WindESCo has signed up global renewable components supplier Phoenix Contact as a strategic technology partner.
Phoenix Contact will provide WindESCo’s “Swarm Edge” component of its Swarm technology, the “first commercially available, patented solution for autonomous, cooperative control of wind assets”.
Swarm Edge is installed in each turbine to provide data collection and centralised control.
Swarm, licensable by OEMs and partners, enables turbines to cooperatively adjust positioning to mitigate wake effects and boost production for the entire farm – not just single machines – by 3-5% annually.
To optimise wind energy generation across an entire site, Swarm brings together advances in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and artificial intelligence, enabled by on-site hardware such as edge processing units within individual turbines and a central server on site, which in turn communicates with cloud servers to coordinate turbine movements optimally across the plant.
The Swarm Edge hardware component has been created for WindESCo by Phoenix Contact USA, which supplies the electrical controls, networking and automation markets.