Case study · Energy and utilities · Siemens Gamesa
Renewable energy: connecting wind farms
How Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy connects remote wind turbine sites to its control centre with Instaroute.
The challenge
Wind turbines stand where the wind is, not where fibre is. Sites are remote, often without a wired link, and every turbine controller still has to report to the control centre and be reachable for maintenance.
A lost link means lost visibility of generation and a slower response to faults, and a truck roll to a remote site for anything that cannot be done remotely.
How Nexapp solved it
Cellular links that stay up
Instaroute 4G and 5G routers with dual-SIM failover between two operators, and outdoor IP65 units that mount where the signal is best.
Speaks the site's protocols
RS232/RS485 serial ports, a Modbus RTU/ASCII/TCP gateway, DNP3, IEC 60870-5-101/104 and MQTT, so existing controllers and meters connect without replacement.
One console for every site
Instaroute SDWAN Lite 2.0 shows the health, signal and data usage of every router, with zero-touch set-up and canary firmware rollout, wave by wave.
Vendor access without open ports
Engineers and equipment vendors connect through the InstaAccess client (ZTNA, SSL VPN or IPsec VPN) to only the equipment they support, and every session is logged.
What changed
- Turbine data reaches the control centre over managed 4G links, with a second operator ready if the first fails.
- Engineers diagnose many faults remotely, without driving to site.
- Every router is visible and updatable from one console.
Planning something similar?
A Nexapp engineer can walk you through this deployment and map it to your own sites, links and devices.
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