Wind SCADA Overlay

August 9, 2016

Wind Turbine

Introduction

The client a large energy company has a Renewable Energy Monitoring Center (REMC) that is responsible for tracking the status of over 15 Wind Energy sites throughout the United States, requiring operators to monitor a multitude of independent SCADA systems. Grantek worked with the client to develop a single SCADA to standardize data collection methodologies, operator interfaces, alarm management practices, and reporting across all Wind Energy generation sites.

Opportunity

The training and scalability requirements of maintaining various independent SCADA systems for each Wind Energy generation site were not supportable for long-term operations. The client required a single, unified SCADA system and Wind Turbine data model to streamline the asset monitoring process. The system must be reliable, redundant, secure, and scalable. This standardized system would also realize other benefits such as reduced reaction time to critical maintenance issues, improved safety processes for on-site work, and the ability to deploy standard SCADA controls to monitoring centers outside of the REMC.

Solution

The end-solution, referred to as the Wind SCADA Overlay, monitors over 1,000 Wind Turbines across 15 sites and with 9 different turbine vendors. This requires the collection and communication of over a 250,000 data tags and 100,000 alarms. The system supports 50 simultaneous clients both in the REMC and remotely using HTML5 remote desktop technology.

This system was built using a Rockwell Software based architecture. OPC data is collected from on-site servers and brought into a standard Wind Turbine tag model (developed by Grantek and the client) in FactoryTalk View SE and FactoryTalk VantagePoint. Up to 50 clients can access the system simultaneously through FactoryTalk View Clients or through mobile clients using AccessNow HTML5 remote desktop software. This solution takes advantage of many of the Rockwell Software repeatability features to streamline engineering roll-out and promote expandability, including FactoryTalk View Global Objects and FactoryTalk VantagePoint Custom Types and Parameterized reporting.

New REMC operators only require knowledge of a single SCADA system to monitor Wind Energy assets. Since the original installation the Wind SCADA Overlay has been expanded to monitor two additional Wind Energy sites and has been deployed as an on-site monitoring system.

The Wind SCADA Overlay project facilitated a variety of new projects between Grantek and the client including a new implementation of this SCADA architecture to monitor Solar Energy sites, on-site data collection and historization systems, and Power Plant Controls systems.

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