Bedrijfsbeschrijving
Solidwinds
Arnhem
http://www.han.nl/onderzoek/kennismaken/technologie-en-samenleving/lectoraat/
Uwe van Heesch,
Context
HAN, and in particular the affiliated SEECE (Sustainable Electrical Energy Centre of Expertise) are highly qualified institutions in the field of sustainable energy technology. Solidwinds, as a technical consultant for mainly wind energy project developers, seeks assistance during expansion of its services and therefore initiated cooperation with the HAN/SEECE. This cooperation offers students the unique opportunity to gain insight in and contribute to current wind energy technology. Solidwinds benefits from the cooperation by cost reduction and expansion of its network.
The HAN-Solidwinds cooperation consists of development of a well described software program. The whole software development process is devided in two projects, which will both run for half a semester (10 weeks). Total time for the development will take about 1 year. It is well possible that cooperation will continue afterwards, expanding or enhancing features. It is possible that foreign students join mentioned projects groups, therefore project documentation will be completely in English, as well as all coding documentation. Figure 1 represents the project planning scheme.
While wind energy technology and the decentralised electricity production sector as a whole continue to evolve and grow, there is a continuous need for data management and reliable software.
More and more wind energy projects are started from local initiatives. Local energy cooperations are established and projects are owned and developed by these cooperations, without ownership from e.g. a large electricity company. The goal of the energy cooperation is typically to invest (crowdfund!) equity (own capital) by inhabitants of the region, and return profits from the project to the inhabitants as well. In this way, the benefits for the local area as largest stakeholder are much higher than traditional development by a large commercial party would allow.
This change of investment structure causes a need for transparency for all local investors, so mostly local residents, as they all have personal (at least economic) interest in the project, throughout development, build and operation of the project.
Currently existing software is not particularly fit for this specific purpose for a range of reasons; software is developed by a large development company, enabling strictly own projects to be added, software can be too complicated for non-professional users, software is developed by turbine manufacturers allowing only their turbine types to be added and software is often simply too expensive for small-scale early-stage project developers.
Main objective of the software to be developed is to visualize and give clear insight in key performance indicators during both wind measurement campaign(s) and turbine operation, reaching a range of consumers.
During a wind measurement campaign, data related to primarily wind speed and direction is recorded by several possible types of measurement techniques, collected and processed.
During turbine operation, key performance indicators like e.g. real-time production (kW), all time production (MWh), windspeed, and rpm are recorded with an internal data-acquisition system.
Figure 2 illustrates an example of an existing mobile turbine operation app, as operated by Eneco Wind.
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