Skytron energy has made considerable performance upgrades to its monitoring, control and supervision solutions for PV power plants. The ‘PVGuard’ Supervision Platform has been enhanced with improved SCADA software capabilities for energy production planning, performance analysis and system integration.

Problem

PV power plant management has needed to evolve due to changing market conditions for renewable and hybrid power plants; due especially to the opening of the energy market for direct trading on electricity exchanges and the volatility in the investment sector, which is creating a demand for more versatile tools for production forecasting, flexible reporting, extended data analysis and interoperability.

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Solution

Skytron SCADA software enhancements enable production forecasts for strategic grid and market integration to be finely-tuned several times a day. Production forecasts supplying estimates of hourly production for up to 7 days in advance are provided. A new ‘FlexReportXL’ report generator produces plant performance reports that can include information from other sources, such as forecasts from the yield assessment report, and customers’ own calculations can be incorporated in the automatic report. FlexReportXL allows the generation of multiple reports of different content as well as their e-mail dispatch at selectable intervals from an hour to a year. For improved function analysis, XY diagrams enable the creation of 2D and 3D scatter plots which enable PV inverter behavior monitoring against measured irradiance to the inverter power or voltage values. Similarly, cooling effects on solar modules can be investigated by mapping the measurement values for irradiance, module temperature and wind speed in a scatter diagram.

Applications

Monitoring, control and supervision of PV power plants.

Platform

Grid connection specifications of some countries, such as California (USA), Puerto Rico, Romania and South Africa, also insist on a reliable prognosis of the power available for grid injection. In PVGuard, an auto-adaptive algorithm predicts the power production on the basis of current weather data, plant characteristics and the output over recent weeks.