Over the last 3 years we’ve led a multinational author team that has just published a sector-wide review of digitalisation in wind energy, and what needs to be done to address the “Grand Challenges” that lie ahead.
The paper, “Grand challenges in the digitalisation of wind energy” was published as an open access paper in the journal Wind Energy Science on June 7, 2023. You can read the paper at doi.org/10.5194/wes-8-947-2023
This is our summary.
Digitalisation is an opportunity for new businesses
Just because something has worked like that for the past couple of decades, it doesn’t mean that that’s how it needs to continue.
Lots of businesses have used digitalisation to rethink existing business models – think of über, lyft, and other taxi services – or even come up with completely new approaches, for example the e-scooter companies like voi, Lime, or Bolt.
“Digitalisation is the organisational and industry-wide use of data and digital technologies to improve efficiency, create insights, and develop products and services”
Clifton, A., Barber, S., Bray, A., Enevoldsen, P., Fields, J., Sempreviva, A. M., Williams, L., Quick, J., Purdue, M., Totaro, P., and Ding, Y.: Grand challenges in the digitalisation of wind energy, Wind Energ. Sci., 8, 947–974, https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-8-947-2023, 2023.
Digitalisation is starting to arrive in wind energy, too. Data crunching and flow modeling have always been an integral part of resource assessment, and now we’re seeing experience from operational plants being fed back in to the design process.
Digital twins, AI and machine learning – all examples of digitalisation – are helping move operations and maintenance from planned or responsive interventions to preventative maintenance.
Digitalisation might be the only way we can keep up with coming changes
Keeping global carbon emissions low enough to limit global warming to 1.5 °C or 2 °C requires us to generate much more energy from the wind than we do now.
In the US, we might need to install 8 times as many wind turbines as currently operate. In Europe, we might need 3 or 4 times the amount.
Studies from the US also suggest the size of wind farms will decrease dramatically, too, down from 200+ MW now to 40-50 MW.
There is already a skills shortage in the wind energy industry. And, the wind energy industry is not training new experts at the rate needed to design, build, and operate tomorrow’s wind farms.
Together these factors mean that we have to increase people’s productivity, as well as make it easier to design, build and operate wind farms. Increasing reliability would also take the pressure off personnel.
Digitalisation – leading to automation, higher productivity, and higher reliability – is one of the few tools we have to make sure that we can scale the wind energy sector.
Digitalisation needs to happen inside businesses and across the sector
Businesses in the wind energy sector are deeply interconnected. Business need to exchange lots of information to get wind farms built, operate them effectively, and keep electricity flowing.
That means that digitalisation inside a company can only achieve so much; if suppliers or partners are still analog, not much will change.
So, as businesses digitalise, they will inevitably try to partner with other digital businesses – and they’ll all have commercial advantages as a result. Analog companies will be left behind.
And, to be able to deploy wind at scale, the whole sector needs to digitalise.
“Analog companies will be left behind”
Requirements for digitalisation
Enabling digitalisation across the wind energy sector means a few things:
- Connecting people and computers to the data that are needed to make decisions
- Having the best possible workforce available
- People and organisations working together to address the really big problems.
Meeting these requirements will need a combination of actions by individuals, within organisations, and across organisational boundaries. So, we consider them to be the Grand Challenges in the digitalisation of wind energy.
The Grand Challenges are sector-level issues
We identified three grand challenges in the digitalisation of wind energy:
- Data. Creating FAIR data frameworks.
- Culture. Connecting people and data to foster innovation.
- Coopetition. Enabling collaboration and competition between organisations
We noted in the conclusions to the paper: “Addressing the first two grand challenges for the digitalisation of wind energy provides the right conditions for sector-wide adoption. Then, the third grand challenge brings together actors to make progress.” (Clifton et al. 2023)
Addressing these grand challenges creates a virtuous circle that would lead to increasing digitalisation and increasing benefits to the entire wind energy industry such as reduced costs, improved performance, increased safety, and new business models.
“Addressing the Grand Challenges creates a virtuous circle”
Three things you can do now
1. Adopt community data formats
Next time you need to save data, move data around, or set up an API, try using an existing community data format. This makes it easier to exchange data and prevents data being stranded in unsupported proprietary formats.
If the community format doesn’t meet your needs, get in touch with the maintainers and propose an update.
2. Review the status of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your team
Research shows that teams that are diverse are better able to respond to changing circumstances, come up with more innovations, and are generally more successful than teams where everyone is very similar.
It’s important to remember that there are many aspects to diversity, too. What is legally considered to be diversity may change across countries or states, but usually includes characteristics like race, gender, sexuality, mobility and disability, national origin, and many other factors. But diversity in teams can also come from other factors, like family background, higher education, work experience, or working location.
Next time you have a meeting or pull together a project team, take a look around the room – or screen – and ask yourself if you really have the range of opinions and experience you need to be successful. Think about getting different people involved, or even recruiting someone new.
There are lots of resources and initiatives in this area. Talk to your HR team to find out what you can do!
3. Talk with your competitors
In the late 1990s, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Toshiba, and IBM worked together to create a standard for a personal area network for computing devices, and first prototypes. The result – Bluetooth – is now installed in devices from computer keyboards to watches or phones, as well as gaming controllers, cars, and many other types of goods.
From this start, it’s expected that in 2023, over 5 billion Bluetooth devices will be sold by around 35,000 different vendors, who all belong to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.
Bluetooth is definitely a special case, but there are other examples of where collaboration has opened up new markets.
What could we do in the wind energy if we had common data formats, or everyone used the same data schema? This is one area where wind energy experts are actively collaborating, in IEA Wind Task 43 on digitalisation.
But maybe you should talk to your competitors and ask what else you could do together, to open or grow a market? You might be surprised!