What is infrastructure reliability and redundancy? And why is it needed at your wind farm?

Infrastructure reliability and redundancy is one of the critical pieces of a project as it is the sites data bearing transport method and yet it is often over looked in the daily operations until it breaks.  Your infrastructure must be reliable to ensure data flow, and it also has to be redundant in the event of a failure within the infrastructure. Without both you may find your project not acquiring all of the needed data for operations. Without having full data acquisition, the site may not have the appropriate data for supplying reports to off-takers, utilities, regional authorities as well as internal financial staff for production sell.

“Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments.” Source: TechTarget

A wind park typically has several OEM servers such as: Real-Time SCADA Server, Database Server, and Remote Access Server, all of which take up substantial space and require a lot of man power to ensure they run at peak performance. Most wind parks which have servers that have been running since COD are out of warranty (or soon to be), the parts needed to support are becoming harder and harder to find, and they are limited by legacy software restrictions. Often, in the event of failures, support staff are required to reach out to the OEM who in turn install their own proprietary applications costing tens of thousands of dollars.