INGKA turns raw wind turbine data into real-time insight in minutes

Ingka Renewable Energy is a small-scale utility company facing the same central business challenge as its larger peers: How to instantly turn raw wind turbine data into meaningful business insight. Minds and Co.’s off-the-shelf Asset Insights Portal (AIP) cracked the nut. It speeds up data transmission from wind turbines to the cloud while harmonizing all data streams. This has reduced data latency from hours to minutes and provides Ingka Renewable Energy Investments with real-time insight into valuable asset data.

Ingka Renewable Energy Investments, a sister company of IKEA Retail and a subsidiary of Ingka Group, is committed to reducing the environmental impact of Ingka Group’s operations. It handles the whole value chain from establishment to development and operation of wind and solar farms, including renewable energy trading. Since 2020, the company has fully matched its renewable energy production with the consumption of all IKEA stores and the IKEA value chain. Ingka Renewable Energy Investments operates 45 wind farms across 14 countries and four solar farms in two countries and is as such, categorized as a small-scale utility company. So far, the company has invested EUR 4 billion in building sustainable energy sources, and EUR 7.5 billion has been earmarked for further growth by 2030.

The challenge of wind turbine data collection

Despite its size, Ingka Renewable Energy Investments faces the same significant challenge as many large players, namely, to push the raw data from the wind turbines into the cloud-based data center without latency. The data link between the wind turbines and the data center plays a crucial role as it paves the way for meaningful insight into energy production and the state of the individual windmills. “We need to be able to connect data from our existing wind turbines over their entire lifespan,” – explains Masoud Asgerpour, Portfolio Technology Manager at Ingka Renewable Energy Investments. “That’s why we turned to Minds and Co. who has helped us overcome the challenge of turning the wind turbine data into useful business insight. We now know the exact amount of electricity, we are producing so we can trade it instantly. Further, our service providers who manage and maintain our assets locally also have real-time access to data to be able to optimize asset performance.”

Off-the-shelf portal solution

The heart of the solution is Minds and Co. Asset Insights Portal – an off-the-shelf offering designed to retrieve, filter, and crunch wind turbine data. The solution has reduced data latency from hours to minutes, and data is automatically unified, thus applicable straight away. “With Asset Insights Portal, we have access to unfiltered real-time data, enabling insights through numerous dashboards and reports. All data is consolidated in one location, allowing analysis across various data types, including pricing, financial, grid, and safety data. Through real-time dashboards and reports generated via the portal, we know if our investments are performing optimally,” – explains Masoud Asgerpour.

Wind turbines provide immense amount of raw data that can be turned into actionable insights.

Previously, Ingka Renewable Energy Investments relied on a custom-made data integration solution. “Our focus is to maximize the business value of our data. With latency of several hours and inconsistent data, our former solution failed to meet our requirements. Furthermore, we had to maintain the solution ourselves. We strive not to be an IT company burdened with maintaining technology solutions. Hence, we chose Minds and Co. as our supplier and trusted advisor and adopted their off-the-shelf solution for enterprise-level operations, yet scaled to suit our needs,” – he explains.

Reliability and market expertise

So far, Ingka Renewable Energy Investments has deployed the Asset Insights Portal across six assets in Poland and one in Portugal. The reliability and market knowledge demonstrated by Minds and Co. has been instrumental in the successful implementation. “This solution has fully met our expectations and proved to be straightforward to implement. It has made a significant difference for our business collaborating with a reliable advisor like Minds and Co. who possesses deep insights into industrial digitalization as well as the challenges faced by renewable energy utilities. They take ownership of the solution and maintenance, simplifying operations for us, and the entire process from contract to operation and implementation has been smooth,” – says Masoud Asgerpour.