Background
Capital Power is a growth oriented North American power producer, publicly traded (TSX: CPX), and headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The company creates dependable, cost-effective and innovative electricity solutions to power a sustainable future for generations to come.
Capital Power owns approximately 6,500 megawatts (MW) of power generation capacity at 28 facilities across North America. The company has approximately 425 MW of owned generation capacity in advanced development in Alberta and North Carolina.
Challenges
As the number of Capital Power’s assets grew, the data produced by their assets also increased exponentially. Capital Power now owns approximately 500 wind turbines from multiple manufacturers. They needed a solution that would help alleviate data storage limits without incurring high overhead costs.
On average, one of Capital Power’s wind turbine produced approximately 3,000 data points every 10 minutes –which works out to over 50 billion data points per year. In order to make data-driven decisions, it was imperative that historical data is stored properly and efficiently in addition to being accessible. The solution must also seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Power BI and Capital Power’s existing footprint of Operations Management and Analytics application.
Solutions
By leveraging ShookIOT’s Industrial Cloud Data Platform, Capital Power was able to store and easily access all operational data produced by their wind turbines. ShookIOT platform proved to be advantageous over other platforms including historians in the market in terms of cost-effectiveness, vendor-neutrality and ease of integration. ShookIOT platform is based on Microsoft Azure, Capital Power’s preferred cloud provider. This allows Capital Power to procure ShookIOT through Microsoft marketplace and leverage their Microsoft agreements and credits. The solution is also able to integrate with Time Series Insights (TSI) for operational diagnosis and PowerBI to enhance monthly reporting.
With the implementation of ShookIOT, Capital Power has improved the quality, management and access to the data for other systems, and end-users. This will help improve and optimize asset performance and utilization.
ShookIOT’s components that were implemented include:
- ShookIOT Connectors, provides data connectivity to source systems
- ShookIOT Elevate, extracts information from on-premise systems and move it to the cloud
- ShookIOT Fusion, manages operational data in the cloud
- ShookIOT Lenses, organizes to make it easier for users to find data
- ShookIOT Essentials, provides access to the data in an open format to serve different data consumers for visualization, analytics, orchestration and reporting purposes
Applications
ShookIOT became a foundational enabler for Capital Power’s Remote Monitoring and Operations Management Centre. Having all the wind turbine data store and accessible in the cloud enhances their ability for automated asset reporting and provides additional opportunities to streamline Capital Power’s operations. Having the complete wind turbine dataset in the ShookIOT solution enable Capital Power to tackle complex machine learning problems like predicting downtime and maximizing wind facility output.
Benefits
Capital Power’s success criteria and goals were met with the implementation of ShookIOT platform, including:
- Enhanced decision making and support to Capital Power’s employees
- Reduction of total cost of ownership for operational data management
- Improvements of accessibility and scalability to support their future growth
- Enhanced data quality and granularity feeds to critical systems
- Unlocked further opportunities with the use of advanced analytics
“One of the key differentiators that sold us on ShookIOT was that the platform was built with Microsoft Azure cloud technology which allowed us to leverage our existing Azure infrastructure without increasing costs or compromising performance quality. The solution allowed us to store large amounts of data and integrated easily with our current technology footprint. Our employees are able to access data easily which has helped improve its utilization for decision making.”
– Manish Neupane, Director, Applications & Business Intelligence
Capital Power
