{"id":15142,"date":"2023-08-31T13:49:10","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T12:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.res-group.com\/opinion-what-is-sub-optimal-performance-and-is-it-losing-you-revenue\/"},"modified":"2023-08-31T13:49:10","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T12:49:10","slug":"opinion-what-is-sub-optimal-performance-and-is-it-losing-you-revenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.res-group.com\/sv\/opinion-what-is-sub-optimal-performance-and-is-it-losing-you-revenue\/","title":{"rendered":"What is sub-optimal performance, and is it losing you revenue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In life, sub-optimal performance is never a good thing. For elite Olympic athletes and wind turbines the same principles apply. If each aren\u2019t reaching their full potential, even by a very small percentage, the results at the end of the day can be disappointing.<\/p>\n

In the last few years our industry has come a long way with our availability aims. For a long time, the norm was to push for higher time-based availabilities, but those now seem set to be left behind in-favour of production-based availabilities, and even revenue-based availabilities. The key is to incentivise revenue, not just the hours that the turbine can operate. Essentially, there is a desire to make turbines work smarter rather than harder.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just up to the operations and maintenance (O&M) contractors to maximise production. We\u2019ve typically left it to them to \u2018do the right thing\u2019, for example, schedule maintenance during low wind periods, and increasingly we are incentivising this behaviour. However, good technical asset management is all about maximising project yield, some of which means minimising operating losses.<\/p>\n

RES also has a history as an asset owner. That means our default mindset has been to optimise the asset value from day one of takeover. We saw that RES operated sites were performing better than industry standard in availability and sub-optimal performance losses and so sought to investigate this further. We commissioned a study with DNV-GL to independently establish this. The results showed that wind farms managed by RES perform1% better than industry standard.<\/p>\n

The standard assumption is that sub-optimal performance reduces yield by 0.5%, which, on a 40 MW wind farm could mean \u00a340k in annual revenue.<\/p>\n

But sub-optimal performance is not as well understood in the industry as downtime. Owners may be losing revenue without even realising even if the blades are turning<\/p>\n

So what is sub-optimal performance and why is RES good at avoiding it? Sub-optimal performance losses occur whilst the turbine is running (not downtime) but not due to planned curtailments which would have been taken into account in the energy yield. Some examples are: a technician leaving an incorrect curtailment on a turbine after servicing, or a turbine automatically derating because of an overheated component.<\/p>\n