Airtime: VSAT
SCADASat and Garth Wind Shetland Islands Scotland
The Challenge
Garth Wind Shetland Islands Scotland is a community windfarm project based in Yell – one of the picturesque northerly islands of Shetland. The wind turbines, managed by a board of trustees based in the local community, farm the wind to generate power, which in turn they sell back to the grid.
The islands are exposed to some of the UK’s harshest weather conditions, making power outages a likely and unavoidable risk. One such outage resulted in more than £17,000 in lost renewable energy for Garth Wind. At the time, there was no preventative maintenance schedule or service agreement in place, meaning reactive call-outs, engineer mobilisation, and travel to the remote site all incurred significant additional costs.
The SCADASat Solution
Recognizing that prevention is more effective than reactive repairs, Ground Control worked closely with the Garth Wind trustees to enhance their SCADASat service. The solution included a long-term servicing agreement with two planned preventative maintenance (PPM) inspections each year. During these visits, specialist engineers carry out comprehensive health checks, identify potential issues, and replace components showing signs of wear before they can cause failures during severe weather.
By committing to a longer-term service contract, the Garth Wind trustees also secured a 5% discount on Ground Control’s services, reducing ongoing maintenance costs while improving system resilience.
Ground Control’s SCADASat solution provides the critical communications link between the wind farm and the grid connection point, delivering real-time operational data that enables effective monitoring and control of power generation. This connectivity is essential for preventing power saturation at the point of connection, maximising energy output, and ensuring the most efficient use of the electricity generated.
As a community-owned renewable energy project, all profits generated by Garth Wind are reinvested into local initiatives across the Shetland Islands. In recent years, funding has supported projects including COVID-19 response efforts and improvements to the islands’ harbour infrastructure, delivering lasting benefits to the local community.
What’s Next?
There’s further scope of opportunity for not only Garth Winds, but similar community Scottish Highlands projects.
A probable model is that of a hire scheme. Ground Control can deliver all the necessary hardware and robust maintenance, while communities reap the financial rewards of hiring out the hub to anchor services.
Further, Ground Control’s global reach to even the world’s most remote data, presents an opportunity to permanently install infrastructure for this group of Islands to harness the power from much needed renewable energy sources.
Would you like to know more?
Ground Control works extensively with Utilities, Oil and Gas, and Renewables companies, supporting both their SCADA / telemetry requirements, and also connecting their workforce with both safety and communication applications.
Call us, or complete the form, if you’d like to discuss your project; we have many years of experience and will be very happy to share what we’ve learned with you.
Toughsat on Tour
The Ground Control Toughsat kept the Rogue Team in touch and online as they toured the United States on and off the grid.
Rogue’s requirements for passengers and visitors to upload video, surf the web, and stay connected prompted a dual installation of Ground Control’s Toughsat satellite antennas. The two systems may be used independently and allow users wireless access in and outside of the luxury coach. Ground Control’s enterprise-grade iDirect bandwidth gives users an abundance of upload and download capacity. With a touch of a button, the Toughsat is online and creating a wireless environment, even in extreme conditions.
Rogue Picture’s luxury coach was on the road in support of the movie, ‘Fighting’. While at premiers and promotions, guests of Rogue enjoyed the amenities of the spacious vehicle while they uploaded movie reactions to YouTube, checked email, and surfed the web.
Ground Control’s iDirect service offers second to none performance on a shared system. By utilizing iDirect’s patented Deterministic Time Division Multiple Access (D-TDMA) and Multi Frequency Time Division Multiple Access (MF-TDMA) technologies, automated systems at the NOC ensure that traffic is balanced across all the carriers on the satellite.
Not only does this increase the amount of bandwidth on the network, it also increases the security of the network since your traffic is changing its frequency up to eight times per second. iDirect’s payload efficiency is approximately 98% – significantly higher than the 60% efficiency offered by similar solutions. And less overhead on the satellite means more bandwidth for you.
Ubiquitous, reliable connectivity
At Ground Control we believe meaningful innovation can only occur in partnership with our customers. While we manufacture our own modems, transceivers and antennas, we also work with other leading OEMs to ensure that we can pair our customers with precisely the right product for their needs.
To find out more about how we could help with your project, complete our contact form – we’d love to hear from you.