The energy industry was an early adopter of supercomputing; in fact, energy companies have the most powerful supercomputers in the commercial world. And although HPC in the energy sector is almost exclusively associated with seismic workloads, it also plays a critical role with renewables as well, reflecting the growing maturity of that vertical.
The largest wind turbine company in the world, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark (2015 revenues: €8.423 billion; producer of 20 percent of global wind capacity), has worked extensively to harness not only the wind but also its data. The company has amassed 30 years of historical data that, Vestas boasts, is the “biggest wind data asset in the world,” one that grows daily with data collection from more than 50,000 turbines (newer models have up to 1000 sensors) installed around the world.
For the past 10 years, the company has built an increasingly sophisticated big data analytics infrastructure that has a strong element of democratization and self-service, putting data analytics into the hands of front-line soldiers. Analytics underpins operations throughout the company, from optimizing turbine performance, to product development, to service and maintenance – to enabling sales staff in sales situations to determine potential contract ROI in real time.
“We are utilizing data in every step that we take,” said Kim Emil Andersen, director, Vestas Performance and Diagnostics Centre. Speaking at Tibco Software’s recent Houston Energy Forum, he said, “We’re seeing enormous growth in (data), not only because we’re selling more turbines but because we’re selling turbines with more sensors. So we’re seeing an exponential growth in data.”Data collection from turbines dates back to 1991, but it wasn’t until 2008 that Vestas became an early adopter of big data, when the company acquired it first distributed supercomputing system. Back then, Andersen said, the team he now heads “was hidden in the basement,” looking at data, looking into lost production, trying to apply data to ROI.
Read the full article on HPCwire‘s sister publication EnterpriseTech: http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/09/17/wind-turbines-democratized-data-analytics-turning-chaos-order/