by Power Factors
Dec 13, 2018 — Power Factors, LLC, a leading independent software and services provider for renewable energy is pleased to announce its Drive 2.0 release for solar and wind energy assets. Building on the most advanced platform for renewable asset management, Drive 2.0 sets a new bar for technology solutions designed to maximize generation while lowering the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and risk. Drive 2.0 is available in beta now and will have general availability Q1 2019.
Matthew Brocklehurst, CTO of Power Factors says, “Drive 2.0 offers advantages to information consumers in every part of the renewables value chain. We have added a number of machine learning based analytics into our platform resulting from our Arista acquisition and our solar performance characterization efforts. We’ve also automated event response and reporting through intelligent suppression and consolidation, keeping our customers focused on only the events that require action.”
Alarm and event overload often prevents operators from identifying relevant events and prioritizing workflows based on their impact on generation and cost. Event Genealogy groups and surfaces relevant events according to IEC standards, yet shelves and suppresses non-critical sympathetic faults according to business logic which enables portfolio managers and field technicians to take action and drive desired outcomes. Initial deployments are automatically managing, associating, splitting and editing events, saving early adopters several hundred hours per month of labor, and reducing the total number of events requiring human intervention by as much as 90%.
Advanced capabilities for wind turbine performance management are tailored to wind industry specific requirements. These include full data curation solving underlying data quality issues associated with SCADA and IIoT systems. With high quality and curated data, the platform delivers advanced wind turbine analytics, performance engineering and operating efficiency gains, and improved loss allocations. Specific features include deep learning models, visualizations of performance and predicted loss events, and full loss characterizations.
Over twenty advanced analytics capabilities have been integrated into Drive to continuously and precisely identify underperformance, safety or resiliency (fatigue) issues. Combined with the platform integrated analytics, Power Factors offers subject matter experts through its Advanced Services Group to interpret prognostic results and optimize O&M strategies fleet wide for wind and solar assets. To date, these analytics have identified millions of dollars of savings, or several hundred thousand dollars on a single wind farm.
To provide reliable weather data even in the case of equipment or communication failure, Drive 2.0 now incorporates third party satellite weather data as an additional data feed and backup source for data curation. Additional capabilities have also been added for the automatic detection and classification of losses due to snow, soiling and shading amongst others. Existing analytics such as expected production and clipping now leverage machine learning techniques. All Drive 2.0 data quality events and curation are now fully auditable with the reasons for data validation marked, sources for estimation noted, and dashboards provided to identify assets with recurring data quality issues.
Asset managers, performance engineers, analysts, field managers, and maintenance teams have a need to collaborate to address complex issues impacting asset reliability and overall cost of energy. Case Management organizes and integrates historical data, failure modes, events and work order records to provide a common workflow and rapid resolution pathway for all relevant stakeholders. In addition, the integrated asset Knowledge Base provides easy to use and targeted guidance to case workers on best practices and recommended corrective actions.
Power Factors delivers scalable data driven system of engagement that protects capital investments in renewable energy by providing tools to manage performance of renewable energy assets. The company’s advanced SaaS solution is built upon utility-grade software platforms from OSIsoft, Microsoft and Salesforce to ensure reliability and scalability. With over 22 gigawatts of renewable energy assets under management, Power Factors works with some of the largest, most successful clean energy companies across the world to help them drive predictable value out of their investments.