Wind Turbine Power Forecasting | Digital Transformation | GCSI : Social Innovation : Hitachi

Atria Power’s requirements for wind turbine forecasting

Atria Power, one of India’s largest IPPs, approached GCSI to create a power forecasting solution for its farms. Atria has multiple wind farms throughout India and uses a variety of wind turbines from different manufacturers. They needed a forecasting solution that would work with the turbines at multiple locations with disparate terrains and weather conditions.

A typical wind turbine farm is considered profitable if it produces 25% of its rated capacity. If a plant is designed for 32 megawatts (MW), then the breakeven point for the plant is 8 MW. To help improve its power generation capabilities when the wind wasn’t blowing, Atria placed solar panels at the base of its wind turbines, creating a hybrid solar-wind farm.

Hitachi began by analyzing a constant stream of data from 100 turbines each producing 1MW to 5MW of capacity. We also analyzed data from sensors in the turbines (between 600 to 2,000 sensors per turbine), which measure the amount of power generated, speed and angle of turbine’s blade, temperature of components and other detailed machine data. We needed fast, accurate and continuous data collection, so we pulled data from the turbines every 10 seconds.

Once we had data from the sensors, we began to model the entire wind turbine farm, using machine learning techniques to understand the farm’s behavior over an entire year, capturing seasonal variations and creating a more accurate forecasting model.

Every 90 minutes, the Hitachi solution sends Atria detailed energy generation data that forecasts how much energy will be produced over the next 24 hours. The forecast error is required to be within 15%. Hitachi has achieved this goal and we continue to improve. This helps Atria successfully forecast energy generation to utilities and store excess energy in ESS for future delivery. “Hitachi’s understanding of the nuances of forecasting has provided us with insights that we believe will create value as we test out and validate the early results,” said Sunder Raju, Managing Director, Atria Power Corporation. “Even more importantly, the handholding that Hitachi labs have done has ensured the solution provided is a robust solution to our problem statement.”