The new contracts will see Onyx install condition monitoring systems 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. The company is set to connect installed vibration sensors to their hardware-agnostic asset predictive platform fleetMonitor at the wind farms K2 and Armow in Ontario. 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 comprising 532 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 whilst 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. 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 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.
“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. “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.”
Ben Rice, Senior Manager, Operations Engineering at Pattern Energy, added that over the past 5 years the company has benefitted from Onyx InSight’s flexible predictive maintenance offering on numerous projects and that working with Onyx means that there is the option of making performance enhancements directly or having Onyx apply its specialist understanding to tackle a developing fault, no matter the turbine or CMS technologies used on site.
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