About the project
West Durham Wind Farm comprises of 12 onshore wind turbines generating enough energy to power around 15,300 households per year. In December 2023 following a short period of four years away from the site, Natural Power was awarded the contract to provide asset management services after a competitive tendering process.
What were our aims for the project?
During the years where Natural Power had been away from the site, many issues hadn’t been correctly addressed, and several areas of the site were in a poor state of repair. The relationship between the turbine OEM and the incumbent site managers had also broken down. Leveraging its experience as site managers at the site for 10 years during its previous tenure, Natural Power was well placed to understand how the site should be operated, recognising that the site had potential to run far more effectively than it had been during its absence and identified key areas where it could deliver greater support from day one.
What was the outcome?
It became immediately obvious that it was going to require a lot of effort from our local team to bring the site back up to its previous high standards. We began by engaging with the client to understand the issues currently facing the site, then quickly rekindled our relationships with landowners, the turbine maintenance team and regular suppliers to begin working through the issues. By having an experienced local asset management team to draw from, we were able to dramatically improve response times while re-building trust with the wider operational team. Within days of returning to the site, our Senior Authorised Persons were busy applying high voltage isolations to allow the turbine maintenance team to make critical repairs to some of the turbines to allow them to go back into service.
During routine maintenance of the standby generator at site, the equipment failed catastrophically due to a lack of proper maintenance – exposing the site to a significant risk should the mains supply fail. Using contacts that we’d worked closely with at other sites, we introduced our client to a supplier who developed a bespoke solution to replace the failed equipment. In doing so, several long-standing issues were also addressed which meant the new equipment was more secure, would run for longer during power outages, had better theft prevention measures and would also alert the site management team when power had been lost, and the generator had started running. The client was so impressed, that they’re now looking to replace other generators in the fleet with a similar solution.
Natural Power’s state of the art ControlCentre also became an integral part of the delivery team, providing a safer, more effective and efficient work control service than was previously available – far less time was spent by the turbine maintenance team waiting for authority to work, which allowed them to spend more time fault finding and getting the turbines back into operation.
Another key aspect to the smooth running of the site is being able to take the various data streams produced by the turbines and analyse these effectively to understand current performance and predict future issues. The reports provided by Natural Power’s performance, reporting and optimisation (PRO) team ensure the asset management team is properly informed to propose future maintenance plans, target recurring issues and reduce turbine downtime.
Client Feedback
“Natural Power has returned to the ESB windfarm West Durham as Asset Manager, leading to improvements in the appearance and performance of the site. West Durham is owned by West Durham Wind Farm Limited, a subsidiary of ESB (ww.esb.ie) Ireland’s largest energy company. Natural Power’s Phil Martin and his Operation and Maintenance team have addressed local relationships and onsite issues efficiently. The communication between Natural Power and ESB has been effective. ESB anticipates working with Natural Power to continually improve and maintain West Durham wind farm to meet both parties' standards.”
Mark Jones, Wind Farm Manager, GB, ESB