On June 29, 2021, the USPTO will issue VayuAI Corp.’s patent for its Cloud based Turbine Control Feedback Loop technology, Vayu’s implementation of Cloud SCADA technology that ties the power of the cloud directly to the wind farm. Vayu delivers fast output of control strategies to enhance wind farm performance based on simulation of massive amounts of high resolution data, complex wind science and machine learning.
Vayu technology opens the door to low cost wake steering for any wind farm.
Prior to Vayu, onsite wind farm SCADA technology focused on the performance of isolated wind turbines and could not effectively manage wind farm system operations based on wake steering.
Some think that is still the case…
A National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) scientist called this out at a recent webinar, saying: “the biggest challenge with wake steering is that the optimization methods are so costly that they don't scale properly". Those methods include the integration of complex wind science formulas, advanced algorithms and machine learning.
NREL is right, unless you have a team of data and computer scientists (trained to optimize massive amounts of data) build your computational system specifically with scale in mind. Even then, the effort is non-trivial and long term.
And it can be done at almost no cost. In fact, Vayu has accomplished low cost scale with its patented cloud/edge systems approach.
It took us awhile, but we are now processing wind farm simulations for Performance Optimization Assessments, based on high resolution data, in minutes.
In 2015, we had our first encounter with wind farm wake steering and immediately recognized that this superb value proposition came with computational requirements requiring a cloud computing system to scale for constant data intensive simulations alongside an intelligent edge system for real time control strategy selection and new systems for data acquisition. The amount of data and the complexity of wake steering science was a wonderful challenge.
A little customer discovery confirmed that wind farms were using onsite, enterprise “client-server” systems with outdated ‘web server’ networks and strategies, limited on site communication infrastructure and insufficient computational capacity. We saw very little of the cloud computing integration required for the wind systems/wake steering approach and no attempt to deploy real time control strategies.
Our team investigated and by 2017 we had filed a provisional patent application with our ideas. In late 2018 we built an MVP (minimal viable product) to test. The MVP took too long to perform optimization assessments. But it worked!
We added to our team and worked long hours to rebuild the simulation. By 2020 we had a workable system that scaled pretty well. We we ran numerous proofs of concept on wind farms to test our optimization of wind farm performance while adding additional data acquisition technologies (5G) and control strategy implementation partnerships.
The isolation of COVID-19 was a blessing for our simulation work as we worked to improve the “Sim” (as the team called it) around the clock with a very strong team of mathematicians and engineers.
By Q1 2021 we had the scale we were looking for, running Performance Optimization Assessments (“POAs”) on years of wind farm public data in minutes at almost no cost.
Prior to Vayu, there was no acceptable path to try or use wake steering. Now it is almost simple.
Vayu has its Cloud SCADA, an integrated IoT technology solution that works. Vayu’s wind farm ‘systems approach’ with wake steering addresses wind farm concerns. Seamless integration of Vayu with OEM SCADA systems on existing wind farms (or deployed independently on wind farm development projects) makes Vayu a compelling choice for wind farm owners, developers, operators and OEMs.