European wind farm owner Ventient Energy is deploying a predictive maintenance solution across 17 of its UK wind farms to reduce downtime.
Ventient is installing Onyx Insight’s fleet monitoring cloud-based predictive analytics software across more than 300 turbines, to improve fleet reliability and cut costs of refurbishing major turbine components.
Ventient asset reliability engineer Martin Vox said: “We operate some of the oldest wind farms in the UK, which up until now have run with no vibration monitoring of drivetrain components.
“This has led to major component failures being discovered at a late stage of damage progression, requiring unplanned work to restore to an operable condition.
“Some of our oldest wind farms do not have ethernet data transmission available within the nacelle and Onyx Insight has developed a robust 4G solution to allow retrofit on these turbines.”
Onyx Insight’s fleetMONITOR technology has been developed to enable proactive maintenance approaches by operators and owners of wind farm fleets.
Onxy Insight engineering head Evgenia Golysheva said: “Once we get the equipment installed, we can identify bearing failures routinely six to 24 months in advance of repair.
“To ensure efficient installation, we’ve streamlined the process and have a strong quality assurance/ and control process. We have piloted on several sites already to iron out any potential technical challenges and make the scale-up easy.”
Onyx Insight Europe sales director Sven Thiesen added: “This technology will play a key role in the near- and long-term success of wind energy in the UK and around the world.
“And in the current circumstances, when operators have restrictions on where and when to send teams on-site, insight that allows owner-operators to manage their assets and maintain revenues will be invaluable.
“We are pleased that Onyx Insight is proving that the return on investment calculation for adding advanced sensing on older turbines can be turned on its head.”