Vestas Lifecycle Partnerships

Markus Rieck

SVP, Global Service

Published 18th Octobr 2021 

At Vestas, intensive data gathering has allowed us to advance our service provision to the next level – we can confidently warranty the output of a turbine – wherever, whenever. By studying the data generated from our monitors and sensors, we offer our service customers an availability guarantee: Basically, this means that when the wind blows, we give them what’s available – because we can guarantee uptime. And to achieve this we add sensors and measurements allowing us to take our customer’s service planning from reactive to predictive. This is the basis of the design of our service business and a cornerstone of our lifecycle partnership concept.

By lifecycle partnership, we mean that as well as offering everything a classic service provider does, we take into consideration the entire lifecycle of a turbine or wind-farm. Every piece of performance data we gather helps us keep a turbine operating efficiently by allowing us to predict faults before they occur and plan ahead. With advanced R&D capabilities refined using our own-brand and multi-brand knowledge, we have unique offerings that will help optimise a wind farm throughout its entire lifecycle.

Everything - from scheduled services, where we check individual turbines, to alarms that signal a potential or critical incident, through vibration monitoring or oil heat data - is dependent on information we gather, analyse and store from our serviced base. And this has a positive knock-on effect on our supply chain: Because by anticipating repairs or services, we can avoid having to replace entire gearboxes or generators.

By performing up-tower repairs, where we can replace worn or suspect components, we save the cost and time involved in hoisting entire gearboxes up a tower – and most importantly, avoid the downtime of a major breakdown. In fact, by planning ahead using our meteorological data, we can even perform repairs and services at times when wind production is at its lowest to maximize the most valuable uptime. This is something which we are constantly investing in, as it takes out huge supply chain costs.

What is proving particularly interesting for our more sustainability focus clients is our partial repowering capabilities, which enable us to take a non-Vestas wind farm and then selectively replace components of another manufacturer’s turbines with the latest Vestas technology. This means that they too can benefit from the advantages of our digital monitoring: Servicing when it makes sense, when the wind is not blowing and taking a life cycle perspective on fleet investments.

It’s not easy though, and our ambition to become the world’s leading Multibrand Service involves significant investments in software, technology and highly trained technicians. But by aligning all our business data - from just one turbine site to a fleet of different turbines and even hybrids, we can put synergies and scale into our customers’ data systems that allow them to take advantage of a more proactive approach.

In the end, our customers want good service quality at a competitive price. So, we strive to provide the best quality at a good price to drive the cost of energy down. And that’s what monitoring, data and analytics help us deliver – and allows Vestas to be any wind-farm customer’s one stop shop for service, no matter the brand, no matter the location - be it onshore or offshore anywhere on the world.