Situation
Through construction of new wind farms and acquisition of completed projects, a wind farm developer grew to become one of the largest operators in the U.S., managing over a dozen projects spread across several time zones. The developer’s portfolio included a range of turbine models and several system control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Also, many of the sites had complex land ownership and royalty agreements. Achieving a strong corporate branding for the portfolio was also problematic. Across the entire enterprise, the developer needed to unify its SCADA systems, technical operations, branding, and reporting functions.

Solution
The developer approached Second Wind to build a corporate-wide wind energy Enterprise Management System (EMS). Second Wind collaborated with the developer to create an EMS that comprehensively provided a headquarters overview of the entire wind farm business—from the aggregate level; to the wind farm; and to the individual turbine, substation and met tower. The EMS united all the wind projects under a single corporate banner and user interface, optimizing feeds from each wind farm SCADA while portraying that information in a consistent interface. The EMS provided up-to-the minute technical and financial performance plus year-to-date and lifetime accumulated performance in comparison to corporate targets. The reporting flexibility was employed to create custom performance reporting to permit ongoing comparisons among turbine groups, maintenance groups, etc., plus the ability to create reporting structures for individual ownership groups. The EMS integrated and optimized the use of wind forecasting inputs and real-time pricing signals to achieve an unprecedented level of wind farm operation sophistication.

Results
The developer used its EMS as the backbone for all of its performance analysis. Large displays of the corporate-level screens were positioned to provide a view to most of the corporate decision-makers. At individual projects, forecast data from the SCADA were used to improve the scheduling of operations. Individual managers were able to check in on projects from outside the office to view the status of relevant projects or wind farms. Operators were able to restart turbines remotely after viewing event status lists for the turbines. Overall, the entire corporation worked faster and more efficiently because real-time information was available to inform operator action, and executive-level decision-making.