Renewable energy consultancy Natural Power has been awarded more than £100,000 from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to further develop research into improving wind farm efficiency.
The new finance aims to build on a pilot project – ‘Combining complex and disparate data sources to define and deploy leaner and smarter operational strategies to improve the performance of wind farms’.
Natural Power is looking at ways to take a data-driven approach to maximise the efficiency, lifetime and availability of wind turbines, while minimising operating costs by developing a model that incorporates a full-range of available data.
The consultancy will collaborate with the Science and Technology Facility Council and tap in to its data science expertise to help bring this new product to fruition.
The project is due to kick off on 1 October.
Natural Power’s Leanne Ramage said: “The outputs from this project will put Natural Power at the forefront of wind turbine analysis services, but will also significantly extend the range of maintenance planning and delivery offered by our site management teams.
“The increase in capacity will enable us to offer turbine management that is leaner and smarter, contributing to the key drivers of increasing efficiency, availability and turbine lifetime while reducing overall operating costs.
“Natural Power is in a unique position where we have analysis, asset management and independent servicing expertise all interlinked, and provide wind farm management to approximately 30% of the UK wind farms.
“This project will develop a model that takes account of the full range of data available – from handwritten anecdotes to high-resolution SCADA data – and capitalises on our wealth of hands-on experience of the practical management and servicing of wind turbines.”