Schneider Electric is extending digital twins from the design and engineering stage into the operations and maintenance stage of renewable energy installations.

The company made the announcement at this month’s Innovation Summit World Tour, Schneider Electric’s annual customer and partner event.

The new offering, called EcoStruxure for Renewables, is designed for companies developing renewables projects, including hybrid projects that mix solar, wind and storage. It is also suitable for industrial businesses that are seeking to decarbonise their operations by integrating hybrid power sources such as on-site solar plus traditional gensets.

“With the energy crisis driving an accelerated energy transition, grids of the future are evolving to better accommodate more renewable energy,” said Frederic Godemel, executive vice president at Schneider Electric. “That means making sure solar and wind farm operations can keep feeding the grid with green electricity and ensuring that industries can feed their operations with sustainable energy sources. Our latest digital-twin technology in EcoStruxure for Renewables gives companies the digital continuity to make it work.”

Existing digital twins are used to manage design and simulation during the project engineering phase. EcoStruxure for Renewables now lets renewable energy asset managers leverage the same data and digital twins to operate their renewable installations. It facilitates everything from the supervision of a single renewable farm hyper vision decreasing mean time to repair (MTTR) and increasing mean time between failure (MTBF).

For total operational awareness of renewable generation fleets, the digital twins of EcoStruxure for Renewables can further feed actionable, real-time data to the Aveva Unified Operations Center for Renewables.

This end-to-end approach enables agile and responsive management of wind and solar operations by making the complete enterprise visible. It creates value by combining broad insights into geographically dispersed sites with the ability to drill-down on specific performance KPIs and see real-time operations.