Smart turbine automation reduces costs

“Nowadays wind turbines must be seen as part of a wind farm and an entire energy system”, says Gabriel Schwanzer, business unit director at Bachmann Electronic in Feldkirch. The individual technical components already exist and many manufacturers are showing them at the Husum Wind trade fair. The edge that the Austrian firm Bachmann Electronic has is the one-source alliance it creates between controller, SCADA, farm control, condition monitoring system, data portal and grid control.

“The reduction of the energy costs is important when it comes to competition between energy producers. With intelligent turbines it is possible to pursue holistic cost reduction strategies”, adds Gabriel Schwanzer. It is therefore possible to reduce turbine downtimes by improving maintenance logistics through condition monitoring – from ten days to just two. Experience gained from the 100,000 wind turbines that Bachmann has equipped to date shows that there is a 30 per cent cost difference between being able to use all the available data and not having it at your disposal. 

Holger Fritsch, managing director of Bachmann Monitoring believes the time has come to maximise the technical possibilities: “There is no longer any way around standardisation and digitalisation. It is an essential issue for the company. We support this transition with such things as novel algorithms for efficient fleet management.”