Reducing carbon emissions in the energy sector demands the development and implementation of innovative technologies. While greater investment in research and development is essential, it alone is not sufficient to achieve the desired results.
Innovation teams are vital, especially in renewable energy, where change and improvement are constant necessities. As technology evolves, the renewable energy sector must create new tools and techniques. This ensures that systems like solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage solutions become more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable.
Renewable energy systems also encounter significant challenges in data and monitoring. These include issues like integrating diverse data sources from wind turbines, solar panels, and other systems spread across large areas, ensuring real-time data accuracy and reliability, and managing the vast amounts of data generated. Addressing these obstacles requires innovation in software, hardware, and connectivity solutions tailored for renewable energy networks.
How do we work with our customers to innovate?
At GreenPowerMonitor, a DNV company (GPM), innovation isn’t created by a team working in isolation. It is all about collaboration with our customers.
- The first step is to find an idea to develop into an innovation project. We talk to lots of customers, learning about the challenges they face in their work.
- We are looking for one which we might be able to solve, by combining our data with our knowledge of the renewable energy domain and with cutting-edge data science.
- We dig deep into the issue, to get a real understanding of what is required: after all, what an asset manager means when they talk about a problem is not always obvious to a software developer.
What is the process of transforming customer insights into tangible results?
Once we think we understand the problem, we start imagining the solution.
- First with a simple mock up, then increasing the sophistication until we have a functioning prototype.
- This is where we aim to get the best solution that technology can provide.
- But at each iteration, we get feedback from a panel of interested customers. Is what we are making useful? How could it be better?
The innovations that we pursue are technically challenging. They require high levels of domain knowledge and data science skills. It often isn’t obvious whether our answers are right or wrong. So we put as much effort into testing our solutions as we do into making them.
Maybe we can’t find a technical solution to the problem, or maybe we discover that there isn’t broad interest across the industry after all. However, without taking some risks, it’s not possible to make a big leap forward.
The team: the “makers” and the “breakers”
We split the team into two: the “makers” and the “breakers”. The makers develop the solution, while the breakers try to break it:
- They validate results against data that we have from thousands of sites all over the world;
- The source of truth in a validation is carefully established – for a technical innovation, the correct answer sometimes isn’t obvious, or readily available;
- They collaborate with expert engineers from DNV’s advisory departments, ensuring that we use the same techniques which are trusted across the industry.
The result is a product which is not only advanced, but also reliable and trustworthy. For every great innovation that we make, we investigate several ideas that may have to be rejected.
How has customer feedback directly shaped product innovation at GPM?
Data taxonomy project
The rapid growth of digitalization has brought an even more rapid growth in the volume of data that is being created. Managing that data is challenging but vital: without careful organisation it is extremely challenging to extract its real value.
And the renewables industry has a real challenge: different OEMs, integrators and SCADA providers can use different names for the same signal. For example, the energy output of an inverter might be called “Energy”, or “Energy AC”, or “Energy MWh”, or “Energia”. This makes it very time consuming, almost impossible, to combine data from across a portfolio of sites.
GPM has defined a taxonomy: a fixed naming scheme, with defined names for devices, their metadata, and the time series data that they generate. Read more about the taxonomy project.
- This has been a huge task: more than 700 names in total, for solar plants alone. We are doing the same for storage and wind technologies.
- The end result is unlocking the potential of all this data, enabling us to deliver new insights to all our customers.
- We are in the process of applying this to all the sites that we monitor – more than 20 million signals so far, and we are not finished yet.
Figure 1: Effect of taxonomy & renewables
Expected energy production
The ‘expected energy production’ is the name used for the amount of energy a plant would have produced, under actual irradiance and weather conditions, if it had been working perfectly. It is the essential first step in understanding if your plant is working perfectly, and if not, why not.
- The traditional approach relies on having a PVSyst report giving the energy output in every hour of a typical year, a so-called 8760, but this is far from perfect and often is not available. So, then what do you do?
The Innovation team have developed two advanced solutions, building a digital twin of the site:
- The first uses DNV’s advanced SolarFarmer software to model the plant, replacing PVSyst with our own highly validated and trusted algorithm. This gives a theoretical measure of how the plant should be performing and is great when comparing performance against budget.
- The second uses AI to learn how the plant normally behaves. When the weather was like this in the past, how much power did it produce? This method is ideal for spotting equipment failures and improving O&M.
Conclusion: progress and adaptation are constant demands
Innovation teams play a critical role, particularly in the renewable energy sector, where progress and adaptation are constant demands. True innovation thrives on collaboration, and the involvement of our customers is essential.
GPM has a full-time Innovation Team. Composed of engineers with decades of experience in the renewables industry, and data scientists with cutting-edge skills, we are working to deliver the next generation of software features and solutions.
Combining engineering knowledge and data science skills, and with the support of DNV’s 5000 energy experts, we have a team that is giving our customers maximum value from the data that they are gathering.
Do you want to meet us and talk with our Innovation Team?
To make our innovations really valuable to the industry, we need to hear about what you need. So please get in touch, and talk to us about the challenges that you are facing. You don’t need to be a GPM customer – we’ll find the innovation that makes you want to join us.
