Case Study: BRIDGE Wind – Enhancing Wind Energy Portfolio Potential

How BRIDGE Wind Enables Data-Driven Asset Management at Scale with Bruce and Sift

BRIDGE Wind Management are a UK-based renewable energy management company. With over 30 years of experience in renewables, their services combine deep technical, commercial, financial, and corporate expertise with professional advice, practical support, and innovative solutions. BRIDGE’s software platform Bruce backs up their experts by providing easy access to project and portfolio data, enabling customers to pinpoint revenue streams, refinancing opportunities, and maintenance savings.

 

Image of wind turbines across a field of flowers

As a company with extensive experience managing renewable energy assets, BRIDGE is keenly aware that every project has unique challenges. Differences in environment, management, maintenance history, and more, can render deep understanding of individual assets difficult, or impossible, when only using standard tools such as power curves and event logs. The Bruce software – a powerful data management platform – has long supported the BRIDGE team in their day-to-day activities, facilitating high-level operational analysis. However, BRIDGE recognised the need to scale up their data-driven approach and empower their experts to respond with agility to the unique issues faced across their growing asset portfolio. This need for scalable analytics led BRIDGE to the Sift platform.

 

Leveraging Sift for Proactive Asset Management

 

BRIDGE use Sift’s unique combination of flexibility, transparency, and scalability to keep an eye on problems across their portfolio that are easily missed by standard monitoring alone. Sift works alongside BRIDGE’s Bruce software, using data gathered from the turbines as well as external sources such as reanalysis data. Sift’s robust analytics and investigative capabilities mean BRIDGE can detect problems such as curtailments, calibration errors, and controller issues when they happen – these issues can be very costly if left unattended. Using Sift, BRIDGE takes its diagnosis to the next level with tools to dig deeper, understand the problems facing their clients’ assets, make recommendations, and scale their insights to ensure their whole portfolio is covered.

 

As long-running customers, BRIDGE make use of the full flexibility of the Sift Monitor Evolve package, tailoring analyses to suit their needs. BRIDGE and Bitbloom work closely together to ensure the analytics are relevant to their sites and align with their internal working processes. Bitbloom also supports BRIDGE with deep-dive analytics, helping them to pin-point issues and provide important additional context required for resolution. The BRIDGE asset management team receive automated alerts from the system, and key information is fed back into the Bruce software to support the team to make decisions quickly, bring all the information to the relevant stakeholders, and ultimately resolve the observed issues.

Fine pitch offsets are difficult to spot in a power curve

Graphs on the left show the effect of a 5 degree fine pitch offset on the turbine power curve, with highlighted points in the foreground (bottom) and background (top), showing the difficulty in picking up such deviations without a dedicated analysis. This historic example shows 23 days of inefficient operation, resulting in 34MWh production loss.

 

The Sift platform enabled BRIDGE and Bitbloom to work together to quickly deploy analytics that pick up fine pitch deviations within a day of the issue occurring. Now, whenever an issue with fine pitch is found, the BRIDGE asset management team is notified by email, enabling them to resolve the issue quicker than the generally observed resolution time of 28 days. 

The average observed loss for operation with fine pitch offset has been estimated on historic data at approximately 19MWh/week. At a hypothetical power price of £75/MWh this would equate to £1440/week, or an average saving of £4,320 per issue. Responding quickly to these recurring issues can make a big difference to the profitability of a wind farm. 

“Our integration with Sift enables us to easily scale up our analysis processes and identify turbine performance issues that are not practical to detect manually.”

 

Mike Urwin – Director of Asset Management, BRIDGE Wind 

Sift – Powering Up Asset Management Services

 

Ultimately, BRIDGE’s clients benefit from the flexibility provided by the Sift platform, allowing them to spot issues that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, and empowering them with the right information to drive towards successful outcomes and added value. By empowering BRIDGE’s expert team to respond to the demands of technical asset management with agility and creativity, Sift allows BRIDGE to provide a truly differentiated asset management service that ensures every site’s unique demands are given the attention they need.