IoT in the wind sector and its role in the European Green Deal

What is the European Green Pact

The Green New Deal proposes a set of policy proposals that aim to address issues such as global warming and financial crises by ensuring sustainable development and creating a low-emission economy.

The European Green Pact aims to bet on energy sustainable and efficient industries in the use of resources. This is forcing the transformation and digitization of the energy system, where IoT technologies have much to contribute.

State of wind power industries in Spain

Spain is becoming a global benchmark in various industrial sectors and is pioneering the incorporation of technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and IoT in its business processes and operations.

In a recent post we talked about the water sector and in this one we will focus on the wind energy sector, where large Spanish companies are involved in large-scale international projects.

The wind power industry has 195 manufacturing centers in 12 of the 17 Autonomous Communities, as well as 12 research centers in Spain (it ranks third in wind power patent applications in the EU) and accounts for 6% of the national GDP. It is also the second largest source of peninsular electricity generation in Spain in 2020.

Internationally, Spain ranks fifth in the world in terms of installed wind power capacity, after China, the United States, Germany and India, and seventh in the world in terms of intellectual property generated (patents) in the wind energy sector, behind only the United States, Germany, Japan and China.

The European Green Deal and the growth of the wind energy sector

The European Green Pact aims to put energy and resource efficient industries at the heart of Europe's economic revival.  

This requires the rapid transformation of our energy system, which currently accounts for 75% of Europe's greenhouse gas emissions. And it makes wind energy a natural driver of growth and employment .

For the wind sector, this means implementing systems capable of controlling and managing the wind turbines and the wind farm in general to ensure maximum performance and keep the cost of wind energy as low as possible.

In this way, it will be possible to achieve the objectives set out in the European Green Pact and install more than double the annual wind power capacity.

This transformation comes hand in hand with new technologies, which are completely transforming the wind industry, optimizing productivity and reducing costs.

Of particular importance are the initiatives related to Industry 4.0, such as the exploitation of ICT, the IoT or the automation of processes thanks to artificial intelligence systems.

The new digital systems boost the efficiency, productivity and reliability of wind farms in order to maintain 100% production and availability, a scenario that would also help to minimize risk and maximize the return on investment.

The advantages of IoT in the wind industry

Before the advent of new technologies in the wind industry, the overhaul of wind turbines was done in a more rudimentary way.

Sometimes, for example, the technicians had to rappel down the turbines to check for damage to the blades of the wind turbines. At the same time, another technician had to take photographs from the ground with cameras that had a high zoom. The job was a big challenge.

All this is already part of history thanks to the incorporation of new technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence and other technological advances.

Artificial intelligence and permanent surveillance

Among the most representative advantages of Industry 4.0 to the sector, we could highlight what is known as permanent monitoring, which thanks to artificial intelligence systems, massive amounts of data are permanently collected and analyzed through devices installed in wind turbines, which are sent to the cloud.

Thanks to this permanent monitoring, the wind farm management team is able to work with updated indicators in real time on the "state of health" of each of its components .

Artificial intelligence tools are also able to differentiate blades from water, sky and other irrelevant elements; distinguish cracks and defects from other elements that affect the structure, such as bird droppings.

They can also integrate drone location and camera zoom data for accurate joining, as well as classify faults by type and severity.

IoT and predictive analytics

On the other hand, in the wind industry, we could highlight the predictive analysis systems , thanks to which it is possible to foresee failures in wind turbines or other assets before they occur .

In this case, thanks to the IoT, computer systems are able to learn the usual behavior of machines, being able to trigger alarms when any change occurs in the usual behavior of any equipment.

Thanks to predictive analytics, failures can be predicted even months before they occur . In other cases, alerts are used to detect symptoms that would normally lead to equipment damage, making it possible to intervene before a failure requiring repair even occurs.

In this way a wind farm operator can plan repairs, minimise the impact on the operation of the wind farm, reduce costs and improve efficiency .

Likewise, the ability to make more accurate energy production forecasts, offer greater transparency in services, reduce risks and minimise costs are key to making generation offers and ensuring their stability.

All these analysis systems not only facilitate the efficient technical management of wind farms, but also facilitate commercial management and attract investment in the sector.

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