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1. Bp Holdings

4. Remote operations centre gives farms
remote control
From BP Wind Energy’s remote operations centre in Houston, all 13
of its farms across seven US states are closely monitored 24/7. The
information relayed back helps them to produce more efficiently,
economically and safely

5. Sitting in a darkened room more than 30 floors above the streets
of downtown Houston, US, a BP Wind Energy operator is able to
tell visitors exactly how much power is being generated on a wind
farm as far away as California—and what the weather’s like there.

6. This is the remote operations centre (ROC), where some 800
million individual data points from BP’s 13 wind farms in seven
states are stored every month. The mass of information allows the
remote operations team to keep a close eye on critical and variable
factors, such as turbine availability, power generation capacity,
market pricing and wind speed.

7. Software collects the data at each individual wind farm, as well as
from weather services and national electric system operators like the
Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is then
transmitted to Houston. Much of the information is displayed in the
form of pie charts or bar graphs on the centre’s five by 18 feet-long
(1.5 by 5 metre-long) brightly coloured screens—known as ‘the wall’.
It flickers on a regular basis, as numbers adjust in real-time.

8. “The wall gives operators visibility of what is happening at each wind
farm,” says David Grant, director of remote operations and SCADA
(supervisory control and data acquisition) technology for BP Wind
Energy. “We can look at the performance of an individual turbine and
compare it with others from the same manufacturer at a specific wind
farm or across the fleet; we can recognize if equipment starts to
operate outside a normal parameter and react.”