Achievements:

• Control with detailed information from all the elements of the entire solar plant.

• Remote management and maintenance of the solar park that facilitates cost savings thanks to preventive maintenance.

• Improve the efficiency of the solar plant automatically and create alarms when detecting anomalous scenarios.

Description

Nowadays, power generation using non-polluting options to preserve the environment is an option in which all the nations of the world are investing. Focused on the reduction of the emission of carbon and other gases into the atmosphere, investment in renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic, wind, tidal, etc., allows, through an initial investment, to expand the country’s energy mix and to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, with economic savings as result.

In Colombia, the energy generation based on photovoltaic sources is almost nil. This circumstance will be reversed with the creation in the next 4 years of a series of photovoltaic parks that reduce dependence on their current energy sources, especially thermal, and allow to increase the energy sources in the country’s the energy mix.

Inael, Spanish manufacturer of energy distribution control elements and amplia))) through its OpenGate IoT Platform have been chosen to develop a photovoltaic solution in the solar parks of this country that allows the processing and distribution of the energy obtained in the solar parks and the management of all its elements. In this way, a massive and detailed knowledge is obtained realted to the maintenance of all the elements that comprise it and its optimization to keep the facilities in the maximum generation quotas.

Today, solar farms can have several kilometers of solar panels for power generation, as well as other kilometers of elements responsible for the transference of the generated energy and its control. By the other hand we cannot forget the elements responsible for monitoring and supervision of the operation of the plant such as inverters, transformers, string boxes, etc.

OpenGate IoT Platform allows to monitor all of these important elements of the plant, collecting all the possible information to be able to work with the data and adjust its operation, which allows to improve the following points automatically from a friendly, scalable and simple interface:

• Collection and storage of all the parameters related to the behavior of the elements which compose the solar park and the parameters corresponding to the generation of electricity of every solar panel.

• Analysis of this information to obtain indicators and KPIs for global values ​​such as general park behavior, electricity generated in real time and its comparison with historical values, etc. or more specific indicators such as panels with lower than average performance.

• Maintenance tasks optimization of the park elements thanks to the multitude of sensors that, together with the OpenGate capabilities for automatic information analysis, allows the support team to detect those elements that are acting differently from the rest and away from an expected pattern of behavior, including current weather conditions and their comparison with previous historical ciscunstances.