Siemens Gamesa’s Lightning and Severe Weather Best Practices for Wind Farm Operations

Siemens Gamesa is a leading supplier of wind power solutions to customers all over the world. With over 107 GW in 75 countries and 35+ years of experience, the company is a powerhouse in the renewable energy industry. Their energy solutions include onshore wind turbines, offshore wind turbines, and service wind.

How do Siemens Gamesa wind farms use Earth Networks’ lightning data?

Florenci Rey of Earth Networks had the opportunity to discuss the company’s implementation of Earth Networks’ lightning data with Nekane Martinez Vadillo of Siemens Gamesa. During the webinar, Lightning and Severe Weather Management for Wind Farms, Vadillo demonstrates the significance of Earth Networks’ lightning data for the safe maintenance and optimization of wind turbines. A key player and innovative pioneer in the renewable energy sector, Siemens Gamesa utilizes Earth Networks’ lightning data products to develop best practices throughout their renewable energy organization.

Lightning data is crucial for safe wind power operations

Nekane Martinez Vadillo is the owner of the weather and energy forecast system at Siemens Gamesa, with a degree in meteorology and a professional career in weather forecasting.

At Siemens Gamesa, the Weather and Energy Forecast Team has five primary objectives:

1. Creating truly autonomous wind farms with minimal human intervention
2. Remote monitoring and problem solving for wind turbines and predictive diagnostic models
3. Past, present, and future weather and lightning conditions are an important input for this area
4. Safety of people is most important, followed by optimizing operations and maximizing revenues
5. Worldwide solution for a worldwide company

Siemens Gamesa Operations

Metoceanic and economic variables forecasts

• Short, medium, and long-range forecasts. These forecasts help manage cost risks, manage supply chain and material planning, increase security in maintenance tasks, and improve planning and resource utilization.

Lightning Detection System and Severe Weather Warnings

• Early detection of damages in blades. Preventive stop/restart of turbines. The Lightning Detection system is provided by Earth Networks, including worldwide and real-time lightning strike data. The Lightning Detection System looks for all possibly affected wind turbines, a clear benefit is the early detection of damages in blades.

Consultancy Services

• Long term weather and marine analysis

Use Cases for Lightning Data for Wind Farms

Lightning data benefits wind farms because of the early detection of damages in blades.

In areas of the world with high lightning density, the Lightning Detection system captures and stores all lightning data and captures historical data for forensic reports for damage claims. The lightning detection system provides technical support for customer claims.

In remote locations, the preventive stop and restart of wind turbines improves the wind farm performance and ensures asset integrity. When thunderstorms approach a pre-defined radius, the wind turbines are stopped until the electrical thunderstorm passes the wind farm and restarted once the storm passes.

Earth Networks’ Severe Weather Warnings also provide tracking information for hurricanes, floods, cyclones, and any other weather conditions that affect Siemens Gamesa company assets.

This lightning data has resulted in performance improvement as well as protection of the integrity of assets.

Earth Networks’ Products – Sferic Maps & Lightning API

Siemens Gamesa aims to automate all of its processes, with a goal of developing autonomous wind farms. The Weather and Forecasting department at Siemens Gamesa uses Sferic Maps to automate their processes.

Operators use Sferic Maps to see how their wind farms will be affected in a given region. Sferic Maps allows for the monitoring and visualization in the regions by wind farm operators, signaling to them when and how they can work in the wind farms.

Siemens Gamesa offers consultancy services with historical weather data, or reanalysis data, which serves as an important input in wind farm sighting apps, blade prediction models, and more precise pricing for blade integrity management.

Earth Networks helps Siemens Gamesa improve their business capabilities with severe weather warnings and lightning detection systems.

Earth Networks is a part of the Advanced Environmental Monitoring family of companies, offering world-class technologies and services to enable decision makers to improve their reaction time to weather and environmental events, helping to protect communities, people, and infrastructure. Earth Networks’ AEM sister company, Lambrecht meteo GmbH, similarly develops and manufactures world-class meteorological sensors and measurement solutions for wind, precipitation, pressure, temperature, and humidity serving various classical meteorological and highly specific environmental and industrial end-markets.

Lambrecht specializes in on- and offshore wind turbines and industry, including wind energy solutions such as anemometers for mounting on wind turbines, precision implementation, etc. To learn more, explore Lambrecht’s capabilities regarding Severe Weather Warnings, Wind Energy, and Climate Research.

To learn more about how Siemens Gamesa uses Earth Networks to help manage weather in wind farm operations, watch the full video here and access the slide deck to uncover details on wind energy and lightning data.