GE Vernova Leads the Way in Asset Performance Management for Renewables

In the rapidly evolving landscape of renewable energy, effective asset performance management (APM) is crucial for maximizing efficiency, reliability, and profitability. The recent Verdantix study, "Smart Innovators: Asset Performance Management for Renewables and Battery Storage (2025)," underscores the importance of APM solutions in this sector. Among the 16 vendors evaluated, GE Vernova emerged with strong scores, highlighting its leadership and innovative approach to Asset Performance Management for renewables (Figure 1).

According to the study, the key drivers for Asset Performance Management software in the renewables sector include the need for visibility across diversified fleets, high asset availability, performance optimization, maintenance planning, integration challenges, and the management of aging assets. The study focuses on APM solutions for renewable energy sources including solar, wind, hydro, and battery energy storage systems (BESS).

The main challenges facing the renewable industry are:

1. Visibility Across Diversified Fleets

Organizations often operate diversified fleets across various technologies, generation types, and geographies. This diversification can lead to data silos, causing inefficiencies in asset operation and maintenance decision-making. A unified platform that centralizes asset information from various sources is essential to streamline operations and extract more value from a portfolio.

2. Asset Availability

Renewable projects operate on slim margins, so even minor outages significantly impact profitability. Therefore, maximizing asset availability protects revenues. Advanced monitoring and predictive tools are critical for ensuring uptime and maintaining profitability.

3. Performance Optimization

Asset health and equipment failures can lead to underperformance, directly harming revenues. Under power purchase agreements (PPAs), shortfalls in output can trigger penalties. Optimizing asset performance is essential not only for maximizing output but also for avoiding contractual and regulatory penalties.

4. Maintenance Planning

Due to the remote locations of many assets and limited operations and maintenance (O&M) budgets, it’s necessary to conduct maintenance planning to understand the financial implications of performing maintenance. Making informed decisions about how and when to perform maintenance is crucial, especially for offshore wind assets.

5. Integration Challenges

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) failures often stem from flaws in integration, assembly, construction, or operation. Integrating intermittent renewables into the grid creates structural challenges, requiring significant investment in storage capacity, demand-side management, or curtailment mechanisms. Addressing these integration issues is central to scaling renewables while maintaining grid reliability.

6. Aging Assets

The first generation of wind and solar farms are reaching their 20- to 25-year design life. Extending life cycles is now a pressing issue, as O&M needs have proved higher than originally expected. Asset managers must plan for refurbishment strategies and more intensive maintenance as these sites age.

Based on the challenges uncovered by the Verdantix study, here’s how GE Vernova’s Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions can effectively respond to each of these challenges:

1. Unified Asset Information Management

GE Vernova’s Asset Performance Management platform builds and maintains comprehensive asset databases and hierarchies, capturing the complexity of assets like wind turbines and solar inverters. This provides a unified view of diversified fleets, supporting robust data quality management and governance. With our SaaS platform, Essentials, renewable operators can ingest, organize, and action data from CMMS, historian, SCADA, DCS, IT systems, or other third-party solutions to deliver actionable insights in our Asset Performance Management applications. Essentials also enables renewable operators to extend data collection to images from fixed or mobile cameras.

2. Advanced Anomaly Detection and Failure Prediction

By leveraging statistical, physics-based, and AI/ML models, GE Vernova’s APM solutions predict potential failures such as turbine bearing wear, yaw misalignment, and battery cell degradation. These solutions identify early warning signals using historical and real-time operational data, enabling prescriptive maintenance and minimizing downtime to ensure asset availability. With both APM Health and APM SmartSignal, renewable operators can generate health indexes of assets, manage work orders, and identify emerging failures. With APM SmartSignal, operators can deploy digital twins on their most critical assets and develop near real-time monitoring and time-to-failure forecasting to stay ahead of emerging failures.

3. Reliability Analysis and Performance Optimization

GE Vernova employs techniques like Weibull analysis and fault tree analysis to identify critical failure modes across renewable components. This helps quantify risk, forecast remaining useful life (RUL), and inform maintenance strategies that balance preventative and predictive maintenance approaches. Combining near real-time operational and weather data with analytics, AI/ML, and digital twins, GE Vernova’s APM solutions track KPIs such as capacity factor, availability, and uptime, helping link production losses to root causes and support what-if simulations and forecasting. With APM Reliability, renewable operators can create production loss analysis trends, perform Monte Carlo simulations, generate root cause analysis trees, and ultimately help to better manage spares as part of performance optimization plans. Additionally, APM Strategy, APM Health, and SmartSignal also provide an increased level of performance fidelity to better manage asset performance.

4. Smart Maintenance Planning

Integration with computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems allows operators to identify critical failure modes, prioritize resources, and optimize spare parts usage. Prescriptive recommendations and condition monitoring, including computer vision for wind turbines and solar panels, help reduce downtime and bypass unnecessary replacements. Using APM Strategy, renewable operators can connect to EAM and push or pull maintenance tasks across systems. This connection allows users of Asset Performance Management to push work orders, such as spare part ordering, to supply chain teams. More so, GE Vernova enables prescriptive recommendations for maintenance via pre-built templates and continued advancements with AI.

5. Enhanced Integration and Grid Reliability

GE Vernova’s Asset Performance Management solutions facilitate the integration of variable renewables into the grid by providing advanced analytics and forecasting capabilities. This helps address structural challenges such as storing excess generation and managing demand-side resources, supporting grid reliability and stability.

6. Lifecycle Management for Aging Assets

GE Vernova’s Asset Performance Management capabilities connect asset data with financial, risk, and performance modeling to drive capital and operating expenditure (CAPEX and OPEX) decisions in renewable portfolios. This includes lifecycle cost analysis, risk and performance scoring, and operational impact assessments, helping asset managers plan for refurbishment strategies and more intensive maintenance as assets age.

GE Vernova continues to innovate its platform and applications to effectively scale out to accommodate the growing demands of renewable energy sources. This effort is particularly focused on using cloud and SaaS technologies. The emphasis on cloud-based solutions is driven by the need for remote monitoring capabilities, especially as 5G technology becomes more prevalent. This allows for near real-time data collection and analysis, crucial for the efficient management of geographically dispersed renewable assets.

A key aspect of GE Vernova’s strategy is the concept of composability and interoperability. Asset Performance Management solutions are designed to be modular and flexible, allowing for the integration of new use cases as they emerge. As such, the solutions remain relevant and effective in the face of technological advancements and changing market demands.

The Verdantix study also emphasizes Asset Performance Management vendors are increasingly incorporating AI capabilities, including robotics, to provide innovations in their APM solutions to address needs in the renewables sector. For example, GE Vernova's APM solutions use robotics to enhance autonomous inspection capabilities, which is particularly useful for renewable energy assets. This integration of robotics into the inspection process offers several key benefits, including increased efficiency, safety, and comprehensive data collection. Collaborations with AWS and ANYbotics allow for the deployment of legged robotics for enhanced inspections, providing deeper asset insights. GE Vernova is also continuing to develop natural language processing, GenAI, and AgenticAI capabilities to help renewable operators retain and scale knowledge.

The demand for sustainable energy sources is growing. As the renewable energy sector strives to meet it, GE Vernova is well-positioned to help support renewable asset reliability, optimal performance, and efficient operations. For more information on how GE Vernova can support your organization’s renewables performance, contact us today.