BaxEnergy’s Software Solutions: Unifying Renewable Assets

We talk to CEO Simone Massaro about how BaxEnergy is
revolutionizing renewable energy management. Their groundbreaking
software solutions that are making clean energy more efficient and
accessible. And the company's recent acquisition by Yokogawa
Electric Corporation will open doors for making their solutions
better and more widespread. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host,
Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're honored
to have with us Dr. Simone Massaro CEO of BaxEnergy. And BaxEnergy
has established itself as a leading provider of software solutions
for the renewable energy sector. Industry. Since its founding in
2010, the company has been at the forefront of developing cutting
edge asset performance and renewable energy management systems
under Dr. Massaro's leadership, BaxEnergy has gained recognition
for its innovative approach to optimizing renewable energy assets,
including wind farms and their solution helps energy companies
monitor, analyze and enhance The performance of the renewable
installations, ultimately making clean energy more efficient and
accessible. And in a significant development this year, BaxEnergy
was acquired by Yokogawa Electric Corporation, a global leader in
the industrial automation and control industry. This strategic move
is set to bolster BaxEnergy's position in the renewable energy
market and open doors to new technologies and markets. And that's
what I want to talk about today. Dr. Massaro is here today to share
his insights on BaxEnergy's journey. They're groundbreaking work in
renewable energy management and the exciting future ahead following
the Yokogawa acquisition. Simone, welcome to the show. It's great
to be here. Thank you. Was that an adequate introduction? Because
you guys are doing so much at BaxEnergy. It is amazing the
capabilities you're providing to the renewable industry. Simone
Massaro: Yeah, I mean, BaxEnergy is essentially a software solution
provider. And is focused on doing one thing and one thing only,
which is making renewable energy more affordable for everyone. And
the way that we do that is by making the power plants more
efficient. BaxEnergy is creating and delivering the software
solution that is taking control of the renewable energy power
plants, and is actually making them more efficient. In other words
it's taking all the aspects of the power plants that are difficult
to handle the dark side of the renewable energy and is transforming
it into something more efficient. Our history as commenced about 10
years ago with the development of a solution, which was optimizing
wind farms. And was focused on wind energy. And then from that, we
evolved into solar energy, hydroelectrical energy, geothermal
energy. And nowadays we're working a lot with hydrogen, which is a
little bit of the forefront of energy storage. Not many people
realize how difficult it is to work with renewable energy because
renewable energy are by nature uncontrollable. The reason is that
the source of the energy itself, the sun or the wind. They are at
their source. They are uncontrollable. They are not depending on
the will of the man. So we we wanted to have energy on demand, but
in reality, the sun is shining and the wind is blowing on a
completely different schedule. So our focus is to make sure that it
is possible to create a balance on the network by controlling this
uncontrollable part of of nature. And we do that by mixing all the
energy together. Allen Hall: It's been an amazing progression,
because if you think about the complexity of the energy system we
have today, and where we are going, and where we have been 10 years
ago, right? The, the, the issue, the early issues, and still exist
today. You have a lot of energy companies that have different
assets that are manufactured at different times by different
manufacturers, wind and solar in particular, the big two,
integrating that into a useful system. has been very difficult for,
for operators to achieve. I think you've really bridged that gap
now in, in terms of software. And that had to be a big hill to
climb to do that. You want to explain how you accomplished that and
how you kind of working that in software? Simone Massaro: Yeah. So
that's that you, you make a very good point over there. So, when
the new energy we're representing. A very small percentage of the
global energy production. They were not creating a problem, but as
the amount of renewable energy has grown to reach 10%, 20%, 30% in
some countries, even 50% or more of the energy being produced, this
is also increasing the fluctuation on the grid. So the grid that we
had before. Which was designed for big monolithic power plants was
not sufficient to handle the fluctuation and the distribution of
this renewable energy power plant. So, new technologies had to be
invented to put this under control, not just the monitoring, but
also the capability to shut down the power plants when when a wind
farm was producing too much or when a solar power plant was
producing too much to avoid fluctuation. On on the grid. So the
software somewhat evolved with these challenges. At the very
beginning, we were focusing on gathering the data from the power
plants. And the key focus really from the utilities was just to
visualize this data. Later on the challenge came because Each of
these power plant is, is typically produced by a different
manufacturer. Now, you have not only different technology clearly a
wind turbine works in a very different way than the solar inverter
and the hydroelectric power plant or geothermal power plant. But
each of these power plant may actually be manufactured by a
different OEM, by a different vendor, by a different original
equipment manufacturer. And each of this vendor is actually
creating its own way to exchange data and its own way to control
the power plant. It's like having a different fleet of vehicles. So
you can think of wind, solar and hydro making a relationship with
the transportation. You can think of them as airplanes, cars. And
maybe trains and ships, essentially they're all moving people from
one place to the other, but they're doing that in very different
ways. And when you think of even just one of these categories, like
cars, you don't have a car, you have maybe 20, 30 different type
of, of, of cars. You have utility vehicles, you have trucks, you
have, very different size, very different objective, but also made
up from different vendors. So that, that's the same thing that you
have a renewable energy. And imagine now that you want a system to
control all of these all of these equipments, all of these machines
from one single place, that's what the utility need. Because
effectively, utilities are not buying just wind or just solar or
just hydro. They're buying all of these technologies. They're
building all of them. And they're not doing it with one vendor
only. They're doing it whichever offers the best price on the
market. And as we started to work with utilities, we realized that
That sometime utilities were having not, not one system, not two,
not three, sometime 15, 20 different systems in order to monitor
their power plants. Because each of these power plant was coming
with a different system. Each wind farm was equipped with his own
monitoring and control system. Each solar power plant had his own
power plant control system. So surely enough, if you have so many
systems, you also need a lot of operators that they have to be
trained to operate these different, these very different power
plants coming from very different manufacturers. So that challenges
no one had solved before us. So early 2010, we came out with the
first system. Which was unifying the monitoring and the control of
different renewable energy sources all under one roof, regardless
of the energy type, the technology type, the manufacturer, the
vendor of that power plant, regardless of the communication
protocol. Regardless, even of things like unit of measurements,
imagine a wind turbine produced in the U. S. will measure the wind
speed in feet per second and one produced in Europe will measure it
in meters per second. So you know, these, these, these utilities,
these owners of the power plants, as the number of power plants was
growing, they really needed to have that unified platform. So that
was the first challenge. That we addressed. Allen Hall: You've
grown as the industry has grown in terms of capability. Your first
hurdle was trying to communicate everything to communicate with one
another. So many different vendors, so many different technologies.
It must've taken you an immense amount of time to even get that to
work. Just to get the data. Just to get the data, right. And to
make sure that it works. Properly, but then to take that knowledge
and then explode it into making sure the grid is more stable.
That's amazing. Simone Massaro: Yeah. And surely enough it's taken
a lot of of people actually have the calculation of that. So to do
the, the data collection, the, the capability that we have today is
to interconnect every single vendor that exists in the market.
Every single winter turbine buying and inverter manufacturer. That
produces inverted today in the world. Do we have a protocol for
that?