Boston, MA, 20 April 2023 – WindESCo, a pioneer in improving asset performance and reliability for wind turbine stakeholders, rolls out its innovative FIND, FIX, MEASURE™ SaaS analytics solution at CEZ ’s 600MW Fantanele-Cogealac wind farm in Romania. The technology will deliver turbine performance and reliability improvements, reverse efficiency losses from aging assets and increase AEP of one of Europe’s largest onshore wind plant.
It’s no secret that wind assets decline in performance and reliability over time, requiring either large-scale intervention, decommissioning or repowering – all of which come at a substantial cost. While aging is a fact of wind turbine life, understanding how power generation gradually declines over time, and subsequently reversing that trend, is complicated. It requires continuous, in-depth, and verified analyses across hundreds to thousands of individual turbines to generate maximum AEP recovering opportunities.
FIND, FIX, MEASURE™ (FFM), WindESCo’s continuous, scalable optimization solution for wind assets, works by analyzing high resolution SCADA to deliver performance and reliability improvements, without the need for additional hardware. FFM pinpoints anomalies affecting wind turbine performance through 60+ continuous checks of the SCADA from every turbine. FFM then provides recommendations and instructions to fix each anomaly including the financial and AEP impact. Once fixes are completed, the system calculates and reports the performance improvements in both financial gain and additional MWh at the turbine, site, and fleet levels.
Commissioned in 2012, Fantanele-Cogealac is among Europe’s largest onshore wind farms and consists of 240 2.5MW GE turbines. With over a decade in operation, its wind assets require a variety of solutions to boost overall performance and enhance reliability. While performance and reliability analytics can typically add extra work hours to pinpoint optimization opportunities, FFM enables internal teams to leverage their key performance managers, prioritize work and subsequently save time and money on having to add additional manpower – something that sets it apart and completes other existing solutions implemented by such large size players.
Liviu Gavrila, Chief Generation Officer, CEZ Romania, said: “Over the past decade our wind assets at Fantanele-Cogealac have helped us reliably serve our customers with clean renewable energy. WindESCo’s solution will complete the optimization tools package implemented by our team across the years, allowing us to better manage and improve the performance of our assets.”
Ed Wagner, Chief Revenue Officer, WindESCo commented: “Our only job is to increase the AEP of underperforming wind assets both onshore like Fantanele-Cogealac and offshore. Without active monitoring of high performance data, there is a risk that underperformance can become baked into long term production. It’s our objective to ensure that wind assets remain optimized for improved production – crucially without requiring our clients to invest in more people and further hardware technology.”
