Benchmarking exercise of predicted and actual production losses based on SCADA data (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). Régis Decoret presents his findings to PES.
The need for post construction performance assessment
It’s nothing new: wind energy is a capital intensive business, meaning that wind farm developers need a significant capital over
a short period of time to build each new project, before generating revenues over 15-20 years. This sentence is by itself a perfect summary of the project financing process for a wind farm, as the project financial model is mostly driven by these
2 parameters: required capital cost and expected revenues. Of course, anyone working with these financial models will rightly argue that there is a lot more in it than these 2 key items, but at the end of
the day, it all comes down to costs and revenues, or better said, costs and energy yield. I will leave the cost issue for financial experts and rather focus on the energy yield assessment.
Although pre-construction energy yield assessment techniques are not new either, they keep on being upgraded on a regular basis, as the wind industry gets more and more mature and a larger quantity of operational data become available. And for a wind analyst, getting hold of real production data of wind farms for which he/she performed the energy yield assessment before construction is a dream come true. How accurate was the pre-construction assessment? Is the gap due to an over/under estimation of the wind resource? Are the turbines really performing as expected? It is only by interrogating data from the SCADA systems, that the industry will close the gap between production expectations and reality.
