Operational events

An operational event is anything that affects a site’s production: an outage, an alarm, a curtailment instruction or a planned maintenance event. Each event has a type, a description, the site it affects, a real start time and, once it is over, a real end time. Its status moves from open, to acknowledged when someone takes ownership, to resolved when the site has recovered.

The start and end times are the facts the rest of the business depends on. Lost production, availability figures and conversations with the grid operator all use them. An event cannot be acknowledged without its real start time, or resolved without its real end time, and the system never fills either in from the time the record was created.

The operations engineer logs and runs events; the site manager follows them and approves any maintenance work they lead to.

• Log fast, complete later. Open the event as soon as the alarm or outage is known, with its type and site. Details can follow.
• Acknowledge with the real start. Acknowledging records who owns the event and when it really began, and raises a maintenance task on the same site when a response is needed.
• Resolve on recovery. Resolve the event only when the site has recovered, with the real end time.

Agree the event types your team uses and what each one means; curtailment and outage are easy to mix up. Decide who may acknowledge and resolve events, and when an event needs a maintenance task. If alarms come from the turbine controller or SCADA system, agree which ones open events automatically and which stay in the control system. Prepare examples of a grid curtailment, a turbine fault, a planned maintenance window and a site-wide outage.

At 02:15 the grid operator curtails a site. The night operations engineer logs a curtailment event and acknowledges it with the instruction time as the start. No maintenance task is needed. When the curtailment is lifted at 06:40, the event is resolved with that end time. The morning shift sees a resolved event with a clear four-hour window, and the energy figures for those hours are explained before anyone asks.

The same night, a turbine on another site trips. That event is acknowledged with a maintenance task raised on the site. It stays acknowledged until the technician’s work is complete and the turbine is back, so it is still on the open events list in the morning.

• Open operational events — Events still open or acknowledged, by site and type.
• Event timeline — Events with their real start and end times.

• Event to resolution: The full path from logging an event to resolving it.

Plan the integrations if alarms come from a control system.