Monitoring and Performance analysis of Solar PV Plant using – Advanced SCADA

Solar is a fast growing industry in India. Solar power generating capacity increased more than 6 folds in last 5 years. India with a mission to achieve 30% to 35% power through Solar by 2030 is moving ahead. With increase in capacity, we are also facing challenges to keep the grid undisturbed. The traditional SCADA system, wouldn’t be enough, we face many challenges in the monitoring of solar power plants. A typical solar power plant contains thousands of connected devices from different vendors dispersed across a large geographical area.

For deploying a robust and scalable SCADA system we forethought all the challenges and the requirements and developed SCOPE ActionWise SCADA. The architecture of this SCADA can be quickly rolled out as new power plants are built, which requires a lot of forward planning. The ActionWise SCADA does planning from the operations and maintenance perspective as well. It has the ability to quickly identify and correct any issues. In addition to answering these challenges, Action Wise SCADA also strives to build a solution which is highly polished, both technically and graphically.

Requirement/Pain area of Customer

In the current scenario, the monitoring and performance analysis of solar plants is the necessary part in the perspective of utility and industrial levels. The visualization of assets is more critical in the current scenario because if the visualization of assets is not scalable, robust and smooth it will increase the operation and maintenance costs. To reduce the downtime and increase the life of installed assets the centralized monitoring of solar plants is extremely required. The solar plant architecture is denoted below figure-1.

How SCOPE T&M will deploy SCADA at Solar Plant?

SCOPE T&M will deploy its ActionWise SCADA; which will provide an advanced solution for monitoring the solar plants. It enables centralized control and operation and also incorporates all the basic features available in a high-end generation SCADA system. The Main components is shown below in the Fig-2

Acquiring Weather Monitoring System (WMS) Data:

After integration with the WMS system, SCADA will acquire the data from various sensors like humidity sensors, Air temperature Sensors, wind direction sensors and other parameters through different sensors. It will help us to provide an accurate energy forecast.

Remote Terminal Units (RTUs)

 RTUs installed will communicate with substation Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), sensors, HMIs, inverters, trackers and other devices and transmit acquired data to the supervisory system.

Industrial PCs (IPCs)

Industrial PCs are mainly deployed for process monitoring and acquiring data for the analysis of parameters. IPCs can be fed with data input remotely for solely industrial data analysis needs.

Human Machine Interface (HMI)

This is a graphical user interface that displays the acquired data from RTUs to the operator. It will provide a view of alarms, events, reports etc.

Servers

In the SCADA system, there are several servers. Each of these servers deals with a particular set of parameters. For example, there are particular servers for data acquisition, monitoring, and processing jobs. These servers can be either running virtually on the same physical HW or occupy several physical servers in case of large installations.

All the plant parameters can be monitored. Which includes String Combiner box (SCB) data, Inverter data, LT & HT panel breaker status data, HT panel Relays, MFM and Annunciator data. Complete Plant Overview includes data collection from RTU.

• LT panel and HT panel Circuit Breaker status
• SCB data include string current, total string current and power
• Inverter data include AC / DC parameters and inverter status
• Weather monitoring station monitoring includes radiation, Accumulated daily radiation, Humidity, Ambient Temperature, Module Temperature etc.
• Auxiliary Panel Monitoring includes auxiliary consumption
• HT panel Incomer Relay data, Outgoing Relay data, Incomer Multi-Function Meter (MFM) and Annunciator alarm and trip status
• CO₂ suppression system and Fire alarm status
• Alarm Banner includes the most recent alarm

Advantages of Solar SCADA

• Real-Time monitoring of asset
• Reduced maintenance costs by using condition-based strategies
• It helps in minimizing the risk of unplanned downtime by proactively addressing issues
• Data Visualization
• Weather Forecasting

Why consider our SCADA System?

• Our Software will provide a User-friendly graphical interface and data visualisation are salient features of modern monitoring and supervising software
• Our SCADA System mainly focus on Data quality it will greatly improve the stability and consistency of data acquisition with the help of built-in redundancy and the use of backup systems
• Our system will follow the latest mandate of Cyber security
• Our SCADA system is developed entirely on Microsoft’s .Net platform. This is a modern, robust, safe, efficient platform with the support of one of the largest companies in the world in the sector
• Our system has an easily expandable facility to support additional data points
• Our system has the possibility for system upgradation

Conclusion

• Provide the Summary of gathered data from field devices. it will help identify underlying issues to optimize maintenance management.
• The Monitoring and control of solar plants will reduce the cost of maintenance.
• The lost energy is something you need to keep a close eye on, as it impacts your bottom line. The lost energy is calculated considering what would have been the amount of energy produced if all the installed devices were functioning optimally. This creates an opportunity to analyse the equipment which is not performing as expected

In this manner, SCOPE ensured that ActionWise SCADA system for Solar PV is available with all the latest features . To know more about this solution, please write to us at marketing@scopetnm.com