With several Gigawatts of PV (Photo Voltaic) installations, a huge amount of time series data from Solar PV plants such as meteorological data, string-level measurements, transmission loss & generation data are collected. Such lengthy time-series data from solar PV plants are no doubt highly multi-dimensional and challenging to process, but the bigger problem is getting clean data from various sensors in this case Combiner boxes, Inverters, MFMs (Multi-FunctionalMeters) & WMS (Weather Monitoring Station). That’s where the Majority of the existing SCADA (Solar Control And Data Acquisition) systems are failing!
Internet of Things (IoT) provides a technological platform to achieve this with its ability to gather data from Anything or Everything connected over a network. The emergence of this technology will prove to be a significant differentiator in this race by providing access to the plant remotely, thus increase productivity and maximize the Return of Investment.
APIC (Avi on Premise IoT Controller) series Intelligent Datalogger, in-house built & uses real-time analytics and artificial intelligence to enhance the operational performance of solar power plants. Most solar PV plants are in remote locations and may have a very low bandwidth internet connectivity. Existing sensors or specialized sensors placed at critical points in Solar plants, monitor parameters including temperature,DC power, AC power, Voltage, Current, Faults, etc. Sensors that are part of a SCADA system collect, consolidate & logs all the data of a Plant. Hence, to ensure real-time monitoring of the plant, critical data is packetized using special algorithms and pushed to a cloud server. Cloud Server gives the flexibility of preserving/Maintaining huge volume, the velocity of plant’s historical data. The data is also stored at a local control room and can be retrieved in case of communication failure with CloudServer, thus ensuring reliable and accurate data availability
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Data Collection at the solar plant can be achieved in three ways by deploying APIC series Intelligent Data logger/ Smart Sensors.
1. Wireless Remote monitoring SCADA: Here the data from the inverters (Central/string), MFMs,VCBs(Voltage Circuit Breaker) or any other device at a plant with Modbus RTU/TCP interface can be collected by APIC-RTU/TCP (Remoter Termination Unit /Transmission Control Protocol).
Concentrator unit (APIC-RF)which is located at MCR which sends request & collects data from RF slaves[ASN] installed at field on various devices (Eg: String Combiner boxes). This received data will be processed and pushed to Cloud server through a secured protocol using GPRS technology. We can optionally route the collected data to a Local SCADA system as well.
2. Wired SCADA: In this method, all the devices which are to be monitored are connected through cables (OFC/Ethernet) till the Main Control Room and the plant data can be monitored in control room PC. The APIC -intelligent data logger, installed in MCR which collects, process and sends to cloud server through a secured protocol using GPRS technology.
3. Third party SCADA Integration:
It can be achieved in three ways:
. Push Method: In this method, Avi Solar will setup FTP server and provide login credentials to Third Party SCADAvendor. The Third-Party SCADA vendor should PUSH plants data to FTP server in near Realtime. The format of the Data should either in CSV (Comma Separated Value) or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. This data will be read and stored on our cloud servers.
. Pull Method /API: We will call third-party SCADA APIs for the extraction of data for the particular plant (Avi Solar will PULL Data by making calls to Third-Party REST (Representational state transfer)API. The Third-party SCADA vendor should provide REST API's credentials to AviSolar for pulling data.
. Scripting: In this method using the client credentials we can run the software on client's computer (Scripting) and extract the data/download the data automatically every 5 min interval from the existing Web Based SCADA software."
APIC series has currently 3+ Intelligent Data logger/Smart Sensor
Different Variants:-
· APIC-RTU : For Wired Modbus RTU devices.
· APIC-TCP : For Single/Multiple TCPdevices.
· APIC-RF : Wireless solution, irrespective of devices.
· ASN : For Modbus RTU wireless solution