At the Top Crop farm in Dwight, Ill., 200 wind turbines rise from a sea of corn and soybeans, their blades turning day and night to generate energy. The turbines monitor their own performance and each other’s with sensors. If one falls behind in meeting goals such as speed and ouput, it reaches out to an office about 850 miles away in Schenectady, N.Y., where General Electric’s (GE) remote operations center uses data from 19,000 windmills worldwide to find the most efficient way to help. Intelligent monitoring of the machines has helped GE fix faults, limit snags, and preempt thousands of failures.
Image: Bloomberg Businessweek
