Frequently asked questions

Answers for the teams evaluating an assessment and for those running an operating deployment.

Search the answers or browse by category: getting started, data requirements, findings and alerts, integration into the maintenance process, and commercial terms. Questions about how the platform works are answered on how it works; questions about what each part of the platform does are answered under product; questions about a term are answered in the glossary. Anything specific to a fleet reaches the team directly.

Getting started

How does an engagement begin?

With an export of existing SCADA history for the sites in scope. The data is validated for coverage and quality, the models are fitted per turbine, and the first findings are returned ranked by the annual energy and revenue at stake. The quickstart in the documentation sets out each stage.

How long does a first assessment take?

Days rather than a deployment project, because the analysis runs on history that already exists. The elapsed time is usually governed by how quickly the export can be produced and transferred, not by the modeling.

Does anything have to be installed on site?

No. There is no hardware, no change to the control system, and no software installed in the operational technology environment. The platform reads exported operational data and returns findings.

Who needs to be involved from our side?

Someone who can produce the SCADA export, and someone who knows the fleet well enough to explain events in the record. The second is more valuable than it appears: a machine that was down for a retrofit is an anomaly to the model and an obvious fact to the person who scheduled it.

Data requirements

Which channels are required?

Active power, wind speed and direction, nacelle position, and pitch angle where recorded, plus the alarm and status log. Temperature and vibration channels are used where a turbine model exposes them and are what allow a finding to name a component rather than a deficit.

How much history do you need?

Twelve months is the working minimum and twenty-four months is preferred, because two winters separate a seasonal pattern from a developing fault in a way that one year cannot.

Should we clean the data before sending it?

No. Pre-cleaning is the most common cause of a weak assessment. Gaps, outliers, and curtailed periods are informative, and filtering them removes exactly the evidence the models use to separate a fault from a period of low wind resource.

What if some turbines have incomplete data?

They are reported as out of scope with the reason stated, rather than modeled at low confidence and presented alongside the rest. The validation report lists every exclusion before any modeling runs.

Do you work with mixed-manufacturer fleets?

Yes, and that is often the reason to adopt the platform. Expectations are fitted per turbine from each machine's own history, so a portfolio running several manufacturers and rotor diameters is assessed on one scale instead of through separate portals.

Findings and alerts

What does a finding contain?

The turbine and site, the period over which the deviation was observed, the class of loss, the evidence behind the classification, a confidence level, and the annual energy and revenue at stake. Every field is documented in the reading a finding reference.

How do I know a finding is correct?

Check it against what the operations team already knows. Findings that correspond to events already understood are the control for the rest of the list, and the evidence on each finding is published precisely so that an engineer can disagree with it.

Why did a finding appear on a turbine with no alarms?

That is the class of loss the platform exists to identify. Underperformance and alignment losses do not raise faults and do not affect availability, which is why they persist through conventional reporting.

How are false positives handled?

Confidence is exposed rather than hidden behind a fixed threshold, because the right threshold depends on the cost of acting. Findings closed out as incorrect are fed back, which is one of the reasons close-out matters operationally.

Working with findings

How do findings reach our maintenance process?

Three operator decisions govern it: the confidence level at which a finding raises a work order, who receives findings for each site, and how a finding is closed out once the intervention is complete. We help set all three during onboarding.

Why does closing out a finding matter?

Close-out records what intervention was performed and when, which turns the estimated value on a finding into a measured recovery over the following quarters. It is the step most often skipped and the one that compounds.

Can findings be reviewed with your team?

Yes. Support is staffed by engineers who work on the modeling, so a question about a result is discussed with someone who can explain the expectation behind it rather than escalated.

Does the platform replace inspection?

No. A finding identifies a deviation and its probable cause from operational data. It narrows where to look and establishes what looking is worth; it does not diagnose a component the way a physical inspection does.

Commercial and data handling

How is the platform priced?

Per turbine under management, on one axis, with no per-seat component. Assessments, continuous monitoring, and portfolio engagements are set out on the pricing page and quoted directly.

Can we evaluate before committing?

Yes. An assessment runs on your own historical data over a period whose outcome your team already knows, which is the only form of evaluation that proves anything about a specific fleet.

What happens to our operational data?

It is processed to serve your fleet. It is not sold, not pooled with other operators' data, and not used to train models serving anyone else. The data processing addendum is available for review before any transfer.

How long is data retained?

For the term of the agreement, so that expectations remain fitted on the fullest history available. Retention and deletion terms are set in the commercial agreement rather than left to a policy page.

Answered by the engineers who build the models.

Technical support is not a commercial tier of the product. Every account reaches engineers who work on the modeling rather than a scripted layer in front of them, because most questions about a finding are questions about the model that produced it: why this turbine, why this period, and why the evidence points at that component.

That is possible because the answer is usually already contained in the finding. Every alert carries the turbine identifier, the window, the signals that moved, and the expectation the machine was measured against, which makes a question about a result an inspection rather than an investigation.

What we ask in return is specificity. A site, a turbine identifier, and the period under review turn a support thread into a measurement. The glossary defines the vocabulary precisely, and how it works sets out the stages a finding passes through before it reaches you.

Four kinds of question, four places they are answered.

Most of what an operations team needs is already documented. This is where each kind of question is resolved fastest, in the order we would work through them.

How the platform works

How it works covers the stages from a SCADA export to a ranked finding, and the product overview covers what each part of the platform is looking for.

What a term means

The glossary defines the vocabulary this industry uses loosely, from capacity factor to yaw misalignment.

Why a finding says what it says

Questions about a specific result are questions about the model. Every finding carries its evidence, and the team will work through it with you.

Anything specific to your fleet

Onboarding a new site, commercial terms, and anything carrying a turbine identifier reach the team through contact.

What onboarding involves.

Onboarding is deliberately small, because the data already exists. The operator provides SCADA history for the sites in scope, OpenTurbine validates coverage and signal quality, and the first assessment runs on that history. Nothing is installed at the turbine and nothing changes in the control system.

The work that matters is agreeing what a finding means operationally: which confidence threshold raises a work order, who receives it, and how a finding is closed out once the intervention is complete. Fleets that skip this stage receive accurate findings that nobody actions, which presents as a model problem and is not one.

Moving from an assessment to continuous monitoring is a data connection rather than a rebuild. The models, the findings, and the fields are identical in both, which is what allows the assessment to predict what monitoring will produce.

Not answered here?

Anything carrying a site or a turbine identifier reaches the engineering team directly.

Contact the team