Sweden’s Vattenfall Mobilizes Data to Power Its Sustainability Competitive Edge

Wind turbine maintenance engineers have to be expert climbers adept at using a rope and harness alongside their skills as mechanical engineers. Maintaining the growing fleet of wind turbines means scaling a 110-meter high structure, typically a 15-minute ladder climb, and then bilaying down the sides of a 70-meter blade to check its integrity. For wind farms in Sweden and other north European economies, there is the region's famously changeable weather and rough seas at offshore turbines to contend with. Among these outsized challenges is a need to capture information.

Sweden's major energy firm, Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest producers and retailers of electricity and heat. It has digitized its maintenance processes and worked closely with its engineers to ensure it was generating a technology outcome that would be used on-site. Digitization has also created new data insights for the business. 

Vattenfall has been generating electricity for over 100 years. The business began as a sustainable energy provider operating hydroelectric power stations before diversifying into other energy sources. In recent years, the business has expanded into markets beyond Sweden, such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and the Netherlands, and it has set itself the target of being a Net Zero carbon emissions contributor by 2040. 

"Sustainability is our competitive advantage, and we are constantly investing," said Jimmy Wahlfors, senior project leader at Vattenfall and who led the digitization of maintenance. 

At present, Vattenfall produces electricity from a wide variety of sources, including coal, nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, and natural gas. It operates over 1,300 wind turbines that generate 6.1 gigawatts of electricity across five countries in Europe. Whatever the energy source, the machinery that turns carbon-based fuels or natural energy into electricity requires detailed and regular maintenance.

Vattenfall set out to digitize its maintenance processes to deliver improvements to the engineers on-site and to the wider business. 

"We wanted to reduce the documentation; there was a lot before in PDFs, and we wanted the process to be paperless," Wahlfors said. 

However, there was a challenge for his technology team.

"We have onshore and offshore wind farms, and there is no connectivity on these wind farms," he said. 

Using Data Analytics to Better Manage Resources at the Edge

Yet Vattenfall wanted its engineers to connect directly to the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and provide data to the firm's Microsoft Azure data analytics platform in order to improve maintenance analysis. 

"We wanted to bring all the information out into the field onto a mobile device for the end user, the engineer," he said.

Further investigations revealed the engineers didn't like the SAP interface. The technology leader also learned a great deal about the unique environment in Vattenfall's engineers work. 

"When a wind farm is within international waters, you have to export everything that is taken out to the wind farm, whether it is a spare part or a screwdriver," he said. 

The export duties of the countries the business operates in had to be incorporated into the App his team developed. 

"That is important because you cannot just go back to the van; it is two hours away by boat," he said.

This understanding of the challenges was gathered through Wahlfors and his team working very closely with the maintenance engineers of Vattenfall. Wahlfors' technologists met with the engineers at 6 am in the morning before their shifts to gather requirements and understand their needs. Those sessions informed Vattenfall that the digitization process had to work both online and offline. 

"Offline working was an important factor as they are working offshore or at a hydroelectric plant they are working 50 meters below ground level," Wahlfors said.

Easy Access to Powerful Data From the Field 

Vattenfall was also looking to simplify its processes as part of the digitization. Simplification would lead to the engineers adopting the digitized processes, benefiting both themselves and the company. 

"It should be simple for the end user. They will not read any documentation; they want a self-explanatory App," said Wahlfors.

In looking to simplify, Vattenfall discovered complexities within its own organization that digitization could eradicate. 

"We had 25 wind farms working all in their own way. So we put them all in a room to agree on a harmonized way of working."

As a result, Vattenfall's engineers defined how they described assets and maintenance processes. 

"If a process is good for one site, it is probably good for all sites," said Wahlfors, explaining that almost 60% of the digitization project time was taken on ensuring the processes were well-defined and agreed on.

On the technology side, Wahlfors' team then ensured that all the suggested use cases for functionality within the App connected to a maintenance or business process.

Low Code technology from Neptune Software was used to develop the App. Two proof of concept projects (POC) were carried out in two different markets (Sweden and UK).

Once the POCs had proven the power of a maintenance App, Vattenfall rolled the technology out across its business. Maintenance engineers now have a single App for work orders, insights into how that day's repairs should be carried out, and the tools they will need for those jobs. Once the task is completed, they can report what has been done. The App will connect and upload the information to a Vattenfall cloud analytics platform when connectivity is restored. 

"Data has been easier to capture and is of better quality than it was before," Wahlfors said.

This has led to better planning of maintenance schedules in the engineering offices, and Vattenfall is also seeing improvements in on-boarding new engineering staff. 

"We have a harmonized process, and that has been a key factor," said Wahlfors.