ABO Wind

ABO Wind is a worldwide project developer for renewable energies. Since 1996 the company has developed and sold wind energy, solar and biogas projects with over 3,000 megawatts of capacity. ABO Wind's experts prepare expert reports, handle the approval process, financing, and take care of construction and grid connection. In addition, ABO Wind handles the long-term operational management and offers service products such as maintenance, gear endoscopy, inspections and repairs as well as technical reports.

"At ABO Wind customers get more than just conventional operational management", Andreas Fischer, technical director of wind farm management at ABO Wind, emphasizes. "We offer many additional solutions to optimize operational processes".

ABO Wind's service portfolio also includes ABO Lock, a modern and remotely controllable intelligent access system, which is specially tailored to decentralized wind farms.

Reference customers for the ABO Lock access system include Grünwerke GmbH (since 2018) and, as of 2020, SOLIX Energie aus Bürgerhand Rheinhessen EG . For customers, the focus is primarily on increasing the security of the plant and the responsibility as plant operator. The 1NCE IoT Lifetime Flat provides the necessary secure connection.

Background

ABO Lock enables operators and managers to gain more control over the accesses and components in a plant. They can control and monitor who can operate in which area of a plant.   In this way, the plant responsibility according to technical guideline TR 7 A1 can be fulfilled and the plant operators always have documentation at hand. The concept behind it: Access authorizations to the wind turbine are managed centrally using easy-to-use software.

Service teams, surveyors or park attendants unlock the plant using an access code or smartphone app and, depending on their qualifications, have access to the components that have been activated for them, such as the medium-voltage switchgear, transformer station or lift.

This enables operators to monitor and control access to their systems and the secured components in a targeted manner. It is also possible to restrict access for a limited period or to open it quickly from the control room in case of an emergency. Conventional keys, which can be lost and do not allow seamless access control, are largely superfluous.

Challenge

Modern wind farms usually have their own grid connection for operational monitoring and plant control. However, the ABO Lock access control system works independently of this.

It is therefore ideally suited as a retrofit solution for older turbines and saves installation costs that would be incurred through integration into the existing network. Access is controlled by the central key box, which is connected to the door lock, a PIN pad and an LTE router.

All opening procedures are stored here and can be called up and monitored centrally: Who has access to the system, for how long, when and with what authorization level. With complete logging, operators can fulfil their system responsibilities without additional manual effort.

Remote maintenance of the locking system such as firmware updates is also possible. In addition, the operating personnel can also open the doors conveniently via app with their smartphones.

1NCE Solution

ABO Wind was looking for a simple M2M SIM solution that could meet various requirements: Instead of complicated framework agreements, the 1NCE IoT Lifetime Flat provides a perfect pre-paid model for only $14 for 10 years.   This means no further dependencies and an easy to calculate cost model per installation. In addition to that, since many wind farms are also installed in border regions where the foreign mobile signal might be stronger, cross-border roaming is also important.

Here the 1NCE IoT Lifetime Flat offers a seamless transition without the danger of disconnection in case of permanent roaming or additional roaming fees. Finally, the OpenVPN solution, which is already integrated in the 1NCE IoT Lifetime Flat, saves additional administration effort for the secure transmission of all data.