abstract：Is "fault free wind farm" an achievable goal or a castle in the air?

Is "fault free wind farm" an achievable goal or a castle in the air?

After continuous high-speed growth during the 13th Five Year Plan period, China's wind power industry has entered a new era of wind power focusing on large-scale and high-quality development.

In February 2021, Longyuan Power Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Longyuan Power") took the lead in putting forward the concept of "fault free wind farm" in the industry, and cooperated with 8 wind turbine manufacturers such as United Power and Goldwind technology to create a fault free demonstration wind farm throughout the year. This is not only a challenge, but also an inevitable choice for the development of the industry.

After more than one year of continuous construction, what is the operation of the "fault free wind farm"? Is "fault free wind farm" an achievable goal or a castle in the air? The reporter found the answer at the summary meeting of the phased achievements of the "fault free wind farm" construction held by Longyuan Power recently.

Taking digital transformation as the starting point, the "fault free wind farm" has achieved remarkable results

As the earliest and largest new energy specialized company in China, Longyuan Power currently directly manages nearly 14000 wind turbines, involving more than 20 main engine manufacturers and more than 100 models.

Talking about the original intention of creating a "fault free wind farm", Tang Jian, general manager of Longyuan Power, frankly said that at the present time when onshore wind power units of 3 MW and above are popular, facing the increasing internal pressure of equipment management and external pressure such as parity and competitive bidding, how to fully explore the potential of storage equipment is the primary problem that Longyuan Power must solve.

According to Tang Jian, Conceptually speaking, fault free wind farms refer to wind farms that keep "healthy" and that can realize "necessary generation". It is required that the transmission, transformation and distribution of wind farms have no fault trip (excluding the SVG and other equipment faults that are affected off-site and do not affect the operation of wind turbines); The wind turbine unit shall not have any fault requiring local treatment (including reset) (the fault shutdown time is more than 10 minutes, excluding the fault caused by force majeure such as blade icing, extreme cold temperature and typhoon).

Facing the huge equipment supervision, how does Longyuan realize tracking, statistics and analysis in the process of creating a "fault free wind farm"?

"The digital transformation of production is the starting point." Tang Jian introduced that Longyuan Power formulated the "three-year and three-step" strategy of production digital transformation in 2020 to empower production and operation through digital means.

In the past two years, the digital platform for new energy production of Longyuan electric power has been put into operation and continuously optimized and improved. It has realized the comprehensive convergence of real-time data of equipment, audio and video data, positioning data of people, vehicles and ships, personnel maintenance data, online vibration and other intelligent sensing data, and has carried out long-range real-time monitoring of equipment operation status, dynamic supervision of personnel behavior, and three-dimensional supervision of operation process, During the construction of the fault free wind farm, the equipment status is intelligently tracked, intelligently counted and intelligently ranked to form a production digital control system of "three-level common management, platform sharing, man-machine integration and online closed loop". The professional management team carries out equipment supervision, data analysis, fault early warning, power prediction and other work all day through the digital platform, comprehensively excavates the data value, pinpoints the pain points, guides the on-site planned maintenance, eliminates the hidden defects of the equipment in advance, prevents small defects from developing into large faults, and improves the reliability and power generation performance of the equipment.

According to Xia Hui, deputy general manager of Longyuan Power, since the beginning of the year, the frequency of fault shutdown of 58 participating projects of "fault free wind farm" of Longyuan Power has decreased significantly, the number of continuous operation units has doubled, the number of utilization hours has increased significantly, and the phased results have been remarkable.

According to the data, the cumulative number of fault outages of Longyuan Power in 2021 decreased by more than 30% year-on-year, and the fault downtime decreased by 45% year-on-year. The proportion of 100 day, 200 day and 300 day continuous fault free operation units reached 82%, 39% and 17% respectively.

"The data of the fault free wind farm of Longyuan Power in the past year is shocking, and also provides a reference and basis for our future host selection." Said a participant from the domestic mainstream operators.

Give play to the demonstration and leading role, and propose long-term operation benchmarking of wind turbines

Behind the extremely low fault frequency and high availability, the strength and specialization of Longyuan Power are of course important, but the ubiquitous preventive maintenance concept and the quality culture of standardized fault handling are also particularly valuable. Timely and in-depth summing up experience, sorting out problems and proposing solutions are the powerful guarantee for the long-term operation of follow-up wind turbines, and also the vivid embodiment of Longyuan Power's leading role in the industry.

The series of measures taken by Longyuan Power to create a fault free wind farm can be summarized as a set of effective "combination fist".

On the monitoring screen of Longyuan Power new energy safety production and operation monitoring center, the icons of small wind turbines represent each wind farm. Click to see the operation of each unit in the wind farm. Under the operation of the staff, the reporter checked the on-site maintenance work of Anhui Lushan wind power plant thousands of miles away. Several workers are carrying out real-time video images of equipment maintenance.

"The production digital platform automatically pushes the early warning information to the equipment responsible person and correlates with the single phase of the work, implements the online closed-loop of hidden danger treatment, and achieves' early warning is watched by someone, defects are managed by someone, and pieces can be closed-loop ', which effectively guarantees the quality of equipment maintenance, operation and maintenance." Jia Kebin, director of Longyuan Power Production Technology Department, said.

In the special treatment of equipment hidden dangers, Longyuan Power used the digital platform to carry out vertical and horizontal benchmarking analysis of equipment, find out the reasons for frequent faults and interruption of long-term operation of equipment, and carry out targeted special treatment. "More than one year's experience in the construction of fault free wind farms shows that the main reason for the interruption of long-term operation of the units is electrical control failures, which are concentrated in the pitch, frequency conversion and main control systems. After systematic treatment, the reliability of the units has been significantly improved." Introduction by Tang Jian. Over the past two years, the equipment availability coefficient of Longyuan electric power wind turbine has maintained the leading level in the industry for a long time.

With the support of digital means, the organizational structure has also been optimized and adjusted. Longyuan Power focuses on breaking the barriers between stations, integrating management, technology, human and material resources, giving full play to the advantages of professional division of labor, allowing "professionals to do professional work", and implementing unattended and few people to be on duty according to local conditions.

In the management of maintenance standardization and operation standardization, Longyuan Power uses the production digital platform to standardize the business, standardize the form, and informatization the form. The online standardized business process and operation standardization ticket card package have been comprehensively promoted in the wind farms of Longyuan Power, effectively integrating risk pre control, safety measures, maintenance quality, and maintenance process into the whole process of production and operation control.

After summing up the construction achievements of fault free wind farms, Longyuan Power took the lead in proposing to the whole industry to carry out the benchmarking of long-term operation of wind turbines: first, the main engine manufacturer should strictly check the product quality acceptance of component manufacturers, and focus on the assembly quality of components to ensure the maximum power generation efficiency of the unit. Second, the component manufacturers should improve the manufacturing standards of electronic control products and select high-quality wiring terminals to ensure that the product quality is qualified. Third, strengthen equipment management and highlight key points.

"According to the statistical data of Longyuan Power, in 2020, the proportion of units operating continuously without fault for more than 300 days exceeded 10%. After a year of hard work, the proportion of units operating continuously for more than 300 days in 2021 reached 17%. This fully shows that fault free wind farms can be realized." Tang Jian said.