Posters

Abstract

Digitalisation, defined as "the organisational and industry-wide use of data and digital technologies to improve efficiency, create insights, and develop products and services" is one of the key drivers for reducing costs and risks of wind energy due to the opportunities it offers. These opportunities include new processes and business models resulting from large amounts of data becoming available at different phases of the wind energy project life cycle, and include digital twins, predictive maintenance, drones and decision support systems. These can all contribute to reducing maintenance costs, increasing energy production and increasing efficiency. However, a number of challenges stand in the way of a successful exploitation of these opportunities. The three "Grand Challenges" of wind energy digitalisation have recently been defined as: (1) Creating findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data frameworks; (2) Connecting people and data to foster innovation; (3) Enabling collaboration and competition between organisations. IEA Wind Task 43 aims to solve these challenges by developing solutions and recommendations for the adoption of digital technologies such as data standards, machine learning and AI, data analytics and visualisation, open-source tools and IOT instrumentation. In this paper, we present a use-case-driven approach for demonstrating the added value of digitalisation in wind energy, developed within IEA Wind Task 43. We define a “digitalisation use case” as “an activity that an organisation or consortium carries out - and the steps as part of this - in order to generate value/save costs/make decisions, to which digital solutions can be applied to improve it.”. As well as demonstrating the value of digitalisation to the industry, this approach has the potential to compare reference methodologies, quantify the range of data types required for certain tasks, highlight implementation challenges and frame opportunities around key decisions.