SmartWind is an industry-driven demonstration project focused on the energy digitalisation that  will contribute to achieve a reduction of the total costs of renewable wind power generation and the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE), providing advanced and automated functions from data analysis for early fault detection and diagnosis, and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) planning at wind assets.

Such functions will be part of a cloud platform that collects data from SCADA, sensors and control systems, such as condition and maintenance management or inspections and facilitates the decision making for O&M. Machine Learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence techniques are the backbone of early fault detection and diagnosis.

As a result, SmartWind will face the main challenges of the wind industry (LCoE reduction) through the optimisation of O&M processes while maximising production from the available resource. The main KPIs to measure the project success are the reduction of O&M costs by 10% and the increase of availability and production indicators by 5%. To achieve the objectives of the project the partners will bring on board their extensive expertise in data management, algorithms development, machine learning, artificial intelligence, operational and management failures as well as control and optimisation. This action will contribute to start the project from a leading position in this field and to reinforce the action plan to be covered within the project. Furthermore, the standardisation of the prototype solution, the validation phase in the laboratory and the field test in wind farms with real operation are considered as a vital aspect of the working plan. The plan covers the following technical actions: i) Analyze technologies and applications, ii) Modelling and data characterisation, iii) Algorithms development for problem detection (faults and performance diagnosis) and optimised wind farm control and operation, and iv) O&M Decision Support Systems (DSS).

The primary objective of SmartWind is to provide an integrated platform for cost reduction and revenue optimisation based on advanced and automated functions for data analysis, fault detection, diagnosis and O&M recommendations, this way achieving operational excellence, maximising availability and OPerating EXpenditure (OPEX) reduction both at the wind farm, wind turbine and component level. In summary: i) Maximise high-quality reliable information available in SCADAs and systems as a basis for analysis, ii) Identify faults and performance problems, quantifying losses and proposing actions and iii) Support the O&M decisions.

The project consortium is well balanced with five actors from industry and academia covering the whole value chain: Three specialists in ICT systems for data analytics and the monitoring and control of renewables (ISOTROL, ENFORMA, NETAŞ), one O&M company (ZORLU ENERJİ) and two research centres with crucial competencies in maintenance and wind generation optimisation (TECNALIA and RUB).