ETi-SOL 5.0: IIOT SCADA

The current COVID-19 pandemic situation exposed the limitations of Local SCADA systems deployed at plant locations and the importance of monitoring plants from “Anywhere and Anytime”.

The next generation IIOT SCADA ETi-SOL 5.0 released in June 2020 by EnerMAN technologies goes beyond just monitoring of Solar PV plants. The ETi-SOL 5.0 platform is purpose-built to do “Not only Monitoring (NoMon)” but also transforming PV plant data into Knowledge so that all the stakeholders of PV plant (plant owner, O&M Manager, technician) benefit from it. 

Here are some of the salient features of ETi-SOL 5.0 SCADA

The Portfolio Page This is the dashboard that can provide plant and portfolio level KPIs like Generation, PR, Plant Status, etc. This data is very useful for the plant owner as well as O&M Manager to know how their plants are performing on a day. The SCADA transforms generation data into carbon footprint knowledge that the owner can take pride in how he is contributing to a healthier planet.

The Plant Overview Page

This dashboard (refer to figure 1) is designed after taking inputs from many customers with a combined portfolio of 900+ MW. The technician can get complete knowledge about how his plant is operating. Some of the performance metrics are generation, insolation, peak power, total power, PR, CUF, yield etc. Many of the components on this page are customizable to the specific needs of a customer. If a key performance indicator is outside the expected range, there is a provision for the technician to share the incident knowledge to the managers at HQ by adding Bulletin messages.

The Mapview page displays all Inverters and SCBs on a Google Map with exact geo-coordinates of the plant and the color of Inverters and SCBs become red if there is a device fault.

SLD diagrams The SLD diagrams are very important for an electrical engineer or technician to do live monitoring and take quick action if a device turns red due to a fault. This page is custom-built for each plant based on how the plant is designed by referring to its schematic diagrams.

The Device Dashboards All major devices like Inverter, SCB, Weather Station of a plant have their own dashboards and can be accessed from this page. 

The Inverter dashboard displays hourly, daily, and monthly generation and insolation in a Graph.

The users of SCADA can drill down from Plant->Block->InverterRoom->Inverter level to get the generation information.

As part of EnerMAN Technology's efforts to deliver Knowledge, not just data, the Inverter dashboard has a unique feature called “Dip Reason”. The Dip Reason window automatically displays if there is a dip in energy generation due to Grid Outage and/or Inverter faults. There is also a provision for a technician to manually enter any other reason which is not automatically inferred by the SCADA system.

The SCB dashboard displays any underperforming strings so that the technician can take action just by looking at color-coded information.

The Weather Station dashboard displays all the weather-related data of the plant in both graph and table view.

The Analytics Page The user can download pre-defined daily, monthly, and yearly reports by a click of a button.

The user can pick and choose primary parameters across different devices and analyze trends and performances in a graph or table view.

In addition to primary data, the user can also analyze and download computed KPIs like PR, Yield, Insolation, and DGR (Daily Generation Reports).

The Alarm Page No SCADA is complete without an Alert module. The ETi-SOL 5.0 works closely with datalogger ETi-Log to provide real-time, robust, and accurate alarms and events. It has two levels of Alarm detection logics, the primary logic deployed in the edge device (ETi-Log) and the secondary logic deployed in the SCADA (ETi-SOL 5.0). This extra layer of alert logic ensures that the user will not miss an Alarm.

The alert module supports both e-mails as well as SMS notifications to users and has an inbuilt escalation matrix. The O&M manager and the plant owner will receive an email notification if there is an unresolved alert.

The ETi-SOL 5.0 is an end-to-end solution completely in-house developed to deliver accurate and real-time operational analytics of PV plants to the O&M team and plant owners at an exceptionally attractive price. The EnerMAN Technology takes pride in “Vocal” about “Local” transformation currently happening across India.

Author: Ravisha D N, Sr. VP - Solar Analytics, EnerMAN Technologies