Germany: Siemens Develops Wind Power Plant Service Portal

Siemens has developed a wind power plant service portal based on Simatic WinCC Open Architecture for the operation management of wind power plants and wind farms. Visitors to the HUSUM WindEnergy from September 18 – 22, 2012 will have the chance to find out more about the new Siemens offering at booth F19 in Hall 1.

To prevent downtime on windy, high-energy yield days and allow necessary servicing assignments to be planned for times when wind activity is at its lowest, operations and plant servicing managers require an up-to-date overview of the status of their plants and full access to all machine data. This also entails the optimum coordination of servicing personnel, taking into account aspects such as travel time and vehicle fleet management, weather conditions and spare part management – particularly in the case of offshore wind farms.

Using a system based on the open Scada system Simatic WinCC Open Architecture, high-resolution data is captured at the individual turbines or wind farms and stored locally, ready to be accessed by the remote service control desk on demand and used to perform comprehensive system evaluation processes.

What is special about this system is the integrated architecture which allows the same software package to run both locally and at the control center, merging the distributed system databases to form a single virtual database. This approach allows large volumes of data from distributed plants to be made available to the service center in a single application over networks with a restricted bandwidth for necessary evaluation processes in any optional quality.

Uwe Hünichen of the WinCC Open Architecture Center of Competence in Germany: “Working in consultation with wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm operators, we have developed a sustainable solution which addresses the needs of wind power plants distributed over a large geographical area. This has provided an unequivocal answer to the many issues and enquiries we received during the course of the last Husum Wind.”

Integrated architecture and ease of communication, as well as the use of long-term databases on the turbine or farm level, have meant that service technicians in the control center are now able to access detailed up-to-the-minute data from all connected turbines over a central application and to carry out any kind of comparative analysis.

This eliminates the need to dial into each turbine separately and change between different applications, while still affording service teams unrestricted access to any online data, alarms and histories for troubleshooting and analysis. A smart data management system makes for unrestricted data access even with low bandwidth connections.

The wind power plant service portal is an open, adaptable Scada solution offering diverse functions and interfaces for the integration of wide-ranging plants and different applications, such as plug-and-play configuration for the convenient connection of new turbines or farms to the control center. Secure, event-oriented, encryptable and seamless communication ensures data consistency in the control center even in the event of connection failures. Different user roles are pre-defined across every level from on-site operating personnel to the manufacturer’s service engineers.

The plant tree structure set out by IEC 61400-25 is predefined for around 1,500 individual data items per turbine. The system is prepared for the application of RDS-PP and provides high availability through to double redundancy. The wind power service portal has web capability and also supports mobile devices. Master data maintenance, long-term turbine and farm data storage, maintenance management, reporting and logbook functions are all integrated.

Functions include a wind farm overview in the form of geographic mapping, a data mining module for cross-farm comparison of plant data, an interface for direct power marketing, SNMP network monitoring and individually configurable graphic plant images with live data. The system can be scaled at will, comes with multiple language functionality for English and German as well as an upgrade option for up to 40 languages, and offers manufacturer and platform neutrality for use with Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The wind power plant service portal for Simatic WinCC Open Architecture is currently in operation as a wind farm management system in Germany’s North Sea offshore wind farm, is used by a German turbine manufacturer in its new turbine series, and also by a Chinese wind farm battery storage manufacturer.

Another user is the PROKON company group from Itzehoe, which has opted to deploy the new wind power service portal as a local turbine Scada and in its Scada control center for monitoring its new P3000 3.0 MW wind power plants.

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Press release, September 20, 2012; Image: Siemens