Giuseppe Madia looks at a map of Europe on a monitor. It shows the entire BKW wind farm portfolio. The Managing Director of BKW subsidiary Proxima Solutions zooms in to the different wind farms, even individual turbines. With just a few clicks, he can check how they’re doing. It’s Wind-Log which makes this possible. Proxima Solutions introduced the monitoring tool to the market in 2020 and has been constantly updating it ever since.
A highly complex thermometer
Wind-Log provides real-time data for every turbine. It shows just how much electricity each turbine is producing at any given time and even allows a virtual glimpse into their inner workings. Various components of a wind turbine – such as the gears and the generator – are fixed with sensors. They measure the temperature, and Wind-Log uses this data. You could compare it to a thermometer, albeit a highly complex version. Madia explains: “If the turbine has an elevated temperature and is running hot, that’s an early sign that something is wrong.” Wind-Log compares the data of any single turbine with all the others in the same wind farm. This means that outlying values can be quickly detected.
![[Translate to Englisch (CH):] Screenshot Wind-Log](/fileadmin/_processed_/7/5/csm_Wind-Log_Screenshot_bc68368db2.png)
«If the turbine has an elevated temperature and is running hot, that’s an early sign that something is wrong.»
Madia clicks on turbine five in the Marker wind farm, Norway. The gears in the turbine are running a little hotter than the others in the same wind farm. A look at the time series – which Wind-Log also records, of course – gives the all-clear: it’s a temperature fluctuation. “It’s worrying when it’s just getting higher,” says Giuseppe Madia. Wind-Log allows early detection of this kind of problem. It’s almost worth its weight in gold. “If a small part of the gears breaks off and we pick it up early on, we can repair the turbine. The repairs cost around ten thousand euros. But if the damage goes undetected long enough, sooner or later the entire gear operation will break down. Then it has to be replaced from the ground up using a crane. The repair costs can quickly rise to around a hundred thousand euros – and that’s before the income lost through the production outage,” says Madia.
Data flows – from Trading to Wind-Log and vice versa
If a turbine part has to be replaced, Wind-Log helps determine the ideal time for the operation. The tool also holds wind forecasts, including data from BKW Trading. Wind-Log combines the forecast data with the remuneration in the system or the expected market price. This means every planned maintenance procedure comes with a price tag, which represents the potential income lost. Once the work is scheduled, this data flows back to BKW Trading. This means the colleagues on the trading floor know when a certain volume of electricity will be unavailable so they can acquire it in good time on the market.
Interaction of people and technology
Wind-Log processes up to 4 million datasets in real time, running on 74 servers in the cloud and encompassing a total of 3,300 microservices. As impressive as these figures are, it is the interaction of people and technology that really unleashes the full force of Wind-Log. That’s because it takes people to correctly interpret the data from the tool. And it is people who record how they responded to the various disturbances. This means that over the long term, Wind-Log will not only predict disturbances but also provide suggestions for remedying them. It also takes people to develop Wind-Log further – including Madia and his team. After all, Wind-Log is not the only monitoring tool on the market, so they’re constantly working to make it faster, more convenient and simply better. The Proxima Solutions team is dedicated – and they have the results to show for it. Alongside the BKW wind farm portfolio, they are already monitoring various installations run by third parties. And Wind-Log has no geographic restrictions. Who knows – perhaps it will be a world map on Madia’s monitor before long.
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