Eurowind Energy manages a portfolio of more than 1400 mw of wind turbines and 80+ mw of PV plants. The company is planning a significant expansion of its PV portfolio, especially in the area of large ground-mounted systems. The current portfolio has so far been monitored with very different software solutions, which over time has led to inefficient and expensive structures. In order to manage its strong growth efficiently, Eurowind Energy has now looked at the entire asset management process to find an optimal solution for its ambitious growth.
ampere.cloud and Eurowind had their work cut out
ampere.cloud migrated a total of 29 plants with a total size of 83+ mw in a record time of less than two weeks. There was no hardware replacement involved. Through the cooperation with ampere.cloud, Eurowind is now for the first time able to cover the entire operational process of the plant including monitoring, maintenance and automatic reports with a single platform. The cross-border team structure has ensured the most convenient way to work together.
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Florian Strunck, CEO and Co-Founder of ampere cloud, in conversation with Lasse Plauberg Iversen, Project Manager of Eurowind Energy:
ampere.cloud
ampere.cloud: What was the most pressing dissatisfaction with your previous structure that finally led to a system change to ampere.cloud?
Eurowind Energy
Eurowind Energy: We were looking for a system that was ready to go and had the ability to take over the entire workflow. ampere.cloud has brought the substantial functions we know, i.e. monitoring, ticketing and analysis, into a user-friendly setup and gives us an excellent comparison tool. ampere.cloud has a structured programme with a wide user configuration. In the main display and in monitoring, the data relevant to the user is displayed in the order in which it is needed. So now we have a programme that fits into the way we work, instead of us having to customise it. ampere.cloud also offers many options for the master data. We can create our own fields and fill them with data that will be shown in the master and monitoring display. This is a completely new and relaxed way of working for us.
Basically, we have gone from a locked system with no customisation options to suit the user's needs to a system that provides all the data and lets the user define how it should be displayed. This is a huge step towards more efficiency for us.
ampere.cloud: Which of your requirements for your new tool and the supplier were most important for your decision?
Eurowind Energy: Above all, we finally wanted a programme that met our own needs. With other suppliers we would have had to fit into a standard monitoring solution and there were some hardware requirements. There are a lot of smaller plants in our PV inventory that a lot of other providers had trouble integrating into their software. ampere.cloud has made it easy for us to integrate older and smaller plants in a cost-effective way. Only in a few plants are we considering upgrading the equipment because the data collection of older plants is poor.
ampere.cloud: How did you experience the migration process and the speed of switching your plants to ampere.cloud's systems?
Eurowind Energy: The migration was very quick at only 14 days. ampere.cloud took care of the substantial setup of the inverters and data loggers. We had to validate the data and make some minor adjustments so that the basic data was available. After the initial setup, we were able to effortlessly manage most of the settings ourselves with the support of ampere.cloud. This ensures that we understand the programme in the best possible way and that we now have the settings and alarms set up exactly as we need them. Throughout the migration, ampere.claud responded within hours - often within 30 minutes - when we had questions or needed support.
ampere.cloud: What positive effects on your daily work are you already noticing after the system migration?
Eurowind Energy: We now have a distinct feeling for what is really happening in the plants. We have a tool to see my colleagues' comments on an alarm, for example. ampere.cloud's system also keeps previous comments on an alarm and "reopens" alarms instead of creating new ones. So you can quickly see if it is a recurring alarm and see what has already been done to solve the problem.
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We also have a better tool to detect inverter underproduction and compare the outputs of plants. So we have already found possible faults in the underproduction of strings that we could not see before.
ampere.cloud: What is your most important expectation for the future cooperation with ampere.cloud?
Eurowind Energy: We would like ampere.cloud to ask us regularly about our experiences with the programme and to have constant updates. In this way, we feel that we have mastered the facilities so well and efficiently that we can really trust ourselves to achieve the considerable growth that Eurowind is planning. (mfo)
