The compulsory GADS-W reporting can be a time-consuming and cumbersome task, however, advances in software capability can drastically reduce this to produce a one-click report.
VANCOUVER, BC: Clir Renewables software’s suite of capabilities includes functions that automate GADS reporting, reducing the time and labor required to prepare Generating Availability Data System, Wind (GADS-W) reports.
In 2017, North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) introduced GADS-W reporting. It was only in 2018 that the NERC made the GADS reporting mandatory for wind farms with 200 MW or greater total installed capacity. This year there are new requirements. As of January 1, 2019 operators of wind farms with 100 MW or greater total installed capacity are required to compile reports on a monthly basis and submit those reports to NERC each quarter. And sites of greater than 75 MW will be required to report from January 1, 2020.
With less than a month to submit the Q4 2018 GADS report, analysts across North America are scrambling to find time to prepare reports to meet the February 15 deadline.
Operators are required to submit two reports. First, the Performance Data Report, which summarizes overall wind turbine operation in a particular month. Second, the Component Outage Report which identifies the area or reason for lost production as reported in the Performance Data Report. NERC uses the information in these reports to calculate wind farm performance, reliability, and availability statistics. The requirements in producing these reports are challenging with complex rules and conditions that must be considered when allocating downtime to appropriate GADS-W reporting categories.
For many wind farms the data streams available to operators to produce these reports, e.g. OEM SCADA, are not set up or designed to comply with GADS-W reporting directly. Also, operators generally don’t have the tools to process their available data streams. These structural challenges leave operators faced with the periodic, time-consuming and complicated task of manually processing and editing available data streams to try and produce GADS-W reports. To address these specific challenges, Clir Renewables has developed a GADS-W Reporting tool which makes generating and submitting reports to NERC a straightforward task.
Leveraging Clir’s industry-leading proprietary data model, the software processes turbine SCADA data streams to seamlessly and automatically produce GADS-W reports, ready for submission to NERC, at the click of a button. It is a collection of functions working together that produce the one-click report. How does it all work? Firstly, SCADA data is processed by Clir to identify and categorize wind turbine downtime and lost energy accurately. Clients can then interact with the software to edit default allocations, a functionality we call ‘error code reconciliation’, to ensure downtime is accurately categorized. In addition, Clir has developed software to ingest documents like service reports, to ensure the reasons for downtime and lost production are accurately described on the platform. Clir’s software also identifies sequences of status codes automatically grouping these into outages enabling easier editing of event allocations and maps status codes to the appropriate default GADS-W reporting allocation. All of these functions drastically reduce the amount of time required in preparing GADS-W reports.
Dr. Shane Butler, Data Scientist at Clir, stated, “Generating the monthly reports on a quarterly basis is a time-consuming and onerous task for an operator to produce. Mistakes due to human error and misunderstandings in allocating downtime can be expected when dealing with such large amounts of data, especially at larger wind farms.
“Using Clir’s software to process the data required for GADS-W reports, not only reduces the time required but also ensures greater accuracy,” Butler continued.
In 2018 Clir Renewables’ clients with wind farms over 200 MW of installed capacity utilized the Clir GADS-W Reporting tool to produce their reports, easily meeting each deadline and will do so again for the February 15 deadline for the final quarter of the 2018 production year. Feedback on the tool was all positive, with clients telling of their delight at the ease with which the reports are produced and the amount of time saved against manual production of the reports.
Deadlines for the 2019 production year are May 15 for the first quarter, August 15 for the second quarter, November 15 for the third quarter and February 15, 2020, for the fourth quarter, mark them in the calendar now.
About Dr. Shane Butler: Shane is a recognized industry expert in the application of data science skills to real-world problems to enable and support informed decision making. For the past five years, Shane has been applying his big data analytics skill set within the domain of wind farm operations, performance analytics, and predictive maintenance. Expert user of Matlab, Python, Tableau, and Cloud-based computing platforms.
About Clir Renewables: Clir Renewables is a renewable energy AI software company whose industry-leading cloud-based tools help asset managers and owners maximize production, and give owners clarity on performance. Founded in early 2017, the company now serves over 2 GW of assets, raised over $5m funding in 2018, and boasts alumni from major owners, investors, developers, consultancies and software developers among its staff (DNV GL, Wood, Vattenfall, Natural Power, Amazon, among many others).
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