The report, ‘Decoding Wind’s Future,’ identifies three steps that owners and operators must take to ensure continued success, in the short and long term:
Eliminate Silos
Optimise complex, diverse portfolios
Move away from ‘magic bullet’ digital tools
Eliminate Silos
The biggest obstacle to the wind industry achieving operational excellence is siloed data. According to the report, 62 percent of wind industry stakeholders consider data integration a significant barrier to digital advancement.
To overcome this obstacle, owners and operators should consider an asset as a single power plant and make operational decisions that optimise output across the whole plant, not just individual turbines or modules. According to the report, this will boost profitability on an asset level while unlocking sustainable competitiveness, greater investor confidence and further industry growth.
Optimise complex, diverse portfolios
Traditional approaches to O&M are trailing the new reality of mixed technology portfolios. Onyx Insight’s research predicts that the total installed capacity in 2030 will encompass 902 GW solar, 1114 GW wind, and 87 GW storage.
This means that a single tool to manage a single aspect of operation will not be sufficient for owners and operators - a platform for hybrid assets, which incorporates deep sector knowledge for each asset type, will be critical.
Move away from ‘magic bullet’ digital tools
Keeping assets running, maximising power production and a focus on MWh has been the default strategy for many to date.
Within this report, Onyx Insight make the case for moving away from MWh financial models to capital profitability models using metrics such as $/MWh, Climbs/WTG, MW/tech and MTTR (Mean time to respond) and the adoption of flexible operating strategies, underpinned by market pricing, where turbines can be uprated or derated to maximise the value of energy sold.
“This is a pivotal time for renewable energy” said Bruce Hall, CEO, Onyx InSight. “As the sector scales up and prepares to be at the heart of global energy production, it must maintain a sharp focus on profitability. Make no mistake, building the centralised software platforms of the future is not a trivial task. It requires deep multidisciplinary expertise, combining analytics and data management as well as the latest engineering and operational knowledge.”
Evgenia Golysheva, Head of Engineering, Onyx InSight, added that industry stakeholders will benefit from being open-minded – but not naïve – about technology and data and that using powerful tools to become more agile in response to a changing landscape, both on a macro and micro level, will open the door to continued success, in the short-term, and in the decades to come.
Onyx Insight will be at Global Offshore Wind at stand 203, and Evgenia Golysheva will be speaking on accelerating digitalisation in offshore wind on Thursday 30th at 11:30.
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