GE announced that E.ON Climate & Renewables’ (EC&R) has signed a contract for GE’s PowerUp, a customized software-enabled platform that increases a wind farm’s output by up to 5 percent.
EC&R will enhance 469 of its GE 1.5-77 wind turbines with the PowerUp platform.
The PowerUp offering agreement between EC&R and GE is an outcomes-based approach. EC&R will pay GE only on the actual benefit of the PowerUp platform.
“The outcomes-based approach aligns well with our goals of providing cleaner, better energy at a more affordable price,” said Steve Trenholm, chairman, E.ON North America.
“Investment in wind energy has led to technological advancements like PowerUp that continue to make renewables more and more competitive with traditional forms of energy,” Trenholm added.
PowerUp is part of GE’s brilliant wind platform, which harnesses the power of the Industrial Internet to analyze tens of thousands of data points on a wind farm every second, driving higher power output, increasing services productivity and creating new revenue streams for customers.
The solution leverages connectivity and advanced analytics, and is an ecomagination qualified product.
GE and EC&R have agreed to a set point of additional annual energy production per wind turbine, which could bring the equivalent power of as many as 19 new 1.5-77 wind turbines for the EC&R fleet.
“We see PowerUp as a new path to development for our customers. Without any development risk, or installation expense, EC&R will see the equivalent of 19 new turbines in the ground today,” said Andy Holt, general manager of GE’s renewable energy projects and services organization.
GE will work with EC&R to perform a complete before-and-after wind farm power-performance analysis to validate the performance improvement, the company said.
Also read: GE supplies more than 40 MW of installed capacity to two new wind farms in central England