CHICAGO, IL AND IRVINE, CA (February 21, 2018) – Invenergy, North America's largest independent, privately-held renewable energy company, and NarrativeWave, an Irvine-based Internet of Things software company, announced a three-year agreement. Invenergy will use NarrativeWave's software to optimize its fleet of wind turbines and other renewable energy assets.
The announcement follows a successful 60-day pilot, where Invenergy proved out two use cases for their operations. The first use case focused on Reducing Lost Production. The second use case focused on Reducing Unscheduled Downtime, accomplished by empowering mechanical, electrical, and turbine performance subject matter experts (SMEs) to rapidly build analytic models and deploy them across a fleet of turbines without the need for data scientists.
Through these pilots, operators in the 24/7 Invenergy Control Center (ICC) used NarrativeWave to fully automate time-consuming manual processes and accelerate return-to-service times on wind turbines, in some cases by more than 50%. For example, previously, when high generator bearing temperatures caused a turbine fault, a control room operator would log into a web page and manually analyze a host of temperature, wind speed and power production variables to decipher the next course of action. With NarrativeWave, this process was fully automated, providing the operator a recommendation in mere seconds.
"As North America's leading wind energy operator, Invenergy embraces digital innovation to maximize uptime and productivity from our fleet. NarrativeWave's unique solution improves our fleet management, which ultimately benefits the customers and investors who rely on Invenergy to maximize the value of the renewable energy assets we operate," said Alex George, Senior Vice President of Operations and Asset Management.
"NarrativeWave enables our Operation Engineers to easily build analytic models without having to be computer programmers, complementing their expertise and rapidly delivering new analytics for our growing wind and solar fleet," said Jim Klus, Manager of Performance Analytics at Invenergy.
NarrativeWave provides a user-directed toolset that allows companies to increase productivity and succeed at self-operating, without the increased cost of software engineers and data scientists. Companies are using NarrativeWave to maximize asset performance, increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, and accelerate machine learning capabilities.
"We are honored to partner with one of the most innovative companies in the global renewable energy industry," said Benjamin Decio, CEO of NarrativeWave. "The Invenergy team is very talented and unique in their adoption of technology as a key differentiator in their business. As Invenergy helps their customers move towards "self-operating" models, we will continue to benefit from their leadership of developing new use cases with NarrativeWave to further impact their customer's future."
NarrativeWave's industry focus includes Energy, Aerospace, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Mining, Transportation, and Heavy Equipment. The solution combines sensor data and domain expertise to deliver critical information at the fingertips of decision makers, eliminating the black box approach.
"NarrativeWave is one of the first solutions available focused on empowering domain experts," said Johnny Dobbins, Director of Client Engineering at NarrativeWave. "Our industry-leading partners are focused on closing the gap between their data and SMEs, while reducing data science and engineering costs associated with delivering actionable insights."