ONYX InSight, an independent predictive maintenance partner that gives asset owners clarity and control over their operations, has secured multiple new long-term contracts with Pattern Energy to provide predictive maintenance services across four wind farms in North America. This brings the total number of sites under ONYX monitoring to five.
To read the full case study click here.
The new contracts will see ONYX install condition monitoring systems (CMS) on 234 turbines across two wind farms, and deliver a three-year contract to provide monitoring and analysis of maintenance data across Pattern’s portfolio. At wind farms K2 and Armow in Ontario, ONYX InSight are set to connect installed vibration sensors to their hardware-agnostic asset predictive platform, fleetMONITOR.
Monitoring and analytics of Pattern’s wind turbines at these sites will commence in phases through to Q1 2019.
The widespread adoption of ONYX’s predictive maintenance across the Pattern fleet will allow a holistic view of performance, incorporating oil, temperature and maintenance data across a 950-MW fleet of 532 wind turbines. The project builds on a long-standing commercial relationship between the two businesses that has seen Pattern take advantage of ONYX InSight’s predictive maintenance service combining data analytics with real-world engineering expertise.
The drivetrain engineering support provided by ONYX will help Pattern reduce LCoE and downtime while extending the lifetime of drivetrain components. Throughout North America, asset owners and operators are increasingly turning to innovative predictive maintenance solutions to drive down OPEX costs and gain greater control over the operational and financial performance of their wind farms.
“Our aim is to give project owners and operators the ability to take control of their O&M decision-making, whether that’s by scaling up our ecoCMS offering and using fleetMONITOR to remove obstacles to ‘going digital’ or by undertaking the in-depth technical analysis they need to get to grips with engineering challenges,” said Ashley Crowther, Group Vice President at ONYX InSight.
Despite advances, the diversity of turbine and condition monitoring system (CMS) technologies in use across sites and portfolios means that effectively harnessing the resulting data in order to gain a consistent, fleet-wide view of wind-turbine condition and maintenance requirements remains a challenge.
To address this, ONYX connects their pioneering ecoCMS hardware to fleetMONITOR, a cloud-based predictive analytics platform capable of bringing together data streams from multiple drivetrain technologies. fleetMONITOR builds on engineering expertise to accurately alert maintenance teams of turbine performance issues 6 to 18 months before they become critical. The use of CMS to collect data is scaling up, and the market is turning to providers of complete solutions which are tested and proven to meet their predictive maintenance needs.
“Taking on responsibility for monitoring for 950 MW of turbine production demonstrates the strength of the relationship we have with Pattern Energy as we collectively aim to increase uptime and reduce O&M costs,” said Ben Rice, Senior Manager, Operations Engineering at Pattern Energy. “Over the past five years, we have benefitted from ONYX InSight’s flexible predictive maintenance offering on numerous projects.”
Rice added: “The deep insight that fleetMONITOR provides will help us to continue the work done at Grand Renewables across our other projects in reducing both the number of labor hours spent on drivetrain inspection and our overall OPEX expenditure.”
To read the full case study click here.
Filed Under: News, O&M, Software
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