Enabling a Predictive Maintenance Revolution

Recently the term ‘predictive maintenance’ has received much attention across many industries. Perhaps this is due in part to the synergies with other rapidly developing areas of technology such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the internet of things, and big data analytics. It is certainly not all hype; in mostareas of industry where operational costs represent a significant proportion of the overall life-cycle cost of a product, a strong business case can be made for the introduction of predictive maintenance. Wind energy can certainly benefit from such innovations, and perhaps the potential reduction in the overall cost of energy would be the final push that is needed to bring the industry through grid parity and beyond. Although the use of condition monitoring in wind turbines is nothing new, recent technical innovations provide the framework that is needed for a more complete implementation of predictive maintenance.