Problem

Tilt Renewables was managing multiple disparate software solutions, Excel-based workflows, and site-specific tools that demanded significant resources to maintain. They conceived TEMPO as a way to replace this complexity with a single platform accessible to operators, asset managers, maintenance teams, business managers, and third-party contractors.

Tilt came to Cromarty Automation requesting assistance to consolidate their technology stack down to one or two software solutions because the tedium of running a large technology stack was costing too large an amount of resources.

After using Ignition as a five-minute MMS dispatch system (via Cromarty’s 8Legs product), Tilt saw the power in Ignition to cut down this technology stack.

At each site, Tilt needed to monitor:

• Turbine metrics such as:
• Active power
• Reactive power
• Wind speed
• Power setpoints
• Nacelle status
• Production metrics
• Yaw
• Hydraulics.
• Combining turbines into collector groups/DUIDs (Dispatchable Units) to summarize information such as:
• Power generation
• Elements generating
• Lost power
• Possible power
• Total production
• Combining DUIDs into site metrics
• Rolling up all site metrics into a portfolio

This presented a large list of complex challenges from how to gather the data, all the way up to streamlining the enterprise system for users.

Solution

Cromarty began development with a navigation framework. The core concept was built around a matrix of views derived from a vertical list of modules or sub-modules (the TEMPO menu) and a horizontal list of asset components (asset breadcrumb).

The module list dynamically generates based on the selected site and security level of the authenticated user, allowing for site-specific configurations. Modules can also be designated as global, meaning their associated views are displayed regardless of the selected asset in the breadcrumb.

The navigation framework is powered by a single dynamic view that receives module and asset parameters directly from the URL. Tilt can pass additional parameters as a JSON-encoded string, enabling deeper customization of each view. This URL-driven design ensures that every view in TEMPO can be uniquely identified and accessed via its URL, making it easy for users to share views by simply copying the link.

The intention of TEMPO is to provide a “single pane of glass” for operators, asset managers, maintenance teams, business managers, third-party contractors, and OEMs. Essentially, anyone that needs information on a Tilt Renewables’ site will be able to use TEMPO.

The platform aggregates data from individual generation elements (turbines, inverters, etc.) up through collector groups, sites, and the full portfolio. Cromarty developed high-level “modules” including SCADA, performance & analytics, outages, and administration:

SCADA

The SCADA module replicates the on-prem SCADA screens at each site in Perspective. This includes views for Substation SLDs, site and DUID overviews, and detailed wind turbine P&IDs. As Tilt adds more sites to TEMPO, the site SCADA screens will be duplicated in Perspective via the tags collected from the site using the redundant Ignition Edge deployed to the site. Each screen is optimized for different screen sizes, and allows seamless transitions between different turbines, DUIDs, and sites inside a module selection.

Performance & Analytics SCADA

The performance & analytics module replicates and improves Tilt’s previous third-party analytics software stack, providing asset performance and analytics insights. The module’s sole purpose is to collate data from multiple sites, DUIDs, and turbines to generate KPI metrics such as power export, downtime, capacity and production loss. Ignition uses transaction groups to store derived data in wide tables from tags and static sources provided by Tilt. The section is split into the monitor, analyze, tags, and alarming. Drilling down to a specific turbine, the IEC state for each IEC state level is shown with a historic of IEC states

Outages

The outages module replaces an Excel spreadsheet that was previously managed by a single person. This Excel spreadsheet contained information about current and scheduled outages at all Tilt Renewables sites. TEMPO now allows for multiple people to create outages, update existing outages with full outage versioning, view and filter outage timelines based on site, impact, time, etc. Additionally, Cromarty added further functionality to send outage notifications to predefined or custom stakeholders based on the site or requester OEM. Cromarty plans to add further functionality to provide details about the cost of the scheduled outage, both at a financial and available capacity cost.

Administration

Cromarty developed various Perspective pages to provide tools to administer TEMPO directly from the UI. This includes view and page management, site, DUID and turbine configurations, outage module definitions, etc.

Each module supplies Tilt with critical site information that both helps to manage as well as streamline the software stack into one Ignition-based Unified Namespace. Tilt asset managers use TEMPO to manage, track, and report events to upper management without the need to traverse multiple Excel files, and other software packages.

Technical Highlights

• The system’s URL-driven navigation framework allows every view to be uniquely addressable and easily shared, including a custom Grafana-style time selector.
• The system integrates with Azure Databricks via private endpoint networking. Databricks acts as a source of time-series data for long term archiving in addition to providing:
• A SQL client for long-term analytics
• Integration for the Databricks App into Perspective UI via iFrame.
• Leveraging a Hub & Spoke architecture, the system comprises three redundant Ignition Gateways and nine redundant IoT Edges, collecting over 600,000 tags across the whole portfolio.

Result

TEMPO has materially reduced the operational overhead of managing Tilt's growing renewable energy portfolio, giving cross-functional teams a single source of truth for site performance, outage management, and reporting. Centralizing both real-time and historical analytical data has opened the possibilities for new functionality and insights. The solution has also provided a clear roadmap for further capability as Tilt brings new sites and asset types online.

Project Team

This project has been and continues to be developed as a very close collaboration between Tilt Renewables and Cromarty Automation.

• Daniel Vlahovic (Tilt Renewables): Project manager, infrastructure (Azure and site) administrator, end user, developer, client (end user) liaison.
• Ilia Eligulachvili (Tilt Renewables): Infrastructure (Azure and site) administrator, edge integration developer, end user.
• Taylor Edgerton (Cromarty Automation): Ignition developer, Docker and AI engineer.
• Nathan de Hoog (Cromarty Automation): Ignition developer, Cromarty engineering manager.
• Jackson Bledsoe (Cromarty Automation): Ignition developer
• Jack Lim (Cromarty Automation): Ignition developer, QA

Project Scope

• Start Date: November 2023

• Deploy Date: April 2024 (ongoing)

• Tags: 620,000 across 23 tag providers, with 9 remote edge deployments

• Screens: 1 page supporting 152 views. Some views change data sources via URL parameters; for example, a turbine view can display data for any turbine across all sites (480 turbines total).

• Clients: 2-10

• Alarms: ~550

• Devices: Redundant Edge IoT (9), OPC UA, OPC DA, Modbus TCP, DNP3

• Architectures: Hub & Spoke, Redundant Edge IoT, Redundant Backend IO Gateways, Redundant Frontend UI Gateways, Dev Gateway

• Databases: 17 with multiple schemas: Azure SaaS PostgreSQL, Azure SaaS SQL Server, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Databricks

• Historical data logged: ~270k historized tags across 9+ sites, growing with new sites. For each DUID (8), a block transaction group stores 1-min averages for 8 tags per turbine (389) in custom PostgreSQL tables; hourly roll-ups run every 24 hours.

• Number of people on team: 6