How ENERCON accelerates global wind-fleet service with Cumulocity

ENERCON faced a high number of incoming notifications and service orders from their turbine fleet. Complicated procedures including multiple system breaks made processing resource intensive and slow, directly hurting profits because of strict SLA penalties.

Because of the remote nature of its wind energy assets, fixing problems remotely is key for cost efficient operations and high availability. In fact, before using Cumulocity ENERCON spent 3,300,000 working hours for on-site service, 1,100,000 of those only for driving.

Because wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 to 30 years, many fundamentally different technology, communication, and data model stacks are present in the fleet at any given time. Harmonizing these was of paramount importance to ENERCON to enable unified monitoring using dashboards, data analytics across the field, and enabling unified automations for common procedures and errors.

With Cumulocity, ENERCON was able to productively onboard its first turbines within 3 months and scale out to the entire diverse fleet of 30,000 wind turbines within less than 1 year.

Building on this foundation, ENERCON has also implemented direct connectivity to wind energy converter (WEC) devices using thin-edge.io, enabling communication directly with turbine devices rather than routing communication through SCADA systems. This allows ENERCON to gather more detailed measurements at higher frequencies and support additional operations. Access to this richer operational data also creates a foundation for more advanced analytics and future AI integration.

ENERCON has also successfully onboarded sub-devices and sub-controllers using thin-edge.io, enabling direct communication with these components. This extends visibility beyond the main turbine controller, providing access to more granular operational data and supporting deeper diagnostics and monitoring across the fleet.

At this point, ENERCON had an excellent industrial IoT solution based on the Cumulocity platform for the use case of remote monitoring, failure analysis and remote repair. This also had a major impact on turbine availability and service efficiency. Remote service technicians stating that with Cumulocity they are 30% faster in detecting, diagnosing and fixing turbine issues.

While turbine data is crucial for ENERCON’s use cases, tight integration to existing backend systems significantly increased value to end users by making master data and expected turbine parameters as well as master data and contractual information available to provide a holistic and precise picture in a single pane of glass. This use case extension enabled better prioritization of service tickets and therefore directly positively impacted SLA adherence lowering penalty payments.

IT integration also enabled the next use case: parameter comparison. Turbines run using several hundreds to thousands of technical parameters that fine tune operations e.g. to adapt to local geographical or regulatory requirements. Comparing expected parameters from backend IT systems with as-is parameters from the turbine and getting alerted on deviations enabled the detection of undesirable parameter changes and thus optimize turbine performance which ENERCON financially profits from because of its ENERCON Partner Concept revenue sharing model.

Staying focused on the mission to “efficiently provide high technical availability for a large number of diverse turbines that are globally distributed”, ENERCON was challenged with an ever-growing fleet but a limited number of expert support engineers. This led to the introduction of streaming analytics as part of Cumulocity to aid error diagnostics and even automate the response to frequent low risk error states. This reduced the load for remote service engineers and is freeing up time to deal with more complex challenges and preventive actions.

Next, ENERCON started the next use cases based on the Cumulocity platform: Remote firmware and software updates. As updates up to this point were always applied logically by service technicians, running update campaigns was connected to high efforts and therefore avoided when possible, hurting innovation. Because of slow software lifecycles, turbines were not running the latest most optimal firmware and software. By using Cumulocity and its inbuilt firmware and software update features, ENERCON is now able to rollout software assets remotely increasing availability, remaining useful life, and energy generation efficiency.

The latest use case concerns automated alarm responses. When turbines face an issue they usually shut down normal operation and enter a safe mode. Before Cumulocity, these alerts entered the remote service queue and stayed there until a service technician was ready to pick them up. The technician then had to perform the manual reset and keep in mind how often the reset was executed to find repeated errors. Some of these alerts can be reset without further investigations if they don’t happen repeatedly. However, the manual approach implied that turbines remained non-operational for a longer period of time because of waiting time in the queue.

Now with Cumulocity, ENERCON is using Streaming Analytics to identify alerts in real time and categorise them. If an alarm is eligible for auto-reset and the alarm did not show up repeatedly, Cumulocity can automatically create the reset command and bring the turbine back in operation. These and similar automations can be created by domain experts of ENERCON themselves with the Analytics Builder no-code environment. By using real-time monitoring and automated responses, ENERCON was able to reduce downtimes significantly and increase the energy generation of its entire fleet.

Looking ahead, ENERCON is planning to integrate AI capabilities into its Control center application, building on the richer operational data made available through direct WEC and sub-controller connectivity. This planned integration will support rapid, AI-assisted analysis and troubleshooting, helping remote service teams investigate turbine issues more efficiently and identify potential causes faster. It offers significant potential for further efficiency gains, particularly as ENERCON continues to expand its global fleet while optimizing the use of specialist engineering resources.

ENERCON is also planning to automate service-order creation for technicians through its SAP interface. By connecting turbine monitoring and fault detection more closely with service management workflows, this planned capability will enable service orders to be generated automatically when intervention is required. This will reduce manual administrative effort, streamline service processes and help accelerate the transition from identifying an issue to initiating the appropriate service action.

Together, these developments demonstrate how ENERCON is continuing to expand its use of Cumulocity, moving from fleet-wide connectivity and remote monitoring towards increasingly intelligent, automated and data-driven service operations.

ENERCON has built all use cases on stock Cumulocity together with its own resources and Cumulocity Professional Services to customize and configure the platform for their company specific needs. With direct device connectivity already implemented and further AI and SAP-driven automation planned, ENERCON is well positioned to continue improving service efficiency, maximizing turbine availability and optimizing energy production across its global fleet.