Engie to open data for 21 MW French wind farm - report

French energy group Engie SA (EPA:ENGI) is preparing to open data for its 21 MW wind farm La Haute Borne, in a move to showcase the capabilities of its big data management tool Darwin.

The open data wind farm project will be launched by the end of this month, Paul Poncet, an expert data scientist at Engie, told French industry magazine Usine Nouvelle.

The Darwin tool, developed by Engie, is based on the Wonderware industrial software of Schneider Electric SA (EPA:SU) and the Microsoft cloud technology. It currently retrieves and processes real-time data from 160,000 solar panels and 717 wind turbines at 109 power plants of Engie in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Romania.

Darwin is much more than just a monitoring tool, Raphaël Genin, Innovation Manager at Engie, explains.

It also allows the development of predictive maintenance on equipment and at a later stage it will even inform and answer questions from local residents or communities via multiple interfaces like website, smartphone app and even chatbot, developed by a dedicated team of software developers, web developers and data scientists.

For example, Darwin identified that default wind turbine settings caused a delay in their orientation which lead to a 0.5% loss on production. Correcting the settings would be worth EUR 10 million over 10 years of operation, Genin noted.

Opening the data collected in Darwin from the Haute-Borne wind farm to the community of developers, manufacturers, operators, researchers, students, will showcase the tool's capabilities to the world.

By the end of 2017, Engie will extend Darwin coverage to installations in South Africa, the UK, Brazil and Canada as well as to all the installations of wind and solar power developer La Compagnie du Vent which is now 100% owned by Engie.

The French company plans to switch its global wind and solar fleets to big data by 2018.

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