Solar Power Plant Monitoring and Control System
A utility provider based in Taiwan wanted to remotely monitor its solar farms. Key performance areas include solar panel effectiveness, solar array performance, battery load and environmental data from sensors.
Scenario
The power industry is now ready for clean energy such as solar energy. Utility-scale solar power stations with electric power capacity of more than 50 MW and the capability to feed excess power back to the electric grid for future consumption, are being built to meet the growing demand for solar power.
A utility-scale solar power plant can consist of hundreds to thousands of solar collectors. Plant operators need to collect and process data from numerous devices located at remote sites to achieve high energy efficiency.
A utility provider based in Taiwan wanted to remotely monitor its solar farms. Key performance areas include solar panel effectiveness, solar array performance, battery load and environmental data from sensors.
System Requirements
- Industrial-grade embedded edge computer for remote monitoring, data acquisition, data logging, and protocol conversion of inverter data to monitor solar panel effectiveness
- Low power consumption to maximize the electrical output of a solar power plant
- Reliable operation in wide-temperature outdoor environments
- Web-based remote monitoring of solar array performance, battery load, and environmental data from sensors
- Sunlight-readable HMI for inverter control
Solution
- Rugged fanless UC-8100-ME-T and UC-5100 IIoT gateways with wide -40 to 70°C operating temperature range
- Multiple I/O UC-5100 IIoT gateway to directly connect with sensors
- Ready-to-run ThingsPro software solution for Modbus data acquisition and Modbus-to-MQTT protocol conversion
- 1000-nit sunlight-readable MPC-2070 HMI panel computer
