Here are some of our top tips for Windfarm Owners:
1. Beware Market Meter Readings
Keep an eye on any differences between your SCADA meter reading and what’s being issued through the market, particularly during grid outages. There have been a number of issues already, and it’s important that the market is notified, through your trading partner, to ensure that you’re not missing out on revenue.
2. Keep detailed records
Put all your trader availability notification records in a searchable database so that you can easily query what was submitted by what time in response to any issues raised by traders.
3. Visualise your data
We’ve found visualising upcoming outages, forecast production and real-time production on a single line graph gives a very handy quick reference for windfarm managers, and helps to increase the accuracy of our availability predictions.
4. Get your availability forecasts in on time
Penalties for inaccurate availability forecasts can range from the difference in Day Ahead Market rate to Balancing Rate, to a fixed additional penalty fee per megawatt hour. It’s important to mitigate this risk by being accurate with your return-to-service time prediction, and by submitting your annual, monthly and daily predictions on time. Our GenWatch Availability service can do this for you by combining a knowledgeable operator available 6am to midnight, 7 days a week, to estimate turbine down times with an automated system to ensure that notifications are sent to the trader by the appropriate times.
5. Set up automated alerts for data failures
Once you’ve set up your live data feed to your trader, set up automated email alerts when the feed goes down, allowing you to react in time and deal with the issue before you start getting penalties for not providing live data.
In addition, it’s worth considering an automated failover to a secondary communications link, or a continuous secondary live feed of data from your ESB meter. At EnergyPro, we’ve set this up on a number of windfarms so far – please get in touch if you’d like help setting this up on your windfarm.
6. Keep an eye on your trading partner’s trading strategy
This is important for two reasons: Firstly, given that many PPAs are for 12-18 months, it is a good idea to track your trader’s performance in order to allow you to make an informed choice when the PPA needs to be renewed. Secondly, in certain situations, compensation for dispatch down events is only available for the volume of power your trading partner traded in the Day Ahead and IntraDay markets. Ensuring an appropriate level of trading in these markets means you don’t miss out on this dispatch down compensation.
Our GenWatch Shadow Trading Analysis service provides ongoing analysis which might be useful to monitor this.
