Abstract
There is, at present, considerable interest in the storage and dispatchability of photovoltaic (PV) energy, together with the need to manage power flows in real-time. This paper presents a new system, PV-on time, which has been developed to supervise the operating mode of a Grid-Connected Utility-Scale PV Power Plant in order to ensure the reliability and continuity of its supply. This system presents an architecture of acquisition devices, including wireless sensors distributed around the plant, which measure the required information. It is also equipped with a high-precision protocol for synchronizing all data acquisition equipment, something that is necessary for correctly establishing relationships among events in the plant. Moreover, a system for monitoring and supervising all of the distributed devices, as well as for the real-time treatment of all the registered information, is presented. Performances were analyzed in a 400 kW transformation center belonging to a 6.1 MW Utility-Scale PV Power Plant. In addition to monitoring the performance of all of the PV plant’s components and detecting any failures or deviations in production, this system enables users to control the power quality of the signal injected and the influence of the installation on the distribution grid.
Highlights
Within the framework of renewable energies, photovoltaic (PV) is one of the technologies with the greatest future projection
A full description of the developed system is presented in Section 2: in Section 2.1, the embedded control and acquisition system installed in the inverters to record and process DC and alternating currents (AC) voltages and currents measurements in real-time is presented; in Section 2.2, a wireless sensor network (WSN) added in order to register environmental magnitudes and energy production is addressed; Section 2.3 describes the weather station installed in order to register environmental measures; Section 2.4 explains the synchronization technique of all the measurements within the PV plant; Section 2.5 briefly describes the communication system used in PV-on time and introduces another communication system based on the IEC 61850 standard, which will be integrated in future work
Precision Time Protocol (PTP) standard was developed to synchronize any type of equipment in industrial areas [39], and it is an evolution of the network time protocol (NTP) with further stability guarantees
Summary
Within the framework of renewable energies, photovoltaic (PV) is one of the technologies with the greatest future projection. Its numerous advantages, such as simple installation, high reliability, zero fuel costs, very low maintenance costs, and the lack of noise due to the absence of moving parts [1], have resulted in a high growth rate. Opportunities for improvement in this sector are not based solely on increasing the level of installed capacity, and on the necessity of embracing the challenges of technological advancements that allow producers to both optimize production in order to reduce generation costs, rendering PV energy more competitive, and enable them to make this type of electricity production dispatchable, so that it can be integrated into the future context of Smart Grids [5,6]
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