After a long three weeks on vacation, I’m back to blogging.  I had originally planned to put up a post or two while on holidays, but alas the WordPress interface over a dial-up connection required more patience than I possess.  Instead I spent my time with family and friends, camping and relaxing on the gorgeous beaches of eastern Prince Edward Island.  You can see why I was in no hurry to get back on the grid.  Speaking of grids, from the front steps of my childhood home you can see the wind turbines of the Eastern Kings Wind Farm. The wind farm consists of 10 Vestas V-90 turbines with a capacity of three megawatts each for a total capacity of 30 megawatts.  Every time I drove by them on my way to the beach, I couldn’t help but think of OPC and some of the projects connecting Vestas wind farms.

I got thinking even more about OPC when I read an article that the 10 turbines are now again all operational, after 6 of them had to be taken off-line for repairs to the gearboxes. The article said the faults where noticed during routine inspections.  Considering the gearboxes are 50 m in the air, in a windy location, I couldn’t help but wonder if they ever considered using on-line maintenance monitoring using OPC.  OPC Server connection to the turbine, OPC Data buffer and HDA transport tool to the maintenance application and you’re there. Maybe they could have caught the problem earlier?

Seems everywhere I go, I’m reminded of OPC.  Anyway, it’s time to shake the sand from my shoes and get back to business. There has been some interesting things happening with OPC over the last couple of weeks.  More to come on those topics soon.