Grid over-voltage, no grid, no communication, Inverter overheating, these are faults that can occur anytime at the solar plant which can be daunting at times for O&M provider and can hamper the production of the plant but if an alarm for the same is raised on time, it can help site technicians resolve the problem on time.
Plant controller alarms flag problems related to:
- Operations
- Power generation
- Compliance (overproduction, underproduction, low DC/AC voltages)
- Financial excursions (for example, underperformance due to temperature or lower-than-expected DC values)
Alarms section is a feature of Trackso platform, wherein a user can collectively witness the faults, anomaly occurring at the site level that can hamper the production of solar output. The alarm codes generated by the units/inverters are picked and interpreted efficiently by the Trackso platform for extensive user experience.
The feature allows user to view the status of the currently occurring alarm (open alarm), along with the site and in particular the unit for which this alarm has occurred. Apart from furnishing the real-time alarms, the feature allows the user to take a walk of its historic data of alarms, along with the tagged metadata such as the timestamp of the alarm, the duration for which the alarm persisted along with the option to download this info in the CSV format. The information obtained by this section is going to be further used by Trackso to analyze to deliver even more premium products to its client such as anomaly detection.
There are 3 types of alarms-
1. Inverter alarms- they correspond to an actual event happening at the site, eg. For example, alarm code 01 of a particular inverter will correspond to grid overvoltage at the site. They notify the users that the inverter is running in the state which deviates from its normal running behaviour. Trackso ensures the fault codes/error codes are easily assimilated from the inverters and are interpreted to the users in a convenient manner.
- Communication alarms- They are the IoT gateway/ datalogger alarms, triggered when there is a communication mismatch between the datalogger and the device it is connected to. For example, while the datalogger is pulling the data from the inverter and it doesn’t get a response, then it will show data ingestion error on the dashboard.
- Customized alarms – They are the alarms wherein logs can be viewed when a certain predefined ’alarm’ has been triggered. A customized alarm is defined as a user-defined condition that is imposed on a parameter. For example, a ‘customized Alarm’ is created on let’s say ‘Performance ratio goes below 50’ parameter, the alarm states that when the value is less than 50 then trigger the alarm.
Using a feature like alarms would considerably improve the performance of the solar PV site because then errors and faults would be detected at a stage where the problem can be rectified. It also ensures the optimum output from the plant and health of the solar PV assets making the system more reliable and safe for the long term.
