Vestas
Turning climate into capital with big data
Smart is...
Pinpointing the optimal location for wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs
Precise placement of a wind turbine can affect its performance and its useful life. For Vestas, the world’s largest wind energy company, gaining new business depends on responding quickly and delivering business value. To succeed, Vestas uses one of the largest supercomputers worldwide along with a new big data modeling solution to slice weeks from data processing times and support 10 times the amount of data for more accurate turbine placement decisions. Improved precision provides Vestas customers with greater business case certainty, quicker results and increased predictability and reliability in wind power generation.
“We can now show our customers how the wind behaves and provide a solid business case that is on par with any other investment that they may have.”
– Lars Christian Christensen, Vice President, Vestas Wind Systems A/S
Business benefits
- Reduces response time for wind forecasting information by approximately 97 percent—from weeks to hours—to help cut development time
- Improves accuracy of turbine placement with capabilities for analyzing a greater breadth and depth of data
- Lowers the cost to customers per kilowatt hour produced and increases customers’ return on investment
- Reduces IT footprint and costs, and decreases energy consumption by 40 percent—all while increasing computational power
Journey to Smarter Computing
Designed for Data
Implementing a big data solution enables Vestas to create a wind library to hold 18 to 24 petabytes of weather and turbine data at various levels of granularity and reduce the geographic grid area used for modeling by 90 percent for increased accuracy.
Tuned to the Task
Working with IBM, Vestas can increase computational power while shrinking its
IT footprint and reducing server energy consumption by 40 percent. Today, twice the number of servers can be run in each of its supercomputer’s 12 racks.
Managed for Rapid Service Delivery
Processing huge volumes of climate data and the ability to gain insight from
that data enables Vestas to forecast optimal turbine placement in 15 minutes
instead of three weeks. This in turn shortens the time to develop a wind
turbine site by nearly a month.
