Remote Monitoring and Control for a Windmill Generator

The maintenance & tracking of various modules was an overhead for the customer due to the huge labor costs involved. Being an advanced solar solutions provider, they wanted to ensure early detection of issues and provide the best-in-class customer experience. Hence they wanted to automate the whole process. 

Making wind a reliable source of energy depends greatly on the placement of the wind turbines used to produce electricity. Turbulence is a significant factor as it strains turbine components, making them more likely to fail. Vestas wanted to pinpoint the optimal location for wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs.

Wind provides clean, renewable energy. The core concept is simple: wind turbines spin blades to generate power. However, today's systems are anything but simple. Modern wind turbines have blades that sweep a 120 meter circle, cost more than 1 million dollars and generate multiple megawatts of power. Each turbine may include up to 1,000 sensors and actuators – integrating strain gages, bearing monitors and power conditioning technology. The turbine can control blade speed and power generation by altering the blade pitch and power extraction. Controlling the turbine is a sophisticated job requiring many cooperating processors closing high-speed loops and implementing intelligent monitoring and optimization algorithms. But the real challenge is integrating these turbines so that they work together. A wind farm may include hundreds of turbines. They are often installed in difficult-to-access locations at sea. The farm must implement a fundamentally and truly distributed control system. Like all power systems, the goal of the farm is to match generation to load. A farm with hundreds of turbines must optimize that load by balancing the loading and generation across a wide geography. Wind, of course, is dynamic. Almost every picture of a wind farm shows a calm sea and a setting sun. But things get challenging when a storm goes through the wind farm. In a storm, the control system must decide how to take energy out of gusts to generate constant power. It must intelligently balance load across many turbines. And a critical consideration is the loading and potential damage to a half-billion-dollar installed asset. This is no environment for a slow or undependable control system. Reliability and performance are crucial.

Dulas wanted a way to improve the reliability of the cold chain, facilitating maintenance and ensuring fewer vaccines are spoiled. Dulas wanted an M2M solution which would enable them to record and report the temperature inside vaccine refrigerators.

When James Meringer’s commercial contracting business experienced a rapid increase in solar projects, he also saw an opportunity to extend the benefits of solar by using the bifacial solar panels he’d become familiar with in new ways. Bifacial solar panels enable sunlight from both sides of the panel, making it a more efficient harvest of solar power. Seeing the panel’s power, James and his team set out to use the same technology for street lighting. Until now, solar street lights have served as utilitarian solutions that force designers to choose between form and function. The Mira Bella Energy team has changed that.

Microgrid topologies offer several advantages over large traditional grids including increased resiliency and easier integration of distributed renewables. However, some challenges such as maintaining scalability and interoperability between diffferent vendors and connectivity protocol standards are challenges that have to be overcome in order to reap the benefits of such a system.