Customer Success Story

AES Wind Generation
Palm Springs, CAAES Wind Generation at theMountain View IV Wind Energy Project

An AES Turbine Screen, Built with GENESIS64

About AES Wind Generation
AES is an international power company located in North
Palm Springs, California and specializes in power generation, utilities and renewable energy. Dedicated toproviding cleaner and more sustainable ways to create
energy, AES invests in hydro, wind, solar, biomass generation and carbon offsets as alternatives to traditional
fossil fuels. AES Wind Generation, a special division ofAES, explores worldwide opportunities for wind energy
creation based on more than 25 years experience in thepower industry. They currently manage over 1,700 megawatts of wind capacity across the US, China, and Europe.
In 2010, AES Wind Generation initialized a 49 turbine(one megawatt each) wind farm as part of the Mountain
View IV Wind Energy Project and began searching for adependable SCADA and alarming system to operate it.

ICONICS Software DeployedWith the 49 wind turbines (built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) running, generating a megawatt of energy each,AES understood that they needed a robust system that
could perform calculations in real time from both user
input and data coming from the field. The Energy industry is primarily concerned with the status of the units as
an availability measurement, as well as validating theamount of energy produced versus the amount of energy
predicted by the manufacturer’s published power curve.
After an exhaustive search for which software was thebest fit, AES found in ICONICS GENESIS64™ and Hyper Historian™ a complete SCADA and Data Historiansolution that would connect via open standard protocols(including OPC) and provide both instantaneous and aggregate data for monitoring and reporting.
Project Summary
Wind farms, in general, can be time-consuming to implement due to the high amount of repetition involved
with each unit having identical inputs and outputs. The
global aliasing functions in ICONICS software gave
AES a great advantage in quickly implementing the49 turbines, once the first turbine was configured. AES
brought all the data sources into OPC via various interfaces, such as the Modbus/TCP so the SCADA suite hasa standard source of data. They also commissioned an
OPC server to be built by Matrikon to convert the MHI
CNET protocol into OPC. AES wanted something thatwas not directly programmed to the turbine protocol,
so the turbine data process and the monitoring process
could be changed out independently.
Additionally, the HMI interface needed to be delivered
without software installation on the client computers andwithout authorization issues outside of the portal itself. In

Power & Energy Management, Utilities

AES Wind Generation
other words, AES would not need to share the NT authorization outside of their domain, but control users could
still access the control functions of the SCADA system.
AES also wanted a system that would fit into a virtual
machine environment to facilitate backup and recovery
should they experience a hardware or software failure.
The graphics tools available as a Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) client were ahead of all of the competition and gave AES the ability to publish a best-in-classinterface from an aesthetic perspective.
ICONICS’ Hyper Historian maintains all data from theturbines at the wind farm as well as overall production
data and substation parameters. The ICONICS Universal
Data Management, part of GENESIS64 Platform Ser-An Overview, with Alarming, of the Wind Farm

Palm Springs, CA
was able to quickly and cheaply bring the new indication
into the monitoring system without additional costs.
Conclusion
Using approximately 30 points per turbine (plus 300 digital points), and another 100 points from the substation(plus 100 digital alarms and statuses), Hyper Historianindirectly attaches to:••••

CNET interface of the MHI MRC (turbine controller)
CR1000 data logger for meteorological data
DVAR system (Modbus)
SEL 3530 (real time automation controller functioning as a data concentrator)

Display of all Data Acquired by a Met Tower

vices, is used to create numerous calculations that feed ICONICS’ system gives AES the ability to centrally
manage a data delivery system that is available to all usHyper Historian and other applications.
ers via a Web interface, without installing software on
the client computer. It also allows them to keep the sysBenefits of the System
AES was looking to provide monitoring and control to tem completely in-house, with no future dependency on
operators from both AES and MHI, as well as supply ag- third-party development or integrators. AES expects thisgregate data for their reporting systems. Using ICONICS, to provide considerable cost savings as they accommoAES met these goals and kept development costs to a date changes in both turbine controller logic and shifting
minimum as they didn’t have to use a third party when- operating systems and hardware available in the future.
ever a change was required. For example, they added an With this in mind, Greg Howard, AES’ Systems Integraindication for low wind speeds at the turbine controller tion Manager, said, “We are pleased with ICONICS’ abiland integrated this into the SCADA system shortly after ity to provide a solution that can be built, maintained andthe park was put online. This would have been a substan- controlled without paying consultants at every turn.”
tial cost if they had gone back to a developer, but AES©2012 ICONICS, Inc. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. AnalytiX
and its respective components are registered trademarks of ICONICS, Inc. GENESIS64, Hyper Historian, AnalytiX, GENESIS32, Pocket GENESIS, BizViz and their respectivemodules, OPC-To-The-Core, and Visualize Your Enterprise are trademarks of ICONICS Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of theirrespective owners.
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Power & Energy Management, Utilities

ICONICS Customer Success Story