AP Renewables SCADAScope Cuts Wind Turbine Downtime

Amin Ahmadi of AP Renewables discusses how their new SCADAScope system uses data analytics to enable faster wind turbine troubleshooting and reduce downtime. Check out AP Renewables at https://aprenewables.com/.



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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with co host Joel Saxum. Our guest is Amin Ahmadi technology lead with AP Renewables is based in Ontario, Canada, our friends up north. I was first introduced to AP Renewables because of their SLPS system, which is a grounding brush upgrade kit to reduce static and lightning issues in a bunch of Gamesa turbines.



So it basically gets rid of the air gap on TikTok and LinkedIn from static electricity jumping inside the turbines. They also have a new product now called SCADAScope, which provides insights and diagnostics for Gamesa and a bunch of other turbines. So we're really interested to hear what Amin has going up in Canada.



Amin, welcome to the program.



Amin Ahmadi: Thank you.



Allen Hall: Let's, let's talk about the lightning issue that the Gamesa turbines had and the little spark gap they built into that wind turbine and what it means to the SCADA system because it did cause a lot of problems.



Amin Ahmadi: Yeah we started in fact as a consulting and we started noticing a similar problem coming up, different problems having these phantom noises and I don't have a lightning background like you do, but I saw the problem from.



Random unexplainable electronic faults and escape on calm losses that could only be mapped over weather events and then you go back to building codes and other things like you got a lightning system. You got a ground that thing really good. And this particular design wasn't grounded really good.



So we decided to take the we decided to solve a bunch of problems through a single common design, which was a brush that installs quickly and makes a lot of problems go away. And and what we liked about it was how very quickly you get a lot of gain. The return on investment was huge on it.



And to be honest, I designed a very elaborate thing. I send it to a wind farm we work with. He's this is not installable. And my partner who has a design background, not engineering, he looked at it. It's this is bad. This is bad. And he made it into, so revision two took about 15 minutes to install a revision one, which I had instead design didn't get installed in three, three hours.



So that's, that was how the team came together to really make these things work and work well. And work outside the paper, which sometimes is a great place to design things.



Allen Hall: Yeah. So the design, what it does is it takes electricity, static electricity, or lightning from the blade to the hub without having a big spark gap.



Because every time there was a discharge, a significant discharge in the, in the cellular array next to the electronics, it upset the electronics. It upset the SCADA system. And the turbines would Alarm, right? They would alarm and sometimes shut down for no apparent reason.



Amin Ahmadi: Yeah, you basically charge up the blade as a capacitor and eventually you reach the air gap and you dump that surge of current and the grounding is disturbed enough that the electronics would just fault out for some random reason.



Because, 200, 000 amps is going through the ground now.