In summer of 2017 Spica retrofitted the third whole wind farm in Germany with their control system. The wind farm was privately owned by Jesper Thorsen, CEO of Wincon A/S, one of the leading operators and service providers in Denmark, that already had good experience with the Spica Retrofit Control System.

 

The wind turbines where taking into operation in 1998 and thus they had obsolete control systems from Vest Control, the SCADA-monitoring and communication was poor and there were no possible remote functions. All this led to a low availability and production. Furthermore, the Modem had to be restarted twice every day to provide reliable data.

 

Because of the former project with a Micon M1800 wind turbine in Denmark and the two Wind World W5200 projects in Germany for Energiekontor and wpd Windmanager, Wincon saw the Spica Retrofit Controller as a natural solution to their problems in wind farm Cramonshagen.

 

Because of the big experience with the Vest Control system, the retrofitting of the 6 wind turbine controllers took only 6 days, which prevented much down time. Spica installed a new fiber optic connection between the wind turbines and the transformer station to establish an immediate connection to the extensive data collection that the customer always receives with Spica Smart Park.

 

With the installation of the Spica Retrofit Controller the customer gets several functions for lifetime extension. A soft braking system is coded into the software and a soft start-up module for softer grid connection is built into the hardware to protect the drive train by reducing the load on the gearbox.

The controller is designed with standard & high-quality components from Bachmann electronics gmbh.

 

Original installation	Spica Retrofit Controller