BACKGROUND:
The management system of a wind farm is a fundamental tool in the operational phase. The special features of this type of installation required not only the provision of a monitoring system that would allow the monitoring and control of certain operating parameters, but also the use of a computer application that would allow operational reporting aimed at optimising the wind generation of the wind farm.
The existence at the wind farm of wind turbines from 5 different manufacturers means that, from the point of view of supervision and control, Sotavento Experimental Wind Farm presents some technical peculiarities that are different from other wind farms, and these are expressed in the following aspects.
- The use by each technician of a SCADA system stored in its own database, with files that are incompatible with a standard format
- Access to information with different privileges and, for some technologies, in a non-automatic format
- Measuring equipment located, depending on the wind technology, indifferent points of the wind turbine network
- Lack of synchronization between SCADA technicians, even among the same turbine manufacturer
- Absence of data, within certain time periods, caused by the loss of communication established between the technician’s SCADA system and the wind turbine
OBJECTIVES:
Recognizing this diversity of information, Sotavento Galicia, S.A. has developed a comprehensive management system aimed at integrating itself uniformly on to a single database, from the data parameters and incidents arising from the various systems at the wind farm (wind turbines, meteorological towers and substation) and from it, the preparation of operational reports, which allows for performance monitoring of wind turbines in parallel with each individual technology, enabling the optimisation and parameterisation of the variables that each developer is interested in controlling.
METHODOLOGY PERFORMED:
The actions carried out on the project are in chronological order:
- Integration in the LAN communications of the local operation positions existing in the control room of the wind farm that host respectively the SCADA for the 5 technicians, meteorological towers in the wind farm and substation
- Synchronization between SCADAs and wind turbines referenced to a single time base
- Importing to management database of data files, with ten-minute averages of each technology from corresponding SCADA
- Treatment for the programming routine of data files for homogenisation and final storage in database:
- Time format in 10-minute intervals
- Management of variable fields in each technology
- Importing of incident and error files of SCADA of the technician to the management database (central server)
- Treatment for programming to standardize incident files
- Interpretation of the error codes for each technology
- Application of unavailability as error code
- Format with common fields (start and end of error, length, code, description, availability as technician and Sotavento)
- Introduction to database maintenance tasks
- Programming for reporting based on the database management
CURRENT SITUATION:
Currently this management tool is completed and implemented in the wind farm, undergoing a continuous process of optimisation and adaptation to new needs. Through this the following technical management reports are obtained:
- Energy movement report
- Production per technology report
- Equivalent hours report
- Wind in anemometer towers report
- Wind per wind turbine report
- Availability report
- Power curve report
- Energy deviation report
- Maintenance response times
- Comparison between technologies
- Integration and topographic effects and of contrails on wind turbines
- Integrating of the turbine energy and prediction data
- Programming for statistical reporting of faults and automatic import-export data
Currently we are developing a more flexible and efficient system for the introduction of the working parts, as well as detailed maintenance reports.
