October 20, 2021 • 2 min read
Optimizing onshore wind farms for peak performance
We’ve been awarded the operations and maintenance (O&M) agreements for eight of Pacific Hydro’s wind farms in Victoria, Australia.
Crowlands wind farm in Victoria
Under the new agreements, we will provide asset management to improve the uptime and maximize the performance of the fleet, plus remote monitoring, and operations and maintenance services across Pacific Hydro’s six Victorian wind farms.
The 196 wind turbines at Yaloak South, Crowlands, Portland Wind Energy II, III, IV, Yambuk, Codrington, and Challicum Hills generate enough renewable energy to power 170,000 Australian homes.
“We’ve worked with Pacific Hydro for the last five years providing O&M services for several of its sites. The new extended O&M contracts confirm the value that has been created in that time while adding additional locations to the portfolio,” said Russell Claxton, Senior Vice President, Worley Power Services.
Wind turbine maintenance digital technologies
The wind turbine fleet will be managed through a secure remote monitoring centre (RMC) in Sydney. This provides 24/7 operations, reliability engineering, advanced analytics and energy management.
Autonomous drones will carry out blade inspections, capturing high resolution images that are aggregated with Superstitch technology, assessed by Wind Farm Ai, geolocated (with Fusion Atlas), and stored in a secure cloud environment.
The drone imagery can be reviewed in real time by experts anywhere in the world. And the reports created are tagged in a digital interactive map, which provides a geospatial and time-based history of blade and tower condition. The collaboration of drone based inspection with Ai technology reduces inspection costs a factor of 10, facilitating more regular inspection and far better condition forecasting.
We will also use SaltGrid, our predictive maintenance and analytics software, which applies predictive analytics to health, safety and environmental (HSE) data. It looks at patterns and trends to predict, understand and prevent incidents, which may lead to injury or death.
“Remote monitoring and advanced analytics allows us to optimize the technical performance of wind farm assets such as those at Pacific Hydro,” said Claxton. “We can also identify ways to operate on a higher run time. Increasing asset condition transparency, reducing failures, generating more revenue for our customers and contributing to delivering a more sustainable world.”
“It has been pleasing to see Worley continue and expand its commitment to renewables by providing competitive high quality non OEM options for wind turbine operation, maintenance and upgrades,” said Adrian Ciccocioppo, Production Manager, Pacific Hydro.
