BayWa r.e. Operations Services LLC provides O&M services for a fleet of ~1 GW of renewable energy assets, both owned by BayWa r.e. and assets of other clients. Services include a real-time comparison of actual to expected, weather-adjusted energy output. This allows BayWa’s Operations Services team to identify and address equipment failures quickly, before they result in prolonged production loss events. In addition, BayWa analyzes KPIs in a monthly performance benchmarking procedure to identify the root cause of production loss events and develop long-term plans for addressing identified issues.
Key to BayWa’s ability to deliver O&M services is high-quality plane-of-array irradiance (POAI), wind speed and ambient temperature data, which are used to calculate expected energy output. Traditionally, BayWa collected this data from meteorological (MET) stations installed at project sites. In order to reduce the costs associated with deploying and maintaining MET stations, as well as increase reliability and consistency in data quality, BayWa selected SolarAnywhere® SystemCheck® real-time irradiance and weather data to support its O&M services.
Today, with the SolarAnywhere® API, BayWa r.e. requests updated irradiance and weather data across 25 sites every 15 minutes. Real-time SystemCheck data is pulled directly into the remote operations control center (ROCC) by the SCADA edge device for a real-time estimate of expected energy. BayWa’s performance engineers also used the SolarAnywhere API to automate retrieval of the 1-hour resolution data for monthly performance reporting.
“The difference between SolarAnywhere® data and that of a professionally installed and calibrated MET station was calculated to be equal to or less than the measurement accuracy of the weather stations. Combine this accuracy with the increased reliability that SystemCheck offers, and you have an O&M solution that costs less and saves valuable personnel resources that can instead be focused on value-added repairs and maintenance. Less time and truck rolls are dedicated to MET stations, leaving more time for the energy-generating equipment.”
– David Barnes, EVP at BayWa r.e. Operation Services LLC
Read the case study to learn more about BayWa r.e.’s Operations Services, and how integrating SystemCheck has enabled them to reduce costs without sacrificing any of the accuracy afforded from on-site MET stations.