Expands operations reliability and growth in renewable energy
Innergex Renewable Energy is a developer, owner and operator of run-of-river hydroelectric facilities, wind energy, and solar farms in North America, France and South America. While many of the firm's operational assets are located in its home province of Québec, it has expanded into Ontario, British Columbia, and Idaho, as well as Chile and France
The company has four reportable segments: hydroelectric production, wind power production, solar power production, and site development and management. Through its energy production segments it sells electricity produced from its hydroelectric facilities, wind farms, and solar farms in operation to publicly owned entities. Through its site development and management segment, the company develops energy production facilities to the operational stage and then manages them.
Goals
- Move from independently managed systems to a standardized and consolidated operations control software strategy.
- Enable better data analysis and reporting across operations to reduce communication silos.
- Create a system to ensure data integrity and archiving. Eliminate data loss.
Challenges
- Mixed set of software vendors and vintages deployed across sites and functions resulting in upkeep complexity.
- Remote site communication connections were not 100% reliable.
- Limited visibility into the cause of performance impacts.
Solutions
- AVEVA™ PI System
- AVEVA™ Operations Control
- AVEVA™ Insight
Results
- Increased software system reliability and usage consistency, reducing upkeep effort between connected operations and staff.
- Tiered data architecture gives huge improvement in data redundancy, integrity and archival accessibility for analysis and reporting.
- Implemented critical tools for troubleshooting the process in real time by operations staff at every plant (Tier-1) as well as by the managers from the corporate office (Tier-2) all using the same data.
“AVEVA Operations Control is providing significant flexibility to deploy what we need and makes it easy to upgrade to remain current. It consequently allows us to make accurate business cases when it’s time to invest on process equipment.”
François Riopel, Automation Specialist, INNERGEX