To support the green energy transition, it’s time for the wind industry to rethink what Asset Performance Management means, and move beyond visualization and monitoring towards performance improvement.
Asset reporting, data visualization and performance monitoring have become standard for wind plant owners, asset managers and financial stakeholders, to ensure turbines are running safely and meeting performance expectations. Asset performance management solutions (APMs) began to gain popularity about a decade ago, with the goal of monitoring and reporting wind plant KPIs like downtime and availability. This was driven in part by investor reporting requirements, as well as for tracking availability guarantees from OEMs. Many larger wind companies have invested substantial resources in developing custom software and dashboards to manage their wind assets, with varying success.
APMs have garnered a lot of attention from investors, from private equity and venture capital, in addition to strategic players already in the wind market seeking a shorter path to bespoke analytics programs. Despite the perceived need for an APM from across the market, they have often failed to detect issues that impact turbine reliability and efficiency, ultimately failing to improve asset performance.
