Wind Farms consist of a number of wind turbines that are used to generate electric power. An individual wind turbine is a complex piece of machinery that needs to be managed by its owners for two key reasons: its operational efficiency and the measurement of the energy and hence revenue being generated by the equipment. There are a number of challenges that Wind Farm operators must meet to achieve these goals.

An individual wind farm may consist of a number of wind turbines but, in general, the turbines in a given wind farm come from the same manufacturers. If an operator has more than one wind farm, however, they may find themselves in the situation where they have to manage turbines from different manufacturers. Individual wind farms are managed by the turbine manufacturers' SCADA system offering (SCADA stands for Supervisory Control And  Data Acquisition). SCADA systems are powerful systems that supervise the operation of the wind turbines and the wind farm as a whole. Through the use of the SCADA system, operators can assess how much energy a farm is producing and hence how much revenue they are generating.

This situation is complicated where there are wind farms with multiple manufacturers as operators as they then have a situation where they have a SCADA system for each manufacturer. In a worst case sencario, operators may have to manually add up the output of each SCADA system to ascertain the revenue figures. Some SuperSCADA systems have been developed where turbines from multiple manufacturers and hence multiple wind farms can be managed. One such system has been developed by the Technical University of Denmark - see http://tinyurl.com/no2ezs and http://tinyurl.com/mu8269 cofor more details.

SuperSCADA systems offer one solution to the problem of managing several wind farms with multiple wind turbine manufacturers but Vertoda can offer another solution. Vertoda can aggregate the data produced by different vendors' SCADA systems and can present maintenance, energy production and revenue information in a unified fashion. Vertoda provides a central data repository for the data generated by wind farms and makes this information available in a timely fashion to the rest of the Wind Farm operator's IT systems and software. Users can then view this data from both fixed and mobile devices.

A key metric of wind turbine performance is its availability. Unfortunately for operators, different vendors have different ways of calculating availability. Unsurprisingly, given their complexity, wind turbines can be temperamental. A typical service agreement would be 97% availability for 50 weeks of the year with 2 weeks set aside for maintenance, 1 week every 6 months is standard. This is key data regarding wind turbine performance but can be difficult to obtain. Using Vertoda enables a wind farm operator to assess the availability performance of their wind farms at a high level and at an individual turbine level. Revenue is lost when a turbine is unavailable so without this data accountable losses are not accrued correctly and operators can't quantify how manufacturers are performing.

In addition to availability, the other key metrics for assessing wind turbine performance are production and wind speed. These metrics can be viewed as interdependent. For example, if a wind turbine is unavailable during a period of high wind speed operators lose more revenue than during a time of low wind speed. Metrics therefore need to be correlated and Business Intelligence is required for assessing operational performance using the Vertoda Framework.

There is a potential alternative here as some wind turbines can send email and SMS text messages. The Vertoda Framework can access, centralise and parse these messages and publish them on Desktop, Web and Mobile User Interfaces. This would be a richer presentation than is possible with an email or SMS client and enables realtime data without an OPC interface.