WindESCo Unveils Market-First Swarm™ Tech to Transform Wind Farm Profitability

WindESCo, a pioneer in accelerating annual energy production (AEP) for wind turbine stakeholders, has launched WindESCo Swarm™ - the world’s first commercially available, patented, solution for autonomous, cooperative control of wind assets.

Taking cues from nature, and the intuitive decision-making of birds in flight, WindESCo Swarm™ is set to unlock millions of dollars for wind asset owners by enabling turbines to cooperatively adjust positioning to boost production for the entire farm – not just single machines – by 3-5% annually.
For a typical 1GW wind plant, this would translate to in excess of $20 million (€17 million) over a five-year period.

AEP is a key issue for wind industry stakeholders. Until now, available solutions sought to optimize wind assets on a turbine-by-turbine basis.
This approach can deliver incremental improvements for asset owners, but does not reflect the complex reality of wind farm operations and is insufficient to address the fleet-wide losses of between 5 to 20% of potential power production which are common to the industry.

WindESCo Swarm™ is the first off-the-shelf solution that connects and creates a shared understanding between turbines. It allows turbines to know what is happening at neighboring assets, along with the direction, strength and any shifts in wind resource, to change their operational profiles and optimize the swarm instead of individual machines.

By understanding how their operation is impacting the performance of the site at large, WindESCo Swarm™ enables wind assets to take predictive, protective and proactive turbine control measures for maximized fleet-wide production.

Commenting on the development, Blair Heavey, CEO of WindESCo, said “in a competitive market, our customers are telling us they’re looking to springboard from defensive or risk-based solutions to offensive, revenue-producing solutions to tackle the widespread challenge of LCOE. Wind projects often see low-profit margins, especially when plants fail to meet performance projections, but current solutions do not provide actionable insights and a measurable ROI in terms of tangible site-wide production boosts.”

“The difference between a growth-oriented mindset versus simple risk aversion is building a proactive strategy to improve performance. WindESCo Swarm™ is set to become the go-to solution for wind operators looking to supercharge their assets and deliver consistent, year-on-year revenue increases without compromising useful asset life - in short, squeezing out every megawatt available from their investments,” concluded Heavey.

WindESCo Swarm™ combines hardware and software as an integrated system to help owners unlock value by allowing turbines to communicate with and learn from each other. To develop the system WindESCo used a multidisciplinary approach, combining the fields of turbine loads, controls, meteorology, sensing and machine learning.