We continue in presenting you distributors of ComAp products. This time, we are proud to present you distributor of ComAp products responsible for the Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea: Greenbird Technology.

Mr. Nigel Watson, Managing Director of Greenbird Technology answered some of our questions:

What is your main field of work?
We are the Australian and Pacific Region Distributor for ComAp to OEM’s and resellers. We are primarily involved in distribution and support of our customers, but are also involved in design and commissioning of more complex power generation projects.

How long have you been representing ComAp?
Greenbird has been representing ComAp since 2000. This year is our tenth anniversary of our association with ComAp!

What do you like about ComAp products?
The great capability and flexibility of ComAp‘s products are some of the key benefits - we know that no matter how complex the application there will be a ComAp solution for our customer that will exceed their expectations.

What was your most challenging project realized with ComAp products?
Many of our projects are quite challenging but not because of technical issues but due to the remoteness and harsh environments where the project is located. It is not uncommon for work to be carried out where the temperature in the shade is around 50ºC, and often higher in a shipping container. ComAp controllers work fine at 70ºC – but we don‘t!

One of our most interesting applications recently has been on the island of Vanuatu. All over the world there is a move towards using wind and solar power but the variability for these sources can cause major problems in smaller systems. Vanuatu has a power demand of less than 10MW most of the time and therefore the 2.8MW wind farm is a considerable portion of this load.

Greenbird installed a system using IG-NT gen-set controllers and an InteliMains NT which delivers a constant power level to the grid as a combination of wind + high speed generators. The sets operate in a variable base load mode with very short start up times for power management.
This system enables the electricity company to operate its large slow speed sets in fixed base load to achieve the best possible fuel consumption.
In addition, the ComAp controlled sets provide automatic black start power supply to get the two power stations back on line and also automatic Hz support at times of high load.

This total system was only possible because of the unique features of the InteliGen NT system and we used a large number of PLC functions, shared binary I/O and a user definable InteliMonitor screen to achieve everything the customer wanted.