UK – 500kW Investor-Owned Wind Turbine Enabled

GridGEM Enables Wind Turbine at Complex HV Industrial Site with Significant Physical & Connection Constraints

Overview & Client Problem

Clean Earth Energy (https://cleanearthenergy.com) were contracted by Imerys (https://www.imerys.com) to install a 500 kW wind turbine on a private wire at their site in Cornwall. This project was complex due to the existence of multiple high voltage (HV) electrical connections to the Grid across the client site, each with their own constraints. In addition there was the requirement for the wind turbine to be able to changeover between the client connection and the investor owned connection dynamically.

The DNO would not allow the project to go ahead unless a solution could be found to monitor the multiple HV Grid connection points simultaneously, aggregate them together, and then communicate with and control the wind turbine in a way that was acceptable by the DNO to meet the G100 requirements.

The client also needed data to provide assurance and performance reports for the asset owner.

Argand’s Solution

Argand designed, built and delivered a turnkey GridGEM export limitation control solution for the project. Argand used their significant control & data communication expertise to collect and aggregate realtime power from all of the Grid connection points to ensure that the overall control response was relative to the aggregated site import / export. The project required HV monitoring, which Argand worked with Clean Earth to implement with minimal downtime. The GridGEM technology also interfaced with a changeover system to ensure that should the turbine need to connect to its own Grid connection the control and changeover processes would be implemented dynamically, remotely and automatically. The project also had significant communication issues due to the distances between the Grid connection points and the main control interfaces which were solved by our engineering team through fibre optics and other communications technologies. This communication system enabled the project to meet the DNO’s response time requirements. The GridGEM solution was fully G100 and G59 (G99 now) compliant.

Client Benefits

The result for the investor is that they have been able to deliver a private wire into a site at an economically viable price and in a way that ensures that if the industrial site cannot demand their generation at any point, then they can dynamically switch to their own Grid connection to ensure that they can access export revenues from the market. In addition, the project would not have occurred without Argand’s expertise in accessing & aggregating data from physically distant locations and enabling realtime control in such a way as to meet the DNO’s response time & export limitation (G100) requirements. This has all been done within a complex HV site network. Finally, the client has been able to access economically beneficial electricity prices which have had a substantial benefit to their electrical running costs and CO2 emissions at the site.