From black box to measurable

A Belgian waste management and environmental services company with a growing renewable energies business unit set out to take control of its energy portfolio. That portfolio includes two wind turbines and a solar park across two sites. With Capture, they built a unified operational layer that connects all three assets, turns raw signals into actionable insight, and bridges a cloud optimisation platform directly to the physical turbine.

Three energy producing assets, communicating each in their own protocol, with no shared view. The first asset, a 2 MW wind turbine, communicated via Modbus TCP, the second asset, a 3 MW wind turbine, via OPC XML-DA, and the solar park ran independently. Each asset produced data, but nothing was connected into a common operational context.

A blind spot in grid interactions

The company had a specific concern around the regional grid operator, which can send limitation signals to renewable producers to prevent network overload. Every time the grid operator curtailed the larger turbine, the team had no visibility into how long the limitation lasted or how much energy was lost compared to what the turbine could theoretically have produced. The situation was, in their own words, a complete black box.

One data foundation for all assets

Capture connected and structured all raw data of the three energy assets into a single Unified Namespace, adding context. This Unified Namespace allows Capture to connect all data of multiple assets and to build a data structure according to the ISA-95 hierarchy.

Providing much more context now, that shared data model made dashboarding, calculations and further logic possible across assets that previously had nothing in common.

A set of Node-RED flows then turned raw signals into operational metrics: solar park availability (derived from inverter alarm states), daily energy totals for the wind turbines (calculated from instantaneous MW readings), and a curtailment loss tracker that compared actual turbine output to theoretical production potential based on live wind speed data. For the first time, the team could see exactly how much energy each curtailment period had cost them.

Dashboards built by the customer

After a single training session on querying in Capture, the team built and extended their own dashboards independently. Production comparisons between the two turbines, solar yield curves, site-level overviews, all built by the customer, on their own schedule, without coming back to the integrator.

Closing the loop with a cloud optimisation platform

The company also wanted to integrate a cloud platform that optimises wind turbine output based on imbalance market logic. The challenge: that platform is cloud-only and had no way to send setpoints to the physical turbine directly. Capture bridged that gap and allowed the platform to activate or de-activate the wind turbines in real time based on their logic.

A lightweight custom container runs at the edge, receiving production instructions from the optimisation platform and writing setpoints directly to the turbine using Capture components. The other container runs in Capture's cloud infrastructure. Rolling 24-hour forecasts were calculated and queued locally so the turbine could keep operating correctly even during connectivity outages. Protocol translation, data ingestion, monitoring and alerting all ran on standard Capture components. The custom development was minimal.

• One unified operational view across wind and solar assets, built on a shared Unified Namespace
• Curtailment losses quantified for the first time, turning a black box into a measurable operational metric
• Full dashboarding autonomy for the team after a single training session
• Closed-loop integration between the cloud optimisation platform and the physical turbine, with edge resilience during connectivity outages
• A scalable architecture ready to extend to new sites and assets without rebuilding the integration layer
• And most importantly, no further financial penalties based on the imbalance market

The renewable energy company is still growing. Because Capture abstracts protocol complexity behind a standard interface, adding a new turbine or solar park is a configuration task rather than a development project. The foundation is built. Scaling is a matter of connecting.