Renewable energy

Wind is essential to a carbon-neutral energy supply. Wind farms present unique challenges when it comes to communications systems because they are often located in remote and harsh environments. Safety and operational continuity are essential.

The Nokia Wind Farm private wireless solution provides mission-critical reliability and low-latency broadband connectivity for connecting workers, sensors, cameras and turbines.

See how Nokia is working with wind farms to reach net zero.

The market volatility seen in fossil fuels over past decades makes for an unstable, difficult-to-plan and sometimes risky business environment.

Renewables offer the opportunity for oil and gas companies to pivot their business models to take advantage of resilient, stable, renewable resource supplies while helping the world address the climate crisis.

Sustainable solar and wind installations at mining sites help fuel fleets of electric mining vehicles and automated technologies. The mines perform better with new automation, and are safer for workers. They’re also better for the environment because they reduce the effects of diesel-fueled operations.

Renewable energy is also helping provide a path to economic stability throughout the world following the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many governments and regional authorities are offering funding and investment incentives for renewable energy development.

Investment in this area offers many areas hard hit by the pandemic the opportunity to increase economic development, create new jobs while and reduce their dependency on non-renewable energy sources.

An industrial-grade private wireless network can help you optimize every phase of wind or solar operations, from construction to maintenance. It can enhance worker safety, collaboration and productivity. And it can help you unlock the operational benefits of Industry 4.0 automation and predictive maintenance.

Utility-scale wind and solar farms are growing in size and increasingly located in remote locations that lack commercial mobile service and fixed communications to the nearest town. System construction is slower and maintenance costs are higher due to their geographical location. A larger size operation means any system downtime has a larger revenue impact.

High-performance networks and edge cloud solutions can overcome these challenges to help you:

• Accelerate construction, improve the flow of operational data and simplify the maintenance of your assets to minimize costs and enhance productivity.
• Improve worker safety, productivity and operational awareness by taking advantage of new use cases powered by sensors, enhanced high-definition video and ubiquitous network coverage.

Many wind and solar farms operate in remote areas beyond the reach of commercial mobile services. As a result, they rely on traditional communications solutions such as VHF radio and satellite, which have performance limitations. This can make it difficult to deploy promising use cases that require ultra-low latency or to cost-effectively keep pace with the growing data transfer requirements of workers, vessels and operations centers.

Nokia can help you address these challenges and succeed with your renewables strategy. Our 4.9G/LTE and 5G Industrial-grade Private Wireless solutions make your wind and solar farms safer for workers and optimize your operations. They also accelerate your Industry 4.0 journey by making it easier to digitalize and automate your construction, control and maintenance processes.

Push-to-talk and push-to-video communication services play an important role in connecting workers spread across industrial sites, in helicopters, on vessels, in maintenance vehicles and in the hub office.

These services enable collaboration between teams, remote assistance, communication with emergency services and communication with friends and family during long-term assignments. They can also provide the ability to share large data files such as construction blueprints, which is a time-saving necessity.

Our private wireless solutions provide the connectivity you need to enable real-time communications and monitoring of operations. This can help you improve situational awareness in work zones, simplify maintenance operations and get the most from your power generation assets.

By taking advantage of pervasive connectivity, low latency and high bandwidth to implement greater automation, you can ensure smooth and efficient operations.

Nokia worked with a partner to provide Belgian North Sea wind farms with a private wireless solution that would speed construction processes and enable seamless operation and maintenance. The private 4G/LTE solution ensures that the wind farm operators can reliably connect workers, vessels, sensors and operation centers.

Industry 4.0 applications such as IoT, predictive maintenance, drones and AR/VR applications all require lower latency, higher bandwidth and higher speeds.

To meet the data demands of Industry 4.0, remote wind farms and solar installations need to provide wireless connectivity at speeds far beyond what could have been imagined five years ago.

A 5G-ready private wireless solution can help you achieve operational excellency by using Industry 4.0 applications to:

• Get more value from your renewable energy investments
• Enhance remote worker safety and productivity
• Accelerate construction through enhanced team collaboration
• Optimize operations and cost through digitalization and IoT

Choose a 4G/5G private wireless approach that provides secure, reliable, ubiquitous connectivity across your wind and solar farm. With a Nokia Industrial-grade Private Wireless solution, you can:

• Extend ubiquitous mobile coverage across your-site during the construction phase
• Move beyond vSAT and TETRA-based local group communications to deploy richer, high-speed communication systems, even in remote or offshore sites
• Compensate for a lack of fixed communication to the nearest urban area

We see the potential of digital to create a more sustainable, productive and accessible world. In 2017, we were among the first 100 companies in the world to commit to reducing our emissions in line with the landmark Paris climate agreement. We are committed to helping our energy industry customers bring leading network and cloud technologies and solutions to their operations so they can more easily and effectively make the move to renewables to achieve their productivity, efficiency and revenue goals.