Abstract
Abstract. A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset or system with the purpose of optimizing intelligent behaviour of said physical entity. Digital Twin is a promising tool for asset management as the virtual entity can exist and aid at every stage of a systems life. However, the infancy of the concept means implementation remains at an early stage and particularly poorly defined within an asset management context. Practical case studies of digital twinning (the modelling process of generating and updating Digital Twins) are an important tool to ensure definitions from research are applied rigorously and to aid in their deployment with practitioners in real industrial applications. This-being-said, there are insufficient case studies for asset management digital twinning. In particular, the Digital Twinning process for utility-scale solar has not been considered. Utility-scale solar asset management often suffers challenges due to remoteness and scale of assets, contributing to high labour costs and thus could benefit enormously from an effective Digital Twin to increase precision and accuracy of fault detection and efficiency of labour for O&M tasks. In addition, the data sharing and analysis Digital Twins provide is vital for the immature solar sector. However, Digital Twinning of utility-scale solar has not been well considered and presents issues around cost-effective data collection and modelling. Therefore, this paper details the current state-of-the-art and challenges surveying utility-scale solar and the progress and application of Digital Twin to utility-scale solar. Then a novel proof of concept process for digital twinning of utility-scale solar is presented with a focus on geometric data capture for updating as-is models. Furthermore, the paper will consider Digital Twin requirements and their prescription to current O&M methods in utility-scale solar. Finally, the paper highlights currently available required technology as well as highlighting future technological improvements that would benefit the proposed proof of concept.
Highlights
Photovoltaic (PV) energy is an important resource to transition towards clean, renewable energy sources
The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 details relevant literature on digital twinning and utility-scale solar monitoring, Section 3 presents a digital twinning system concept for utility-scale solar, Section 4 provides a discussion on the concept and future research, Section 5 concludes
Advantages of photogrammetry include: distortion of imagery is inherently removed, working with off-the-shelf equipment, fitting closely with current practises, and capturing more information such as PV module angles and vegetation height which are useful for PV Digital Twin functions like shading simulation or scheduling maintenance
Summary
Photovoltaic (PV) energy is an important resource to transition towards clean, renewable energy sources. Stakeholders of PV plants want to maintain maximal power output by minimising faults while achieving low operation and maintenance (O&M) costs and must use the correct maintenance strategy to balance cost (e.g. sending out a service team) against performance lost (e.g. due to faults awaiting resolution) (Peters and Madlener, 2017) When making this decision, it is important to have comprehensive monitoring and modelling to understand what impact faults are having; for example, strings of PV modules are electrically connected in parallel so any performance mismatch can adversely affect the entire system in complex ways (Bosman et al, 2020). This paper will present a cost-effective and high fidelity automated digital twinning process for a utilityscale PV Digital Twin. The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 details relevant literature on digital twinning and utility-scale solar monitoring, Section 3 presents a digital twinning system concept for utility-scale solar, Section 4 provides a discussion on the concept and future research, Section 5 concludes
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