TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

MONITORING / CONTROL
PV PLANT














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INDEX
INDEX ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................................ 4
2 REGULATIONS ..................................................................................................................................................................... 5
3 ORDER SUPPLY / WORK .................................................................................................................................................. 5
4 SCADA ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 8


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CHANGE LOG
Version Date Changes



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1 INTRODUCTION
This document describes the required characteristics for a photovoltaic plant control and monitoring.
The control and monitoring of the equipment intends to maximize the produced energy, reduce the down time
and consequently prevent equipment failure due to wearing. This way, the equipment malfunction and failure
can be earlier detected.

As a main architecture, the PV Plant will be structured as follows:








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2 REGULATIONS
The company must comply with all laws, standards, ordinances, specifications and current regulations for
electrical, photovoltaic and communication systems.
Regarding the technical specifications and the installed equipment, present regulations in the Country where the
PV Plant will be installed shall be considered, for electrical, photovoltaic and communication systems. Other
standards shall be met, like:
IEC 61724: Photovoltaic system performance monitoring Guidelines for measurement, data exchange
and analysis;
IEC 62446 - Grid connected photovoltaic systems - Minimum requirements for system documentation,
commissioning tests and inspection;

3 ORDER SUPPLY / WORK
Monitoring and Control System apparatus and devices shall have the following main characteristics, at a
minimum:
All systems, equipments, apparatus and applications used for the monitoring and control system shall
be of proven technology and designed for PV plant monitoring use;
Shall be based on standardized layers and open protocols (e.g., modbus, profibus or any other standard
based protocol used for the industrial plant) that are as wide as possible and that shall be able to
manage the large number of devices that will be engineered and installed at the plant;

The system shall be engineered to reduce the number of field terminations, associated wiring, labour and
maintenance and shall be engineered to minimize the distance of data paths that are unsupervised between field
source(s) and data client(s) to improve the value of the data by confirming the availability and reliability of the
method by which it is collected.

So, the scope of the work/supply can be divided and summarized in the following items:
Hardware for monitoring and control Supply and install hardware to monitor and control the
variables gathered from the equipments.

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Field Network All the required wirings to interconnect the whole monitoring system.
SCADA Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Software Software development for hardware
interfacing and monitoring, capable of providing intuitive visualization of these variables.


The following hardware shall be supplied:
Rack
A Rack shall be supplied to hold all the devices that will be present inside the Control Centre. The panel shall
be pressurized with a removable and re-usable/cleanable dust filter in the pressurizing arrangement. Provision
shall be made for adequate ventilation of all equipment to prevent over-heating. A lockable metal door shall be
provided on the front of the panel and apparatus and cabling shall be accessible from the front of panel.
UPS
An UPS shall be installed inside the Rack, to provide stand-alone operation to the monitoring equipment
(except for the inverters) for at least 2 hours, in case of power failure. Vendor shall provide information about
the power consumption of the system, for the sizing of the backup power system in the control centre.
PLC
The PLC will be responsible for gathering all the database data and make it available through its memory
locations for remote access.
All the gathered data should be present in the database, as well as the variables that should be monitored.
Industrial Server
The server will gather all data, store it in the SQL database and host the SCADA Software. It shall have a data
backup system to prevent data losses. The information shall be presented locally by means of a panel/rack
mounted display, to visualize the plant information described in SCADA Software Section, through a connection
to the SQL database. There should be provided remote access for client monitoring through a web browser,
where the webpage will connect to the SQL database and display the PV plant information in a graphical and
intuitive way.
Industrial Ethernet Switch
An Industrial Switch shall be supplied to manage Ethernet Connections in the Control Centre. There shall be
left free two RJ45 sockets in each Ethernet Switch.
Router/Modem (LAN and GPRS)

A Router with LAN and GPRS redundant connection shall be provided to assure the servers remote
connection anytime and anywhere. There should be provided both GPRS and LAN connection to assure
remote access to the server and consequently, to fulfil the remote monitoring. If the LAN connection fails, the
GPRS system must backup the connection and automatically send a warning message with the critical data to
the provided phone number. The awarded company is responsible for providing all the devices to fulfil this
request, namely modems for GPRS, etc.
Weather Station
Since the energy production directly depends on meteorological conditions, for instance the temperature and
the solar radiation, we intend to install an autonomous Weather Station with the following characteristics:
Ambient temperature (accuracy better than 1K)
Module temperature (accuracy better than 1K)
Solar radiation on the solar modules plane
Solar radiation on the horizontal plane

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Wind speed (accuracy better than 0.5ms
-1
for wind speeds < 5ms
-1
, and better than 10% of the reading
for wind speeds greater than 5ms
-1
)
Wind direction
Relative humidity
Pluviometer
Energy backup (battery)
Ethernet Communication
Calibration Certificates for radiation sensors
Tower or tripod for mounting sensors and other station equipment
A data logger is required to deal with all these variables and make them available to the server, as it should be
able to record all the information from the sensors according to IEC 61724 and for at least 15 days. Device
resolution shall be better than 12 bits. The monitoring system should be based on commercially available
hardware which is properly documented with user manuals. Technical support shall be available.
Modules Temperature Sensor:
PT100 or PT1000 type, with the following characteristics:
High accuracy
2 wire;
Calibration Certificate;
Solar Radiation Sensor:
Polycrystalline technology with the following characteristics:
High accuracy (more than 5%);
No temperature compensation
Calibration Certificate;

The weather station will be installed near the Control Centre, in a place where no shade should be created in
the existent PV Modules.
The weather station shall be AC powered and shall have a backup battery.
All data provided by sensors shall be acquired by the SCADA. If a problem occurs, all the acquired data shall be
backed up in the data logger memory, for a minimum of 15 days. Whenever the problem has been solved, all
the backed up information shall be requested by the SCADA software to update the SQL database.















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4 SCADA
Monitoring System Software
This system will provide monitoring capabilities for the communicant devices included in the PV Plant. It will
provide local and remote (via internet) client access, showing data from the physical installations, energy
production, weather conditions and other, converting this system in a powerful tool to take preventive and
corrective measures.
All this information shall be processed and presented in a user friendly and comprehensible way, by means of
tools developed for this specific plant.

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The control interface variables shall have accounts with passwords, in which different users have different
permissions (a user will only have the basic monitoring data, according to their permissions). The monitoring
can be done through a Web page by entering an username and password.


Client Remote
Monitoring
(web
browser)
Access via the Internet with password protection with
ability to create access profiles.
Real time display of measured parameters
Visualization of power quality parameters
Displays historical data by graphs, tables and reports
Prints graphs, tables and reports
Access to SQL database directly
Highly versatile and intuitive
Alarm options for monitored variables

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