NaturEner is a wind developer and operator with 399 MW of operating wind in Montana. These farms operate in relatively remote areas of the grid, and can therefore be constrained by regional transmission system outages. These outages can be caused by a variety of entities, and can have significant financial and operational impacts. Therefore, it is of interest to NaturEner to monitor the frequency, magnitude, and causes of these events for the purpose of monitoring the impact and determining if mitigation is required.
NaturEner is currently utilizing the Versify’s V-Performance Outage Management application in the system to log and manage turbine and wind farm outage events. These outage events are fed into PI Event Frames using Versify API’s that leverage PI Enterprise OLEDB and OPC drivers. Using these event frames combined with operational data managed in PI, NaturEner builds queries and reports that easily summarize and categorize the energy lost to planned and unplanned outages. In addition, these event frames are used to evaluate operational procedures, such as the re-energization process after an outage, where data is queried and reports generated to assess plant performance. Understanding the impact of outage events on generation is essential for NaturEner in maximizing profits from our wind assets.
NaturEner is a renewable energy company that has developed hydro, wind and solar utility-scale renewable energy projects in North America and Europe since 1999. NaturEner currently operates solar and wind power generation projects and has invested more than $800 million in North America since 2006.