Renewable energy

Wind is essential to a carbon-neutral energy supply. Located in remote and often harsh environments, wind farms pose unique challenges to communications systems. 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 the past decades makes for an unstable, difficult to plan, and at times 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 - and at the same time help 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, but also are safer for workers and the environment, while reducing the effects of a diesel-fueled operation.

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, build new jobs while at the same time shifting their dependency on non-renewable energy sources.

Realize an optimized wind or solar operation during all phases – from construction to maintenance.  Enhance worker safety, collaboration, and productivity. Accelerate the benefits of Industry 4.0 automation and predictive maintenance for your operation.

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 help you:
 

• Accelerate construction, improve the flow of operational data and simplify maintenance of your assets to minimize costs and enhance productivity
• Take advantage of new use cases for your operation, including the addition of new sensors, enhanced high definition video for improved worker safety and site surveillance, and ubiquitous network coverage for remote worker connectivity.

Oftentimes a lack of available commercial mobile services in remote areas and performance limitations of available traditional communications solutions like VHF radio and satellite make it difficult to deploy promising new use cases requiring ultra-low latency or to cost-effectively keep pace with the greater data transfer requirements of connecting onsite workers, large 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 enable you to accelerate your Industry 4.0 strategy with digitalization and automation options that span from construction to control, to the maintenance of your operation.

Push-to-talk and push-to-video communication are important between workers spread throughout the site, in helicopters, on-board vessels, maintenance vehicles, and onshore or in the hub office during the construction phase.

This enables collaboration between teams, remote assistance, communication with emergency services and communication with friends and family during long-term assignments. The ability to share large data files such as construction blueprints is also a time-saving necessity.

With real-time communications and monitoring of operations, you can improve situational awareness of the work zones, improve overall maintenance operations and get the most out of your generation assets.

With the pervasive connectivity, low-latency, and bandwidth needed to implement more automated controls, your operation runs as efficiently and smoothly as possible.

Nokia worked with a partner to provide North Sea wind farms a private wireless solution to speed construction and enable seamless operation and maintenance.

Private 4G/LTE solution ensures that these North Sea wind farm operators can keep workers, vessels, sensors, and operation centers reliably connected.  Traditional technologies like satellite, 3G services, and VHF radio would not provide the needed performance.

Industry 4.0 trends will impact data transfer needs. IoT, predictive maintenance, drones, and AR/VR applications all require lower latency, higher bandwidth, and higher speeds. Being 5G-ready means that wind and solar farms will be prepared for their digital transformation.

Overall, wind farms and remote solar installations are faced with the challenge of providing wireless connectivity at speeds far beyond what could have been imagined five years ago, but how can this be done in a way that is both efficient and cost-effective?

Realize more from your renewable 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.

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

Nokia is committed to helping deliver a cleaner and more connected 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. For our energy customers, we are committed to bringing leading network and cloud technologies and solutions to their operations, helping them more easily and effectively make the move to renewables to achieve productivity, efficiency, and revenue goals.