Wind Farm Setup

This guide walks you through setting up a complete wind farm monitoring deployment on the Fleetera platform. By the end, you will have a site with turbine assets, an OPC UA connector, variable bindings, and an edge gateway streaming telemetry data.

Prerequisites

• A Fleetera account with an organization set up
• A Linux server at the wind farm site (see hardware requirements)
• An OPC UA server running on or accessible from the site (for example, a SCADA system or turbine controller)
• The OPC UA server endpoint URL (for example, opc.tcp://192.168.1.100:4840/UA/WindFarm)

Step 1 — Create the site

1. Navigate to Sites in the sidebar and click + New Site
2. Fill in the form:
   • Name — for example, "Wind Farm Alpha"
   • Site Category — select Renewable Energy Site
   • Status — set to Active
   • Location — use the map picker to set the GPS coordinates of the farm
   • Commissioned Date — enter the date the farm became operational
3. Click Create Site

The alias is auto-generated from the name (for example, wind-farm-alpha). You can customize it before saving.

Step 2 — Create a turbine template

Templates define a reusable structure for your assets. For a wind farm, you typically create one template for the turbine model at the site.

1. Navigate to Templates and click + New Template
2. Enter a name (for example, "Vestas V136 4.2 MW") and select an asset category that matches your turbine type
3. Click Create

Add child templates for subsystems

Wind turbines have multiple subsystems. Add child templates to represent them:

1. Open the template and go to the Hierarchy tab
2. Add child templates such as:
   • Generator
   • Gearbox
   • Rotor and Blade System
   • Yaw System
   • Ambient System (for meteorological data)
   • Grid Connection

Each child template can hold its own set of variables.

Add variables from the library

The platform includes a built-in IEC 61400 wind variable library with standard wind turbine variables.

1. Open the turbine template (or a child template like Generator)
2. Go to the Variables tab
3. Click Add from Library
4. Browse the wind turbine library and select relevant variables:
   • Turbine level — active power, reactive power, availability status, turbine state
   • Generator — generator speed, generator temperature, winding temperatures
   • Rotor — rotor speed, blade pitch angles
   • Ambient — wind speed, wind direction, ambient temperature, air pressure
   • Grid — grid frequency, grid voltage, power factor
5. Click Add Selected

You can also add custom variables manually if your turbine exposes non-standard data points.

Step 3 — Instantiate turbine assets

With the template defined, create the actual turbine assets for your site.

1. Open your site and go to the Asset Hierarchy tab
2. Click Instantiate from Template
3. Select your turbine template
4. Choose Bulk instantiation and enter the number of turbines (for example, 10)
5. Set the naming pattern:
   • Base name — for example, "Turbine"
   • Start number — for example, 1
   • Zero padding — for example, 3 (produces Turbine-001, Turbine-002, etc.)
6. Click Create

The platform creates each turbine with its full subsystem hierarchy and all variables from the template.

Step 4 — Create an OPC UA connector

1. Go to the Connectors tab on your site
2. Click + New Connector
3. Fill in the form:
   • Asset — select the asset to attach the connector to (a turbine or leave as "None" for a site-level connector, depending on your SCADA topology)
   • Protocol — select OPC UA
   • Name — for example, "Wind Farm SCADA"
   • Endpoint — enter the OPC UA server URL (for example, opc.tcp://192.168.1.100:4840/UA/WindFarm)
4. Configure the OPC UA settings:
   • Security Policy — match your server's configuration (for example, Basic256Sha256)
   • Security Mode — match your server (for example, SignAndEncrypt)
   • Authentication — select the method your server requires (Anonymous, Username/Password, or Certificate)
5. Click Create Connector

Step 5 — Deploy the edge gateway

OPC UA discovery runs on the edge gateway, so deploy it before populating the connector's data model.

1. Go to the Edge Gateway tab on your site
2. Click + Add Deployment
3. Fill in the form:
   • Name — for example, "Wind Farm Alpha Gateway"
   • Architecture — select the architecture of your Linux server (amd64 or arm64)
   • Utility services — enable Edge Crawler so OPC UA discovery is available out of the box
4. Click Create
5. Copy the installation command from the dialog

On the Linux server at the site:

curl -sSL https://api.fleetera.ai/api/edge/install.sh | \
  sudo bash -s -- --api-url https://api.fleetera.ai --token <TOKEN>

The script installs Docker and the VPN client, downloads the edge configuration, and starts all services. After a few minutes, the deployment status in the platform changes to Online.

Step 6 — Discover the OPC UA data model

Now that the edge gateway is online, populate the connector's data model by running a discovery crawl from the edge.

1. Open the connector detail page and go to the Data Model tab
2. The readiness banner at the top should be green — "Edge ready · crawler <version>"
3. Click Start Discovery
4. Wait for the crawl to complete — a new data model version is created automatically
5. Browse the tree to understand the server's structure and identify the data points for each turbine (for example, ns=2;s=Turbine001.ActivePower)

If the banner shows an amber, blue, or red state instead, follow the prompt — the banner walks you through whichever prerequisite is missing (no deployment, edge still booting, edge offline, or discovery utility disabled).

Step 7 — Bind variables to OPC UA nodes

Now link your template variables to the actual OPC UA nodes.

Option A — Match suggestions (recommended)

If the OPC UA node names are similar to your variable names:

1. Open the connector detail page and go to the Bindings tab
2. Click Run Matching to start the AI matching process
3. Wait for the matching job to complete (progress is shown in an inline banner)
4. Review the inline suggestions next to each variable — each shows a confidence badge (green for high, yellow for medium, gray for low)
5. Click Accept All High-Confidence to create bindings for all strong matches at once
6. Review and accept or reject remaining medium and low confidence suggestions individually

Option B — Manual binding

For individual variables or when match suggestions do not cover all cases:

1. Click the binding action on a variable
2. Choose the connector
3. Enter the OPC UA node ID (for example, ns=2;s=Turbine001.ActivePower)
4. Set the sampling interval and any transform parameters (scale, offset, deadband)
5. Save the binding

Repeat the binding process for each turbine.

Step 8 — Publish and verify

1. On the deployment detail page, check the Config Sync Status card
2. If auto-publish is enabled, the configuration is already published
3. If not, click Publish Config
4. Wait for the sync status to change from Pending → Applying → In Sync
5. Verify that the edge device services are receiving data by checking the deployment heartbeats and service statuses

Data now flows from the OPC UA server through the edge gateway to the Fleetera cloud.

What's next

• Monitor the deployment health on the deployment detail page
• Add more turbines or subsystem variables as needed
• Define KPIs for computed metrics (for example, capacity factor), or install a ready-made KPI pack
• Create additional connectors if your site has multiple OPC UA servers