GE-powered wind farms can increase output by up to 5 percent

GE announced PowerUp, a customized software-enabled platform that will increase a wind farm’s output by up to 5 percent taking into account environmental conditions. For the average U.S. wind farm operator using GE’s 1.5-77 turbine, a 5 percent increase in energy output translates to up to a 20 percent increase in profit per turbine.PowerUp is available for turbine models across GE’s installed base.

“At GE, we define our success by our customers’ success,” said Anne McEntee, president and CEO of GE’s renewable energy business. “By providing incremental power to wind operators, we’re able to help our customers realize both increased revenue and increased profit. It’s a partnership and a true win-win.”

“To put things in perspective, today our customers have more than 9,000 GE 1.5-77 turbines running in the United States. Even a 1 percent energy output increase on this installed base would generate more than 420,000 megawatt hours of additional energy each year, which would provide the equivalent power used by 33,000 average U.S. homes.”

When PowerUp is activated, a GE software program performs a complete before-and-after wind farm power performance analysis, validating the performance improvement. By adjusting performance dials that include speed, torque, pitch, aerodynamics and turbine controls, PowerUp seeks to maximize the power output of a wind farm.

Today’s announcement introduces the first generation of GE’s PowerUp platform. Previously, individual GE software and hardware upgrades were available to address niche opportunities. Wind farm operators now have the option to participate in a continuous PowerUp platform to further increase their output as new software and hardware upgrades are introduced.

PowerUp is part of GE’s Brilliant wind platform, which harnesses the power of the Industrial Internet to analyze tens of thousands of data points on a wind farm every second, driving higher power output and creating new revenue streams for customers. It is an ecomagination qualified product.

To view a video on increasing wind energy production with GE’s PowerUp, go to http://youtu.be/-5k-poZXHXs.