Sentient Science’s executive team visited with top wind industry leaders in China over the last several months to discuss DigitalClone®’s material science-based life prediction and extension solutions. Feedback received showed a high level of interest and need for this technology at this critical point in China’s wind market development.
In response to this demand, Sentient Science recently hired its first Country Manager for China who will be the main point of contact between Sentient’s team of gearbox life extension experts and China’s wind turbine operators, manufacturers, and parts suppliers, and will soon set up an office there. Wind operators around the world contract with Sentient for predictive monitoring of gearboxes and key components. Sentient’s overall goal is to apply advanced technology, material science-based prognostics, to reduce the cost of wind energy by 13%.
In one case, a customer had 18 critical assets on their watch list, which DigitalClone predicted. The software also alerted the customer to an additional 20 assets that had started early crack initiation. Armed with this advanced knowledge, the customer could plan maintenance, with little to no unscheduled downtime over the next two years, and have proper inventory parts on hand. The customer was able to prevent the unplanned failures and save more than $4.5 million in their first year of using the software.
China would similarly benefit from Sentient’s DigitalClone prognostic and life extension solutions as it invests more on renewables than the United States and Europe combined. The country currently leads the global wind industry with 145 GW of total installed capacity. Last year, China broke the record for the most installations in one year with 31 GW and has further capacity installation and energy mix goals in its current 13th Five-Year Plan and other long-term agendas. The Chinese government has placed a high priority on diversifying its energy mix, fueling its growing economy and emerging advanced industrial sectors, but also to deal with serious air pollution challenges.
Despite China’s rapid expansion efforts, wind energy faces serious issues with curtailment and grid connection. In some provinces, curtailment reaches up to 50%, so cost and quality control are even more important as the Chinese economy and energy demand slows. While more power of all kinds is installed, subsidies are reduced and turbines are coming off of their warranties. The many lower quality turbines in China’s fleets, which were rushed during efforts to produce and install turbines domestically, will create greater cost variable constraints on operations and maintenance budgets due to unplanned failures in major components.
For the large Chinese operators Sentient is working with, Sentient’s suite of DigitalClone products will help identify those assets at the greatest risk for failure, much earlier than current methods can, to reduce downtime, analyze the root cause of these failures, and provide life extension trade-off solutions to maximize return on investment.
On another hand, some Chinese manufacturers produce very advanced, high quality turbines and they, and their operator customers, have invested heavily in advanced monitoring systems, which DigitalClone can input data from and output prognostics on a continually updated basis. This level of predictive knowledge facilitates moving from unplanned maintenance to planned repairs and uptower servicing. This results in fewer major outages and directly impacts the bottom line.
Chinese turbine, gearbox, and bearing manufacturers will also be using DigitalClone’s third party validation of life to bring products to the international market. The software will help reduce the time and cost of testing their products and optimize performance in the field.
For more information, contact Zach Friedman, Sentient’s China Country Manager.