Results / Energy
Who watches the turbines at 3 a.m.? A bot, every hour.
Ice on the blades means risk to people and lost output. The bot checks every turbine 24 times a day and raises the alarm immediately.
- Client
- Leading regional energy and agribusiness group (NDA)
- Industry
- Energy
- Systems
- SCADA, VPN, Firefox, SFTP, Azure, Outlook
24/7
monitoring, every hour
≤ 1 h
to an icing alert
~180 h
a year without manual checks
01The challenge
In winter, ice builds up on wind turbine blades. An iced turbine has to stop, and falling ice is dangerous to anyone nearby. The sooner icing is spotted, the faster and safer the response.
Turbine status is only visible in the manufacturer’s monitoring (SCADA) system behind a VPN. An operator opened it several times a day and checked turbine after turbine by hand. At night, on weekends and on holidays nobody was looking.
02What the bot does
- Every hour it connects to the VPN and logs in to the wind farm monitoring system.
- It opens the table view and reads the status code of every turbine.
- It compares the codes with the list of codes that mean icing.
- It writes the state of every turbine to a CSV file and uploads it to the cloud for history and Power BI.
- When several turbines are iced, it immediately emails the on-call team the list of turbines, a screenshot and the temperatures.
03The result
The team learns about icing within an hour at most, whatever the time of day. Manual checks are gone, about 180 hours a year, and there is now an icing history per turbine that never existed before.
The biggest value isn’t the hours, it’s safety: nobody has to remember to check anymore.
Manual work per year
Talk to us
What work does your team do only because someone has to?
Book 30 minutes. Show us the process and we’ll tell you whether it’s worth automating, how long it would take and how much time it gives back. You talk directly to the developer who builds the bot, not a salesperson.