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By Julia Ponzini, SAP Customer Marketing
It was at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21), when history was made as nearly the entire world signed the landmark Paris Climate Agreement to counter climate change. Since that 2015 agreement, COP21 has been the most significant business-focused event driving sustainable development and advancing the “green economy.”
Renewable energy leader Kaiserwetter Energy Asset Management of Germany was driven by the COP21 agreement and has since revolutionized investment in zero-emission energy. They accomplished this by utilizing SAP technology to create an IoT Platform, capable of early failure detection within wind turbines, inter alia.
How Data is Driving Renewable Energy
Established in 2012, Kaiserwetter serves investors, financing banks, and governments within the renewable energy field – offering specialized data analytics as part of their investment process throughout the entire investment lifecycle.
Generating easily understood and actionable intelligence for its customers, Kaiserwetter uses IoT for harnessing, aggregating and structuring continuous, decentralized and diverse data from a wide-range of renewable energy assets and third sources, such as meteorological or electricity market related data. It is the company’s mission to pave the way for investing more heavily in renewable energy and accelerate emission-free power generation worldwide.
With the ambitious goal of catalyzing investment in renewable energy, Kaiserwetter knew investors needed to take their ventures to a global scale. Investing in renewable energy comes with risk, but what if there was no risk?
"One of the most important questions of our clients, such as investors or financing banks, used to be how are we going to minimize the investment risk?,” said Hanno Schoklitsch, CEO and founder of Kaiserwetter. “Our answer is ɅRISTOTELES with its unique IoT and Data Intelligence capabilities."
What is ɅRISTOTELES?
With climate change being an ongoing issue, Kaiserwetter knew it needed to continue to advance its IoT platform to take the risk out of investing fully. This led to ɅRISTOTELES 3.0 as an executive-level dashboard to aggregate and correlate technical, meteorological, and financial data to maximize the performance and minimize investment risks by creating the highest transparency standards.
While earlier versions of ɅRISTOTELES already showed remarkable results for wind farms and solar parks, with the most recent release ɅRISTOTELES 3.0, artificial intelligence finally becomes available on a daily basis safeguarding the performance of renewable energy assets.
Based on SAP HANA and SAP Leonardo IoT technology, the ɅRISTOTELES architecture with its implemented machine learning algorithms has made early technical failure detection and surface alerts possible – allowing consumers to react in advance, and avoid negative impacts on their asset’s performance.
Paving the Way to a Zero Emission Future
How is an IoT platform driving investment in renewable energy? Implementing ARISTOTELES within wind turbines or solar inverter, the following was possible:
- Build a unique simulation model of normal operating conditions for each wind turbine or solar inverter of a specific renewable energy asset,
- Compare the model results against the current asset performance from real-time data of each installation, such as wind and rotor speed, pitch angle, solar radiation and temperatures, .
- Continue to watch the connected machines, identify anomalies, and detect potential failure, which may lead to the underperformance of a unit or even a breakdown.
This information allows Kaiserwetter to provide their clients with the assurance of minimized downtime risk and instead maximize their returns by providing them with the ability to act in advance to avoid any negative impacts on their asset's performance.
Proof of Return on Investment
Clients using the ARISTOTELES architecture to keep their operations running smoothly via renewable energy have found:
- 4-5% Increase in performance (depending on identified performance baseline)
- 97% Accuracy of early failure detection of wind turbines
Ultimately, these improvements provided clients with the transparency needed to support their decision-making process along with the necessary agility to take action in case of potential failures.
To learn more about how Kaiserwetter provide certainty over changeable factors that impact renewable energy assets, check out their SAP Innovation Awards 2020 Pitch Deck.
