The growing global energy and environmental challenges are impacting many industries, with the renewable energy sector at the forefront. Wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams: each infrastructure within the sector requires specific maintenance.
Maintenance of energy infrastructures: a strict regulatory framework to comply with
Whereas it was once possible for renewable energy companies to handle their industrial maintenance in an unstructured way, it is now strictly regulated. Industry players are facing a rigorous regulatory framework that must ensure the safety of both installations and their environment.
The main regulatory challenges include detailed monitoring of all interventions, meticulous application of procedures, adequate training for technicians, and quality control at every stage. The goal of these requirements: to prevent any environmental risk and to ensure the safety of maintenance teams who often work in extreme conditions.
For companies in the sector, compliance is therefore a key objective to achieve. However, this must not come at the expense of economic performance. Just as important is the continuity of activity, which can sometimes be difficult to manage in international or multi-site companies. Business profiles in the energy sector are very varied, but common challenges remain.
The equipment of the sector and types of maintenance to consider
The infrastructures linked to renewable energies vary as does their maintenance. Among the industry’s most common equipment, we mention:
- Onshore and offshore wind farms
- Photovoltaic power stations,
- Hydroelectric dams
- Biofuel production units
Faced with a wide variety of assets, companies in the sector must primarily respond to the following challenges:
- Extreme environmental conditions: The unique location of renewable energy infrastructures poses a challenge for industrial maintenance. Technicians often have to operate under difficult conditions, so they must have comprehensive information both before and during their interventions.
- Accessibility and remoteness of sites: Many energy installations are located in remote or inaccessible areas, thus the transport of teams and spare parts to the site must be planned.
- Adherence to safety and environmental standards: A rigorous regulatory framework governs the maintenance of energy infrastructures. Requirements for traceability, technician training, and quality procedures and controls are particularly high.
- Multiplicity and complexity of equipment: Renewable energy parks incorporate a wide range of high-tech pieces of equipment with complex compositions and operating modes. Their maintenance requires multidisciplinary expertise.
- Safety of maintenance workers: Working on these energy infrastructures located in remote or hostile areas poses significant risks to the safety of technicians. It is crucial to ensure their protection throughout the interventions.
In light of these challenges, many players in the renewable energies prefer to opt for a preventive and/or predictive maintenance approach. These two types of maintenance allow for anticipating and scheduling interventions to limit any unpredictability.
Preventive maintenance is based on a program of scheduled actions at regular intervals on critical equipment, according to predefined indicators (usage time, cycles, etc.).
Predictive maintenance leverages IoT data and artificial intelligence to analyze the real-time condition of components and predict their potential failures.
Far from being antagonistic, these two industrial maintenance approaches are often complementary. Each of them allows for the optimization of intervention scheduling with great precision. They do, however, require total visibility over assets and significant analytical power, which can only be achieved through specialized software. Hence, the adoption of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) solution appears to be indispensable.
CMMS and technological innovations, imperatives for maintenance in renewables
The CMMS software is an essential tool for the energy sector companies. As a true field assistant, CMMS software centralizes and exploits the company’s maintenance data in the service of preventive and predictive maintenance programs, all within the principles of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), an approach that aims to optimize equipment efficiency and reduce losses.
Its features allow the renewable energy industry to ensure: 
- A centralized and detailed management of the entire technical park, regardless of its geographical remoteness or the number of equipment concerned
- Real-time monitoring of spare parts inventories, which accelerates replenishment at isolated sites
- A precise planning of interventions based on multiple criteria (regulations, favorable weather windows, availability of trained technicians…) to optimize operations
- Automation of complex processes such as the scheduling of periodic preventive tasks, a key point to reduce the risk of human error
- The generation of detailed reports on interventions, downtime, costs, and other parameters that enable constant compliance with regulations
- Interfacing with third-party systems (IoT, predictive AI, augmented reality) which more easily feed the CMMS with accurate maintenance data
And this topic of new technologies is also important. Recent devices, in fact, open up new perspectives, particularly for predictive maintenance:
- Internet of Things (IoT) enables continuous monitoring of equipment operation through a network of connected sensors.
- Artificial intelligence provides in-depth analysis of operational data to refine predictions of failure.
- Augmented reality offers visual guidance to technicians and facilitates complex interventions.
- Mobile devices equipped with dedicated apps allow real-time access to information from the field.
When combined with powerful maintenance software, these innovations contribute to a more holistic and intelligent industrial maintenance. This is an indispensable benefit for companies in the renewable energy sector, always in search of precision and safety.
Case study: Waga Energy at the forefront with DIMO Maint MX
The CMMS solution DIMO Maint MX met the productivity expectations of Waga Energy, a biomethane production company. With a continuous production rhythm and significant needs for remote maintenance management, Waga Energy quickly needed to move beyond Excel management and chose to deploy the CMMS solution Maint MX to centralize the data of its equipment and ensure its near-uninterrupted availability.
The choice of DIMO was both a response to the need for a single repository and the necessity to compartmentalize data by site. With CMMS, Waga Energy aimed to achieve optimal visibility and greater capacity for anticipation.
After a gradual deployment across all sites, the results have been significant, both technically and organizationally as well as financially. Thanks to APIs and web services of Maint MX, Waga Energy can now automate many processes to move towards maintenance 4.0.
Towards an ever smarter and more proactive maintenance
As technologies advance rapidly, the entire array of maintenance challenges in renewable energies is constantly transforming. To ensure the performance and availability of their infrastructures over time, sector players have no choice but to deploy a real industrial maintenance strategy. From automating repetitive tasks to understanding the details of interventions, CMMS is one of the keys to confidently envisioning future maintenance.
