OrbiSCADA for Vestas wind turbines

OrbiSCADA for Vestas wind turbines

There are a large number of older Vestas wind turbines in Denmark. 20-30 years ago when the wind turbines were manufactured and installed, remote monitoring and control was not available. Some of the wind turbines were later connected to a telefax solution, which sent an SMS in case of alarms and errors. In 2021, the SMS part of this solution was phased out and Orbital chose, after inquiries, to further develop OrbiSCADA, so that with a modem and accessories it became possible to receive and send data from the original VMP 3500, 4400 and 5000 controllers.

Poul Henning Holmgaard is a Danish Orbital customer who has installed modem hardware to connect several Vestas turbines in Denmark with OrbiSCADA monitoring. Poul Henning has been a Vestas service technician for a number of years but an independent service technician for the past 15 years. In everyday life as a service technician the list, map and dashboard views in OrbiSCADA are helpfull tools for monitoring the current status of each individual wind turbine. In addition, it is possible for Poul Henning and the wind turbine owners to opt in or out of e-mail notifications for of loss of connection and error messages.

Poul Henning Holmgaard comments on the use of OrbiSCADA:

“I am satisfied with the system. It helps me in my everyday life as a service technician. It is convenient that I can log in from a smartphone, tablet and computer. When logged in, I can see how the wind turbine produces at the moment and go back in history. The graph display is convenient as an overview of production and other parameters as wind speed, temperatures, error messages. It is also easy to zoom in on the graph to take a closer look at specific contexts and events”.

In addition to monitoring functions in OrbiSCADA, it is possible to send start, stop and reset commands to the Vestas wind turbines. It minimizes production loss, driving and ressources when errors can be reset through OrbiSCADA and the wind turbine can subsequently be started through remote control. It is possible to deal with the types of faults where the controller allows remote start. The stop command is useful in situations where the power production must be stopped due to legislation or other circumstances.