• Unity Suite
  • Solutions
    Local SCADA, EMS & PPC

    Locally control and monitor your renewable assets in real time with Local SCADA, Local EMS, and Power Plant Controller (PPC) solutions.

    Central SCADA & EMS

    Central SCADA and Central EMS solutions to provide portfolio-level control and monitoring across assets.

    Asset Performance Management

    Optimize asset availability and yield at scale with sophisticated monitoring, analysis, and intuitive workflows.

    AI Insights

    Leverage AI-powered analysis and recommendations for solar, wind, storage, and hybrid assets.

    Field Service Management

    Optimize field service through work order management, personnel scheduling, inventory management and maintenance KPIs.

    Asset Oversight

    Portfolio-level view of assets to provide a comprehensive system of record and enable oversight of operations, service providers, and revenue.

    Invoice Management

    Centralized and automated management of invoices to enable cashflow management, streamlined reporting, and accurate financial management.

  • Resources
    Blog

    Read recent blog posts and thought leadership from our experts.

    Resource library

    Access our library of e-books, white papers, and product sheets from our experts.

    Customer stories

    Read success stories and testimonials from our customers.

  • About
    Meet our team

    Learn more about our vision and values and meet our executive leadership team.

    Careers

    Interested in joining our team? See open positions.

    Contact us

    Get in touch with the Power Factors team.

    Events

    Connect with us at industry events and join our upcoming webinars.

    Newsroom

    Check out Power Factors' latest news and press releases.

  • Get a demo

Qair simplifies asset management using Power Factors’ APM application on AWS

“Using [Power Factors' APM], we can produce as much power as we want and reduce the time spent in reporting or finding the cause of issues.” —Sébastien Lefevre, performance engineer, Qair
wind turbine in field
In this article

Renewable energy sources are the future of electrical power, and independent power producer Qair is helping realize this future by building offshore and onshore wind farms, photovoltaic plants, green hydrogen production units, and other renewable energy facilities around the world. As it expanded, the company realized it needed effective ways to monitor its energy production facilities, gather data, and compile reports.

To solve these challenges, Qair used an asset performance management software-as-a-service application for renewable energy assets, provided by Power Factors, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner. With Power Factors' asset performance management (APM)* application, Qair is monitoring and managing its assets worldwide using one centralized dashboard and improving problem-solving and reporting for its operational control centers.

Building the renewable energy future

Founded in 2017, Qair quickly grew, building its first gigawatt of energy production within 5 years. The company has continued growing rapidly ever since. With dozens of wind farms, photovoltaic plants, and other renewable energy facilities in 20 territories, Qair and Power Factors have set up a digital infrastructure that’s spread out widely across countries and geographies. Qair operates and reports on assets worldwide but also has local offices in some countries, such as Poland and Brazil. If there’s any issue—or event—that needs attention, the operational control centers are close to the wind farm or photovoltaic plant and ready to fix it.

It was challenging to monitor and manage these assets and local teams across multiple continents, and Qair relied on disparate data sources that were cumbersome to track and verify before deploying Power Factors' APM. Monitoring is important for energy producers to confirm that a power plant is running at its expected performance and reliability for its projected lifetime. Using Power Factors' APM, Qair managed to deploy its entire digital infrastructure worldwide, increasing operating efficiency and helping global engineering and asset management teams to collaborate with Qair’s local operations teams.

“Before deploying [Power Factors' APM], the data collection process from all our assets took a lot of time,” says Sébastien Lefevre, performance engineer at Qair. The company needed a more efficient way that would scale as it continued to expand its footprint.

the-solar-energy-B9437RD-1024x682

Improving visibility and streamlining reporting

To improve visibility, streamline reporting, and simplify its asset management, Qair partnered with Power Factors to implement their APM application as part of their digital infrastructure. The application gives Qair a single source of truth across all its disparate assets, making it simpler to monitor its infrastructure and respond quickly to events. The company pulls near-real-time data from all the critical pieces of equipment and control systems in each plant. Then, it monitors the performance of each component with ease to verify that it’s on track to meet expectations and identify potential problems for further investigation. Qair also customizes its dashboards to quickly view alarms and alert local teams, in accordance with its operating guidelines. Thus, Power Factors' APM empowers operational control center operators to verify that their facilities are operating safely while maximizing generation and reducing unnecessary downtime.

Reporting is greatly simplified too. Compared with Qair’s previous system, Power Factors' APM is saving 15 days on reporting each month because all the data is in one place. “Using [Power Factors' APM], we can produce as much power as we want and reduce the time spent in reporting or finding the cause of issues,” says Lefevre.

Power Factors' APM is also simplifying the way Qair manages the huge amount of data that it collects and stores. Qair tracks as many as 200 data points from each wind turbine and 100 for each inverter. It collects new data every 10 minutes for thousands of devices, obtaining tens of millions of data points per day. Because Power Factors' APM does the heavy lifting, storing and processing data using AWS services, Qair can track many key performance indicators and get a detailed view of its overall operating efficiency. The company tracks metrics such as the long-term wind statistics, possibility of wind speed reaching budget, production in megawatt hours, and performance of wind farms versus projections.

With a good sense of its infrastructure and its business through Power Factors' APM, Qair is positioned to continue growing. And the APM software running on AWS can scale seamlessly along with it. Qair is also speeding the onboarding of new power plants in a reliable and scalable way. “Many companies cannot stand up plants as fast as they want to,” says Jennifer Edwards, senior vice president of marketing at Power Factors. “[Power Factors' APM] removes a roadblock by providing scalability and velocity. We provide tools that support the entire lifecycle of a plant, from planning and operations to maintenance and market integration.”

shutterstock_1987073498-1024x557

Managing data efficiently and scaling using AWS

Power Factors’ industry expertise makes it a perfect fit for Qair’s needs. Qair stores all the data it collects on Power Factors' APM, which uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere.

And because its APM application uses Amazon S3, Power Factors can scale and remove repetitive, manual tasks so that it and its clients can focus on innovation. “The volume of data we handle is ever increasing,” says Edwards. “So, we needed a service that puts it into a processing engine and provides educated insights into what actions the client should take.” Improving analytics by cleaning up and augmenting data is a key benefit of using Amazon S3 as the foundation for Power Factors' APM. “We’re obsessive about the quality and cleanliness of the data that comes out,” says Edwards.

Ushering in the future of renewable energy

Qair is positioned to continue growing and expanding its assets around the world. And Power Factors will use its collaboration with Qair to further improve Power Factors' APM.

“We want to help reduce human errors, save time with automated calculations, and provide deeper analysis,” says Ricardo Navarro, customer success manager at Power Factors. As an AWS Partner and with the support of the AWS team, Power Factors continues to make improvements and build new solutions that bring value to its customers.

*Previously known as Greenbyte. To learn more about our rebranding and the unification of industry-leading solutions under the Unity Renewable Energy Management Suite (REMS), read our blog post highlighting these changes.

End-to-end solutions across the entire renewable asset lifecycle

We provide the world’s most comprehensive product suite — purpose-built for renewable energy assets.
W3 Energy Uses Power Factors' APM to Optimize 1.85 GW of Cold-Climate Wind Farms
May 25, 2022
W3 Energy Uses Power Factors' APM to Optimize 1.85 GW of Cold-Climate Wind Farms

W3 Energy uses Power Factors’ asset performance management (APM) application to...

Optimize assets, maximize revenue, and grow your portfolio with Unity

Ready to experience the future of renewable energy management?
Group 2277