahead.

“The wind industry is full of people who are very progressive and open to new technologies,” says Hall. “Right now, there aren’t enough of them – but I think it’s just a matter of time.”

This article first appeared in World Wind Technology Vol. 2 2021. The full publication can be viewed online here.