Lesson Learned through Operation and Maintenance of Distribution Electric Grid Connected Utility-Scale Wind Energy Generation Projects

Utility-scale distributed energy resources are gaining more and more traction with commercial and industrial customer driven interest. RE100 is a group of companies that made corporate commitments to pursue $100 \%$ renewable energy goals. This group is currently 442 companies strong, many of them Fortune-1000 companies. A few of the Nebraskan public power districts and municipal utilities implemented utility-scale wind, solar, and storage projects to assist their current and future customers. This article is a research analysis on some such pioneering wind projects, and the associated operation and maintenance lessons learned over more than 9 years of field operations. The real-world data collected by these distribution grid level Wind SCADA systems is used to evaluate the monthly capacity factors, availability factors, wind speeds, down times, maintenance times, weather outages etc. Finally, the carbon offset value created by these projects is also quantified.