Telecommunications companies play an essential role in keeping Australia (and the world) connected. They are often solely responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure systems such as emergency .....
Our Hyland 920 wind turbine is designed to be used in off-grid locations that are often very hard to access. For this reason, it is important that both Diffuse Energy and our customers can check that the turbine is working as intended without having to visit the site. We have spent the past 10 months developing a remote monitoring & weather data system for this exact purpose. The system uses 3G/4G data transmission (which can be upgraded to satellite where necessary) to directly integrate with our Diffuse Energy Remote Monitoring Dashboard.
The development of our remote monitoring system has been a key part of our ARENA funded project, built by SAPHI - a local Newcastle business that specialise in IoT development. They have done an amazing job in bringing our idea to life.
Our baseline remote monitoring system provides all of the necessary power data to monitor your Hyland 920 wind turbine performance, however we also have an optional add-on weather station that can provide localised weather data for the turbine location. This has shown to be very useful for customers who operate in isolated locations such as telecommunications companies, farmers, and government organisations.
In summary:
1. The baseline option allows both Diffuse Energy and the customer to view the turbine and system output (voltage, current and power). This can be used to check for disparities such as differing phase-to-phase voltages, which indicate that the turbine is not functioning properly.
2. The second option is a complete remote monitoring packaging including a weather station (available as an add-on purchase) that combines real-time Hyland 920 data with localised weather data. Interestingly, we find that the weather data at our sites (particularly wind) can vary significantly to the estimated site conditions from BOM – which is often calculated from weather station 10’s or even 100’s of kms away.
The dashboard has a clean interface that clearly displays (in real-time) all of the critical data that a customer may need. As can be seen in the screenshot below, the dashboard displays data for:
The following weather data is available with the Diffuse Energy weather station:
In addition to the above display, our dashboard also has a graph that is powered by Plotly. The graph displays the following real-time data:
The following weather data is available with the Diffuse Energy weather station:
This technical data is very important as it can be used to analyse turbine performance and check that it is operating as intended. For example, the plot shown below has both turbine generator voltage and wind speed data visible. As can be seen, the turbine generator voltage tracks the changes in wind speed very well. This means that the turbine is operating as intended and is efficiently converting the wind’s energy into power.
This data can be used to discover problems with the turbine and diagnose a likely cause without having to travel to the site and remove the turbine for inspection. This saves money for both Diffuse Energy and the customer.
Due to our turbine being very responsive to shifts in wind, it is important to have high-speed data logging. The system was designed with a variable logging update rate to ensure that it is suitable for all scenarios. We typically log sites at 1 Hz – however we can log sites at any rate up to 25 Hz if needed!
Selecting the ideal location and positioning for your wind turbine is crucial to maximising the wind resource and achieving optimal wind turbine performance (click here to learn more). Our current wind forecasting method utilises a number of databases to predict the wind at any given location. However, as the number of Diffuse Energy weather stations across Australia continues to increase, we will have access to a huge amount of accurate first-hand wind data that will allow us to develop better and more accurate wind forecasting models for our customers.
We are very excited about the capabilities of this system. It is already proving valuable for our customers and it opens up many new opportunities for Diffuse Energy in the area of weather data and forecasting. Please reach out to us at sales@diffuse-energy.com if you would like more information on the system.
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