Green Eagle’s ARSOS Automates Wind Farm Operations

Alejandro Cabrera Muñoz, CEO and founder of Green Eagle Solutions,
discusses their ARSOS platform and how it helps wind farm operators
manage technical complexities, market volatility, and regulatory
changes by automating turbine issue responses for increased
productivity and revenue. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our
weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is
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show? Email us! Wind Farm operators face mounting challenges
from managing thousands of diverse turbines to navigating the
energy markets and constant regulatory changes. This week we speak
with Alejandro Cabrera Munoz, CEO, and founder of Green Eagle
Solutions. Green Eagle's ARSOS platform gives control rooms
immediate responses to turbine issues, which dramatically increases
productivity and captures more revenue from their turbines. Welcome
to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest
innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen
Hall: Alejandro, welcome to the show.  Speaker
3: Thank you, Allen. Thank you for having me here today. 
Allen Hall: so Green Eagle Solutions is in a unique space of
the renewable energy marketplace, and you saw a problem several
years ago, particularly in the control rooms
of [00:01:00] wind operators. What is that problem that
you identified? Speaker 3: Yeah, Allen, I think it, it's, It's
a challenge that, most of our customers, which are generally large
operators, are facing today. But it's a challenge that have been,
growing, in the past years. So first of all, it's, it goes along
with the penetration of renewables in the industry, right? So we
have, due to all these many years of aggregating new wind farms and
solar plants, We are seeing how the complexity, the technical
complexity of operating and supervising these assets is growing
exponentially, right? So we now have customers with thousands of
wind turbines that have, different models, different versions of,
controllers, And also different healthcare issues that they have to
take care of. So the technical complexity is a fair, the
first [00:02:00] factor that, it's has to be tackled from
a control room, And, makes, operations quite, challenging. Along
with this, we have market volatility. So in the recent years
especially, we are seeing how, Negative pricing and optional
markets are now affecting operations in a daily, basis. Basically
in every 15 minutes you dunno if you're gonna produce or not. Up
until recently it was as simple as if you had wind resource, you
would produce energy from wind farms. If you had solar, you produce
energy from solar plants. It's not like that anymore. So the market
is quite, volatile. that adds a lot of complexity from the
commercial point of view of, Of the assets. And the last, factor
that is actually becoming, an increasing challenge for everyone is
the regulatory changes. So basically due to the penetration of
renewable energies, what we see is that all governments, all grid
operators and our market operators are constantly
issuing [00:03:00] new adapt, new regulatory changes,
that everyone has to adapt to no matter what. it doesn't matter if
you have an all wind farm or a newer wind farm. Or you prepared or
not, like everyone has to be adapted to, to the new regulatory,
changes. the three things are actually affecting, our customers and
we are trying to solve all these issues, the way, the, best way
that we can, right? So most of our customers, we just have a
control room full of people. they will do their best effort to
accommodate these challenges. The reality is that we have to. Deal
with, people, procedures, and, systems, and we, if we don't put
these three things in place, it's impossible to cope up. With the
complexity that we are dealing with, and that's where we come in.
Joel Saxum: I think you painted the picture of a really good
problem that's not just like local to the eu, local to India, local
to South America, whatever. it's a global issue, right? You have
the, massive build out of different kinds
of [00:04:00] technologies that need to be managed in
different ways that, bring their own issues, their own delivery to
the grid, those kind of things. and then you, and as Green Eagle
has, painted the picture like, Hey, we saw these issues. This is
where we come in, this is where we step in. So in that, what kind
of inefficiencies are you seeing in the traditional wind farm
operations versus what you guys are bringing to the table now?
Speaker 3: So just to give a few examples, and I think I, I
can be quite, precise on this. let's say that a wind turbine gets
some fault because of, high temperature on the gearbox, and it's a.
It's an automated response from the manufacturer that the ban is
gonna stop for safety measures, right? So in many cases. This is
solved from the control room point. from the control room by
waiting for an operator to just, follow a procedure, right? So this
procedure takes a lot of time. Why? Because you are not only paying
attention to one winter turbine band, you may have 2000 winter
turbines, right? [00:05:00] So you have to first identify,
which is a model of winter turbine band that is affected by this
issue. Then you have to go through the manual, then you have to
check what are the parameters, and the whole process takes minimum
half an hour if you wanna do it properly. The problem is when you
have other issues like high wind speed, right? So normally when you
have high wind resource, which is basically when you can produce
more energy, is when your assets suffer the most. And so they're
more prone to errors, they're more prone to go get on fault. So if
you take a look at these times, the country room, response time is
actually gonna go up in hours, right? So this one of the one simple
example is a end-to-end full haling procedure that takes between.
20 minutes, two hours, depending on how you have a structure, your
systems, people, and procedures, right? So this is the first thing
that we can tackle. Like just as an example with our software, we
can automate the whole process end to end. That means that this
problem is never gonna be dealt with. From an operator, This is
gonna be [00:06:00] automated. This is an, this is never
gonna become an issue for an operator ever again.  Allen
Hall: Yeah. And I think this lends itself to software
obviously, that there's, if you look at these control rooms, if
you, or especially if you looked 3, 4, 5 years ago. It's pretty
chaotic in there. And if you are on the market for electricity and
the price is fluctuating and you have turbines popping on and off,
you have a crisis and it's very hard to sort that out and to get
the turbines up and running if you need them to be, to produce
power so you can make money. 'cause ultimately we're trying to
maximize the revenue to our company. And that cannot be a human
response. We're too slow. Humans are too slow to respond to all
this. And because we'd have to know every nuance to every turbine
or solar farm makes the problem immensely impossible. So that's
where you have developed a piece of software called. ARSOS and it's
a system approach to a very complicated problem. So you want to
explain what ARSOS does  Speaker
3: [00:07:00] effectively, what, what ARSOS does is to
provide immediate response to whatever issue you have already a
procedure to deal with, right? So let's take into account the,
previous example that, that we were using, in this case. And, there
are hundreds of different cases where a wind turbine is gonna stop.
Every wind turbine is gonna, can have potentially hundreds of
different. Scenarios where it's gonna go on fault and require human
attention or attention from remote. So the first thing that we can,
provide is, immediate response time. I think all the investment
funds, IPPs or utilities, can now rely on a system instead of,
relying on people. They can rely on a system that is gonna do
effectively. The first phase actually is gonna do exactly the same.
With immediate response time, this is what our source is all about.
according to our experience, we have identified if you, could take
100% of the issues or incidents that can impact, the availability
of the assets. We have identified that at
least [00:08:00] 80% of those incidents can be managed
autonomously. Among that 80%, almost 75% of them can be resolved
autonomously, and the other 20%. It can be just dispatched to,
technicians on site so they can actually go on the turbine and fix
the issue on site. So this, this is, this is our goal. We can
multiply by five the operational capacity of our customers. but
along with that comes many other benefits. So the, main one, we
already tackling that, right? So immediate response time with that
comes, increase of productivity because we don't need operators to
be doing repetitive tasks anymore, so they can actually do other.
Added value activities, but immediate response also provide with an
increase of availability, which also translate into an increase of
production and again, translate into additional revenue. So
effectively what we're doing is to transform a traditionally
thought of, center of cost, like the, it is
a [00:09:00] control room. We can optimize the control
room to a point where it's no longer a center of cost. Actually an
opportunity to turn that into a center of revenue. We can actually
improve the operations. We can actually capture more revenue from
our assets. But we can only do that through automation.  Joel
Saxum: So when you're talking with operators, okay, so I'm,