The control of wind power production involves factors beyond our control - the wind itself. Wind forecasts are part of the planning of power production and the efforts to maximise the proportion of power generated by wind turbines inevitably leads to occasional excess production.
The market is therefore regulated so that you receive a higher price for wind power if you are able to regulate the power generated by the wind turbines interactively from a central location.

The world’s largest producer
Vestas is the world’s largest producer of wind turbines with approximately 20,000 employees worldwide. The company is a leader in the use of IT for the control, monitoring and collection of data on wind power production. To incorporate wind turbine data in the liberal energy market, it is necessary to collect, receive and publish data from external players.

Connection to the liberal electricity market
Vestas needed to meet a specific requirement from a customer. The wind turbines they supplied were to be connected to the liberal electricity market and provide regulating power. Wind turbines are designed to generate the optimum amount of power under the conditions given at any time and are controlled by sophisticated SCADA systems. To be able to connect them to the liberal electricity market, it was necessary to establish online communication with the wind turbines and publish data to the market via a web service.

Project under pressure
Vestas chose to cooperate with GoApplicate to solve this task. “From the very beginning, the project was under huge time pressure and it was moreover a prestige project. The fact that our organisation did not have the necessary skills didn’t help,” says Teunis De Wit, Director, Plant Product Development at Vestas.

Prompt and competent assistance
While completing the project, Vestas had to transfer knowledge to the consultants of GoApplicate and GoApplicate had to teach Vestas employees how to use the framework. In addition, the scope of the project changed along the way.

“We are grateful for GoApplicate’s prompt and competent assistance. It is one of the main reasons why we reached our goal,” says Teunis de Wit. “GoApplicate had the right technical basis (Application Framework), which meant that we could get going right away. Their LEAN process helped us provide the project framework despite the fact that we didn’t have a complete requirements specification or the necessary project plan.”