Solar PV plants are usually spread across the large geographical areas with many equipments like inverters, string combiner box, and protective switchgears. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system provides a complete overview of the operational status and control of these very equipments. It is a system that unifies all the equipments in a plant to put forth a complete picture. Poorly engineered system can give out an adverse causality at any point in time.
If your PV SCADA system is not functional, or if you cannot see the generation data remotely, do not worry: you are not the only one. A big percentage of PV plants in India do not have fully operational SCADA.
We retrofitted plants with our IoT based monitoring platform, ETi-SOL. There are several more in the pipeline! Surprisingly the SCADA systems which were replaced were not ordinary ones; they were from reputed suppliers. In fact the hardware equipment used in their SCADA panel were of very high quality, global brands. We felt bad that we had to scrap these world-class products. But it was customer’s call as they felt that was the right thing to do for the business!
So, the question is: Why are customers getting rid of their SCADA and opting to retrofit, when they have State Of Art equipment lying in their PV Plants? From our experience, we were able to cite several reasons, few of the prominent ones shall be discussed in this article.
When we talk of Solar PV plant, most of the people think about green energy, saving the environment, reducing carbon footprint etc. But the investor of the project thinks about his ROI (Return On Investment). He expects the plant to generate as per the guarantee given by EPC, consistently for 25 years! With this background, let’s come back to our question.
Reason #1
Plant owners & developers have realized that Remote Monitoring SCADA is the most essential tool to monitor the performance of their asset.
In the EPC phase of the project, the focus was all about getting all the approvals, connecting to the grid and commissioning the plant within deadline. Most of them didn’t bother to validate the data in the SCADA installed. This has created a large void in most PV plants. They now realize that they need to “Watch The Plant” and monitor the equipment remotely. This awareness has prompted them to search for a reliable suppliers of SCADA.
Reason #2
Now that the Solar PV Plant Owners have recognized the need for a monitoring system that can keep track of the generation, that can monitor the string current and identify low performing blocks, they are trying to login into the SCADA portal. Unfortunately, they find themselves in one of the situations:
Situation #1
Login fails because they have not renewed the AMC which means SCADA license has expired. They reach out to the world’s best SCADA supplier who installed the system in their plant. Usually the quote they receive in Euros or USD is extremely high!
Many suppliers sold their system at low prices initially, but owners didn’t know that you need to pay a heavy premium every year.
Very high AMC charges is the No. 1 reason why the PV plant owners are looking for an alternate Remote Monitoring / SCADA solution in India that can replace their existing SCADA.
Situation #2
They are able to login to the SCADA system at site and see the data, but unable to access the system remotely. Which means only Local SCADA is functional.
The developer/OMS team try to reach out to the vendor, but seldom they get the right solution. The reason being: most of these SCADA systems are PLC based and is designed for local monitoring only. The only solution could be to configure a static IP and access the desktop/PC remotely.
Many plants have a monitoring system at the control room, which means you are at the mercy of site engineer. Data accuracy and relevance could be at stake if the plant can’t be monitored remotely.
Monitoring the PV Plant remotely has numerous benefits. We have seen that Inverter tripping, String failures, temperature overshoots are very common events, especially start of monsoons and during peak summer. Most of the PV plants do not have dedicated engineers monitoring the SCADA system. Hence it is very likely that OMS team misses certain critical events. If you can enable remote monitoring function, one can assign a second level of monitoring at HQ or any place which has internet connectivity.
Customers have realized the need for “remote access” of Plant data, which is not available / cumbersome to implement / expensive in traditional PLC based SCADA systems.
Why remote plant monitoring is not effective
We analysed why is that most of the plants do not have a reliable plant monitoring system or SCADA. Here is a list of findings why the remote plant monitoring is not effective.
- Leased line connections not working. Most SCADA needs a high bandwidth internet connection like leased lines, which are very expensive to maintain.
- Cables connecting the SCADA systems are damaged. Most traditional SCADA systems were interconnected using Kilometers of Fibre Optic / Copper cables, which have been damaged by unskilled labourers at the plant.
- No Service / Support engineers visit the plant. Many leading SCADA suppliers provide you telephonic support. But to resolve major issues you need to depute service engineers at these sites which are usually in remote areas.
- No String Level Monitoring. Data collection is limited to Inverter monitoring only. String level faults cannot be detected.
Redeem your non-functional PV SCADA with ETi-SOL
With Covid-19 pandemic striking the world, the need to operate remotely is at high-stake than ever. If anything, this is the best time to make an affordable retrofit to restore your non-functional SCADA and prevent expensive replacements in the foreseeable future.
The good news is that, there are retrofit solutions available which can replenish your existing SCADA and bring the plant data to your remote monitoring center. IoT being the buzz word today, there are several options to get the data from your plant to the cloud in a cost-effective manner. There are several IoT platforms which can monitor data from PV plants.
ETi-SOL is one such platform exclusively developed for Solar PV Plants. It’s extremely low cost and has replaced several MWs of SCADA systems.
EnerMAN Technologies provides solutions to restore your Non-functional SCADA, expansion of your current SCADA system and tailor-made solutions like virtual plant control to meet your specific requirements. With our products like ETi-SOL we further streamline your monitoring to make it cost-effective, with advanced alarming and insightful reports.
Listed below are the most common use cases where customers switched to ETi-SOL.
PLC based SCADA systems does not allow easy remote access / expensive to upgrade for new features
If you are worried about your hugely invested non-functional PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) with unavailable site support from equipment manufacturer, there is an affordable and simple solution from EnerMAN Technologies. We survey your site with the help of our experts and provide IoT dataloggers that are much more efficient and data-driven than the PLCs. We can reuse most of the networking hardware from PLC-based systems. Scalability and Interoperability are in favor of IoT devices today, and we provide just that.
Data available at MCR for viewing purpose only. Cannot download / generate reports
Are you missing that big picture for operational costs, scheduling, maintenance, and resource management despite having an entire SCADA system in place? This is because of the lack of insightful data. EnerMAN Technologies with its expertise in data-driven solutions should be your corrective measure. A small investment can give you a big save. All you need to do is provide your requirements and your existing template. Our solutions make sure you have reduced downtime, required predictive maintenance thereby bringing down the operational costs.
No service from the supplier to restore / replace non-functional loggers
Already have IoT (Internet of Things) SCADA but having trouble with the gateway/ dataloggers? Call us. We are the experts and one of the Market leaders in this area. We survey your third party dataloggers and get your SCADA up and running. We also support any data formats from existing loggers and get the data with the templates you want to see.
We also take up the replacement of non-functional sensor equipments used for weather and power monitoring.
Need additional functions on working SCADA
Already using a functional SCADA system but wanting to expand your power lines but existing SCADA does not support expansion? No worries. Our IoT solutions provide flexibility for present and future expansion possibilities. We will be able to expand your existing functional SCADA in a very short span. No need to worry about the scalability of our solutions for future expansion. Our products are Interoperable, standardized, and scalable. We not only provide monitoring but also device control. All in a single login and a few clicks.
Getting the best from monitoring for Operations & Maintenance
As theoretical, Solar PV plant is the energy sector where you no need to pay attention on the operations hence it doesn’t have any mechanical operations. But operation and maintenance (O&M) of a solar plant is the most important function after plant commissioning to achieve the yield. O&M service provider is responsible for prevention of faults and rectification of failures at the solar plant.
It also ensures that all maintenance issues are detected, reported and resolved with minimal disruption to plant operations and ensures high plant availability reduce downtime. An important aspect to achieve high plant up time is by regular monitoring and checking health of equipments. Typical O&M team needs to perform physical checking for panels, strings, combiner boxes and inverters at plant to ensure that there are no faults, failures, that may result in production loss.
This can be an expensive and time consuming activity. And hence the Operations & Maintenance team may not perform their routine activities daily, which leads to generation loss and ultimately financial loss.
ETi-SOL, an IoT Based remote monitoring system, will reduce time allocated to routine maintenance, rectification of faults quickly and thus reduce labor costs involved in field visits.
The O&M team can remotely monitor the performance of each equipment used in the plant and deploy personnel only when a fault or failure is detected. Remote/Local Monitoring makes all maintenance visits more efficient by performing root cause analysis of the problem and providing the technicians with the best approach to solve it before arriving at the plant. Failures are, thus, restored in minimum time and without the need for any additional visits.
Research says, “To increase the yield, Operator must choose String level monitoring SCADA for their solar PV plant”, which means that even the smallest of issues and deviations at plant are continuously evaluated and reported. It tracks the health of each equipment in the plant by continuously monitoring component parameters. As a result, the need for physical checking at the plant is greatly reduced.
After deploying ETi-SOL, an IoT Based remote monitoring system, the complete physical checking of the plants can be once in a month or two months. Which will reduce the manpower hours allotted for the plant and which finally translates to annual savings.
As the PV plant gets older
As the PV plant gets older, one needs to watch for performance degradations, losses due to aging of plant BOS like connectors, cables and terminations. Your SCADA needs to be operational and you need to have the plant data. It is strongly recommended that you monitor all the equipment, mainly the Inverter, Weather Station, String Combiner Box, Transformers, VCB and Energy Meters. If cost concerns exist for string-level monitoring, Zonal level monitoring solution can be considered.
The history of your plant will not only give insight into the performance parameters, it can also help you a great deal in forecasting & scheduling.
Products in this article
Cloud IoT SCADA
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