MAS suite · Renewables
Three routes through a mixed wind, solar and storage portfolio
IBM Maximo Renewables for IPPs, utilities and commercial owners: SCADA, datalogger and OEM portal ingest, loss attributed at string and rack level, and every job raised in Maximo Manage alongside the rest of the estate.
Three routes
Three ways operators run a mixed portfolio, and the signal for each
Two of the three are right for particular portfolios. The middle route is the one chosen most often, so it is named here rather than left out of a meeting.
Stay in the OEM portals
You are on it if
One manufacturer, one technology, under about ten sites, and the work already happens where it is found.
The wrong move here
Buying a portfolio platform for a portfolio that does not exist yet. Each portal is genuinely good at the hardware it shipped with.
Build a reporting layer over portal exports
You are on it if
A data team owns the pipelines permanently, and the requirement really does stop at a dashboard.
The wrong move here
Encoding an availability definition in pipeline code instead of agreeing it with the contract owners. This route produces a list of known faults and no route to a work order.
Run the portfolio on Maximo Renewables, with work landing in Manage
Route three under regulation →You are on it if
More than one OEM, more than one technology, and an intention that a shortfall becomes a planned job with parts, labour and cost against an asset record.
The wrong move here
Switching the analytics on before the asset structure and the expectation basis are agreed. Every finding then needs a translation step, and the work returns to the portal it came from inside a quarter.
Route three
Two ways in, decided by the operating model rather than by fleet size
Add Renewables as the analytics layer above Manage
Work, parts and cost stay in Maximo Manage. The shorter path, because the work-routing half is solved before the project starts.
- First phase
- Identifier alignment
- Onboarding
- 6 to 10 weeks per technology
- Where work lands
- Existing Manage work types
Start with Renewables, add Manage when work management matures
Renewables runs first as a focused tool for the performance manager. Manage follows when the organisation is ready to plan, dispatch and cost what the analytics find.
- First phase
- Site and asset onboarding
- Onboarding
- 8 to 14 weeks, first fleet
- Where work lands
- Portal or CMMS until Manage arrives
What route three buys
Time to attribute a shortfall to a cause
Three weeks
An analyst reconciling portal exports site by site
Same morning
Loss buckets at string, module and rack level
A loss that takes three weeks to explain has already been paid for, and an OEM warranty window can close inside it.
Illustrative of engagements we run. What changes is attribution speed, not generation.
The data it needs
The asset classes onboarded, and what each record has to evidence
Asset classes in the structure
- Wind
- Turbine, gearbox, generator, converter, blade set, met mast
- Solar
- Inverter, combiner, string, module, tracker
- Storage
- BESS container, rack, module, power conversion system
- Shared site
- Substation, transformer, export cable, site metering
What the record is asked to evidence
- O&M contract
- Contractual availability, on the one definition the contract is written against
- Ofgem REGO
- Metered export by settlement period, traceable to the meter
- Grid connection
- Curtailment separated from technical loss, against the constraint instruction
- OEM warranty
- Serial-level fault evidence, assembled inside the claim window
Reporting obligations differ by market and by contract. These four are the ones we are most often asked to evidence on United Kingdom portfolios.
Scope and boundaries
Where Renewables depends on what you already hold
The OEM relationship stays as the contract sets it
Warranty claims and OEM engineering support continue exactly as written. Renewables gives you serial-level evidence to carry into those conversations rather than authority over them.
Work management belongs in Manage
Planning, dispatch, parts and cost live in Maximo Manage. Without that backbone the analytics produce findings faster than the organisation can act on them.
Identifiers have to agree before attribution means anything
Where the OEM, the O&M contract and Maximo disagree about what a string or a rack is called, attribution becomes a translation exercise. That mapping is phase one.
Curtailment is a loss you cannot maintain away
Grid constraint and market curtailment are separated from technical loss and labelled as what they are. Removing them is outside the scope of any asset management platform.
IBM Maximo Renewables, frequently asked questions
- What is IBM Maximo Renewables?
- The asset performance application in the MAS suite built for wind, solar and battery energy storage. It ingests SCADA, datalogger and OEM portal data, applies loss bucketing, string analysis, weak module detection and BESS cycle health, and raises the resulting work in Maximo Manage. IBM's product page carries the official capability list.
- What data sources does it ingest?
- In production we ingest from SCADA over OPC UA, OPC DA and Modbus, from dataloggers over FTP and SFTP as CSV, JSON, XML or HDF5, and from OEM portals by API where one is published. The connectivity layer underneath is the same one described on IoT and OT connectivity.
- What has to be true before onboarding starts?
- One asset structure with identifiers that the O&M contract, the OEM and Maximo all recognise, and one agreed definition of availability and expected generation. Agreeing those is the first phase of every onboarding we run, and it is contractual work rather than technical work.
- Where does Maximo Manage fit if we run Renewables?
- Manage stays the system of record for assets, work and inventory. Renewables sits above it on performance and availability, and a finding becomes a work order in Manage that follows the same planning, dispatch and close-out as the substation and the conventional plant.
- We also run conventional generation and a regulated network.
- How a renewables portfolio sits beside conventional generation, and how the capital and reporting conversation works under regulation, is on Renewables for utilities. This page stays on the capability, the onboarding prerequisites and where the work lands.
Related capabilities
Related capabilities and components
Bring the asset lists for two sites from different OEMs.
We map the identifier problem first, because that is what decides whether an onboarding runs to weeks or to months, then set out the ingest and analytics work on a real fleet and which of the two entry paths above fits your operating model.
Bring this to the first call
- Two sites from different manufacturers, with their asset lists
- The availability definition your O&M contracts are written against
- How data leaves each site today: SCADA, datalogger, portal API or export
- Whether Maximo Manage is already the work system for these sites
- The last shortfall that took more than a week to attribute