Draft
Solution Delivery

How do you monitor 40,000 wind turbines from one screen?

The platform that's saving $3M in annual overhead.

GE Renewable Energy ran a global fleet of wind, hydro, and solar assets through a patchwork of legacy systems. We consolidated them into Lifespan, one platform now carrying more than 2,000 active users.

$3M+
Recaptured in overhead
every year
40,000+
Wind turbines under
management
2,000+
Active platform users
and growing
1
Stage 01

The Challenge

A global fleet of wind, hydro, and solar assets, managed through outdated systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

GE Renewable Energy manages the lifecycle of a global fleet of wind, hydro, and solar assets: monitoring the machines, analyzing them, and maintaining them. That work was running on multiple outdated legacy systems.

The disconnected set of tools and the inefficient processes around them were the real cost. Together they made managing a renewable asset harder than it needed to be.

What GE asked for was a single pane of glass: those functions consolidated into one experience, on an architecture robust enough to support massive technical and organizational complexity.

They asked for one more thing that had nothing to do with software. They wanted our startup delivery culture inside their organization, to help their own team members grow professionally.

2
Stage 02

The Team

We architected, managed, and implemented the front end and mid-tier of the platform, working inside GE's own development lifecycle rather than alongside it. That placement mattered: decisions about the architecture and decisions about how the organization shipped software were the same conversation.

Which is what “infusing a startup delivery culture” looks like in practice. We infused expert practitioner leadership into GE's software development lifecycle and DevOps processes, which is how the organization's overall developer experience and culture got modernized alongside the platform.

3
Stage 03

The Approach

A single pane of glass over a fleet this size cannot be designed once and then built. We shipped Lifespan incrementally over three years, starting from a front-end prototype and growing it into a performant, multi-language, themed production enterprise platform.

3.1

A multi-tenant platform

Lifespan is a modern, multi-tenant application, which is what lets one platform serve multiple customers at once. It grew into a multi-language, themed system over the same period, and multiple customers rely on it today.

3.2

Built for massive datasets

Lifespan visualizes massive datasets, so the front end is built on React and HighCharts with React Query managing data flow. Node.js on Lambda and DynamoDB sit behind it.

3.3

Grid-level permissions

Access control on a platform managing grid-connected assets is a product surface in its own right. Lifespan is capable of delivering complex, power-grid-level security permissions management.

3.4

DevOps as a first-class product

A robust DevOps suite designed to support two things at once: the experience of the developers using it, and the cost efficiency of the infrastructure underneath it.

4 Stage 04

The Product

Lifespan is the single pane of glass GE asked for: one multi-tenant application covering the mission-critical work of running a global renewable fleet. The surfaces operators live in every day:

01

Fleet visualization

Visualizing massive datasets, which is what makes a fleet of this size legible from a single application.

02

Damage inspection

Inspecting turbines for damage inside the same application operators already use to monitor them.

03

Maintenance cycles

Managing maintenance cycles for the fleet, one of the functions that used to live in a separate legacy system.

04

Business intelligence

Generating BI reports, alongside the other mission-critical functions the platform absorbed.

Product Walkthrough
01 Analyze
Analyze is one of Lifespan's modules, the fleet visualization surface. Damage inspection, maintenance cycles, and BI reporting sit alongside it in the same application, each one a legacy system the platform absorbed. What plays here: fleet performance by region against availability and capacity-factor targets, the sites dragging the numbers down, reliability losses broken out by event cause and read against wind conditions, then a drill all the way into a single turbine's open case and its sensor history.
5 Stage 05

The Results

GE Renewable Energy announced the release of Lifespan in August 2022. Multiple customers now run on the platform, with more than 2,000 active users and growing.

GE eliminated its reliance on the old infrastructure, recapturing over $3 million a year in overhead. The platform that replaced them had come the whole distance: a simple front-end prototype at the start, a performant, multi-language, themed production enterprise solution at the end.

$3M+
Annual overhead
recaptured
2,000+
Active users
and growing
40,000+
Wind turbines now
managed in one place

The savings came from retiring the old infrastructure. The durable outcome is that the fleet has one place to be understood from, and that multiple customers now rely on it.

“The Crux team has been a vital partner, a significant contributor to our successful product development, and supported our transformation to a world-class software team through continuous best practice sharing.”

Brian Case · CDO, GE Renewable Energy

The business hasn’t changed. What’s possible has.

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