EDP Renewables (North America) has agreed to enter into a contract with LexX Technologies to run a pilot of its intelligent maintenance assistant at its Twin Groves wind turbine plant, Illinois.
This pilot agreement comes on the heels of LexX being awarded the global winner of EDP Starter, the company’s accelerator program, awarded at Web Summit Lisbon late 2019.
EDP, who is the second-largest sustainable energy generator worldwide, have a major focus on innovation across its business. With LexX, EDP Renewables are looking to improve overall wind turbine availability through improvements in its operations and maintenance practices. In particular, EDP Renewables are seeking to establish through the pilot that LexX will enable:
Technicians to get it right the first time and continue to get it right. Consolidating best practices, improving maintenance procedures across the organisation and minimising unnecessary use of parts.
An improved workforce capacity. With less technician time spent on the phone, searching for, retrieving and classifying work orders EDP Renewables will increase the capacity of the existing workforce to improve turbine availability.
Scaling of the technical workforce. Less time is needed to train and job-shadow technicians to high competency levels, increasing the scalability and flexibility of the existing workforce.
Enhanced forecasting accuracy. Improved data and configuration management ensures the integrity and currency of the assets, components, spares and resources related to maintenance. This allows the organisation to optimise its inventory through reliable long term-planning and forecasting.
Our AI-based system, LexX, has been designed specifically for maintenance technicians, acting as a virtual assistant for technicians to interact in their Natural Language to troubleshoot maintenance and repair issues. They are then visually guided through to an inspection, repair, service, assembly and resolution to faults, defects and routine maintenance. These are just some the capabilities that LexX will be providing to technicians at Twin Groves.
EDP Renewables has wind farms across the Americas and Europe and have drafted plans to deploy the LexX solution across their 11.2 GW, and growing, international operating portfolio after successfully trialing the platform in North America.
“This form of open innovation and sharing is one of EDP’s priorities which, more than a decade ago, we’d recognized as the revolution that the energy sector would undergo,” says Carla Pimenta, EDP Group Innovation Head of Startup Engagement, “We identified a distinct need to invest in and bring up the best in startups and SMEs worldwide to lead in this revolution. We’re excited by our engagement with LexX and look forward to delivering their innovative capabilities across our O&M portfolio.”
Hersh Sahai, Cofounder of LexX, also said of the pilot, “We were very pleased to be awarded as the global winner of EDP Starter last year and have been working closely with EDP Renewables to use our platform to assist in their wind farm operations. Now we’ll be working closely with their technicians to make sure that the deployed solution truly delivers a substantive and additive user experience to their daily maintenance operations.’’