How Enel Green Power is breaking records

The very important milestone achieved by Enel Green Power in January 2021 was not just symbolic. For the first time in history, a single western company generated 400GWh of renewable energy in 24 hours from its hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar power plants. This record did not come as a surprise: as a matter of fact, there has been a trend of incremental growth in the energy produced every day. This is due to the continuous installation of new plants that are increasing renewable capacity (a new record was set in 2020), as well as to the improvements and upgrades carried out at existing power plants. In December 2020, the one-day figure of 390 GWh was achieved, while on January 29, 2021 production rose even higher and reached 400 GWh. Considering that a household of three people consumes on average 2.7 MWh in one year, the quantity of energy produced in one single day corresponded to the annual consumption of 150 thousand families. “The key to this historic achievement is that our company is working with four different renewable sources simultaneously: energy from water, the sun and the wind, as well as the heat from the earth,” explains Luigi La Pegna, Head of Global Operation & Maintenance di EGP. “This multitude of sources, combined with our presence in many countries, and with diverse and complementary technologies, mitigates the variability caused by meteorological factors, ensuring a production level that is always high. And when the conditions are favorable, it is possible to set new records.” At the time the new record was achieved, Enel Green Power was counting on more than 1,250 renewable energy plants all over the world. The Operation & Maintenance (O&M) division alone numbers more than 5,000 workers, a global team that shares data, experience, and intervention strategies. A record that is the fruit of technology and innovation Behind the record achieved for single-day production lies a journey that is based on a series of targeted interventions and high-tech solutions. One of the most important aspects is monitoring. The information and data concerning production are available in the control room in Rome, but they can also be consulted on every plant manager’s tablet. Equally important, and complementary, is the collection and analysis of Big Data. “Every second, the equivalent of one and a half encyclopedias of information arrives in the control room,” explains La Pegna. The numbers are logged in order to be analyzed with the aim of extracting information that is useful for managing the plants better, not only based on standard parameters, but also by trying to find correlations between the various plants thanks to the use of artificial intelligence. The data-driven approach, in turn, enables maintenance that is not only preventative but also predictive: rather than occurring at strict, preplanned, regular intervals, it is led by specific information and based on the real condition of individual components. This enables the optimization of maintenance operations and their planning in advance, reducing any machine shutdowns to the bare minimum. “With non-renewable energies like coal or gas it is possible to stop the plants and therefore not waste fuel, while in the case of wind or solar power, the time out of action corresponds to energy that is irredeemably lost. So far Enel Green Power’s renewable energy plants have an average availability of 98% of the time, a level that is already extremely high. The goal is to improve it even further and reach 98.2% over the next two or three years.” Luigi La Pegna, Head of Global Operation & Maintenance at EGP While the fact that the new record was achieved following months of the pandemic could come as a surprise, in reality, from a results point of view, the global health emergency had no impact on EGP’s energy production. This can be credited, for example, to the 20 high-tech control rooms located around the world, which allow the plants to be managed entirely from remote locations. Over 53% of O&M staff was able to switch to remote working, including those responsible for monitoring production; the only teams left in the field are the ones that carry out physical maintenance (planned and unexpected), thereby ensuring the continuity and the full efficiency of its power services. Towards the next record Reaching the milestone of 400 GWh in one day is not, however, a finish line, but rather an intermediate target. EGP has a plan that aims to increase the additional capacity of green energy by 100 GW over the next decade. This means a growth of 10 GW a year, which “corresponds more or less to installing one new wind or solar plant every week of the year,” underlines La Pegna. This substantial increase in volume will be flanked by a series of changes, concerning both construction and management. For wind and solar power, in particular, the plants are evolving at structural level and becoming increasingly bigger. “The large constructions that were recently built can span even 90 to 125 miles in length; going to inspect a specific machine means travelling tens of miles, and this is an entirely new scenario,” adds La Pegna. “These massive dimensions, like in the case of the plants in the Chilean desert or in the Brazilian jungle, require new forms of management, the use of drones, and a new use of information, as well as changes to the way people work.” In this context, maintenance is increasingly becoming a constant activity. The idea is to share the best practices and most effective optimizations internally within the company in order to have a “plug and play” model for the installation and maintenance of power plants. “It would be impossible for anyone in the company to visit all of the plants in person. For this reason the model sees a shift even further in the direction of knowledge sharing, even between those responsible for plants in very distant parts of the world,” concludes La Pegna. And while hydroelectric still represented 60% of green energy production in 2020, it is estimated that already within the next three or four years the contributions from wind and solar power will become increasingly important. Hydroelectric and geothermal, with plants that have been running for more than a century, are mature technologies for which innovations are only able to bring modest improvements. For wind and solar power, however, innovations are advancing quickly and, considering the dimensions of the plants, an improvement of a few percentage points leads to a huge difference in terms of production. Then there is also the general paradigm shift to take into account. Soon, in fact, wind and solar plants will represent the majority of green energy production.

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How Enel Green Power is breaking records

How Enel Green Power is breaking records

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