Emerson and Vayu form alliance to optimise wind farms

Emerson has formed an alliance with Vayu to provide automation technology solutions for wind farm energy optimisation in the Americas, Caribbean and Europe. The three-year collaboration combines the power applications and networking capabilities of Emerson’s Ovation automation platform with Vayu’s cloud-computing wind energy optimisation technology. Using this approach, Vayu has identified more than US$500 million in revenue opportunities from just a fraction of the approximately 450 wind farms in the United States.

“Combining the respective strengths of Emerson and Vayu creates a first-of-its-kind, intelligent solution for wind farm optimisation,” said Bob Yeager, president of Emerson’s power and water business. “This initiative will help wind energy producers maximise their aggregate power output, achieve their financial objectives and deliver more clean power to their communities.”

The wind power market continues to grow: 53.9 GW were added in 2018, bringing the overall capacity of all wind turbines installed worldwide to 600 GW, according to the World Wind Energy Association. The United States — the second-largest wind power market — added 7.6 GW of capacity last year.

In traditional wind farms, each turbine is individually optimised. Each creates its own turbulence, or wake, which prevents downwind turbines from receiving full energy from the wind stream, significantly reducing wind energy production. Vayu estimates two-thirds of US wind farms experience reduced capacity due to wind wake. Emerson and Vayu’s solution leverages key data and machine learning to enable turbines to work cooperatively, adjusting the side-to-side movement of each turbine based on wind speed, wind direction and other parameters to extract the optimum energy from wind.

In traditional wind farms, each turbine is individually optimised. The solution offered by Emerson and Vayu enables the turbines to work cooperatively. For a larger image, click here.

Emerson’s Ovation compact controller will communicate data from each turbine’s wind sensor to the Vayu system every 1–2 seconds — much faster than the 10 minutes typically required to perform this function when using traditional equipment. This near-real-time data enables a more accurate calculation of the optimum setting for each turbine.

Vayu is a cloud computing optimisation service that can significantly increase wind farm energy production using machine learning principles. Vayu applies physics-based algorithms against unpredictable wind data, locally and globally, to identify cooperative action among multiple wind turbines, diminishing risk from turbulence while increasing power production.

Top image: ©stock.adobe.com/au/jorisvo