What is a Monitoring and Analytics system for solar PV plants?
A cloud-based monitoring system is a service that can collect critical parameters from your solar PV system and make it accessible to you anywhere, anytime. Such a system is capable of monitoring solar PV inverters, energy meters, weather stations, string monitoring boxes, protection devices, batteries and other essential components. All this data can be collected using devices, commonly known as data loggers/data gateways, which can further send this data to cloud servers [software service] via GPRS, LAN, WiFi or any other internet network. Once the data is sent to the cloud-based servers, the data can be visualized through a desktop or mobile interface. Data can be visualized in different formats like graphs, charts, reports etc.
A monitoring system comprises of 2 parts :
– Data Loggers/Gateway: For collecting data from equipment (inverters, meters, etc) at the site
– Software platform: For visualizing data collected from the equipment in the form of tables, reports, graphs for better understanding and real-time notifications so that problems can be detected and fixed.
Why must Solar O&M companies have a monitoring and Analytics system?
A monitoring system primarily helps in the reduction of the Operation and maintenance cost of the solar plants by 20-30 % annually. This not only reduces the cost but also makes the process of O&M significantly easier with the help of technology-driven features like
- Anomaly detection
A good remote monitoring system provides you with the ability to receive instant email or SMS alerts in case there is something wrong with the systems installed by you. It can mean that either there is some physical damage or some critical fault like under/over voltage, phase mismatch etc. which needs immediate attention. Allowing you such information instantly, this solution enables you to provide a better service, save a lot of money which you might have spent in regular maintenance and keep your system running successfully over its lifetime.
- Customized dashboards and analysis
This is one of the features that allow you to monitor and analyse any number of parameters from any of your systems in your account. For example, if your operations & maintenance team wish to monitor only the fault occurring in your solar PV system, this features allows you to create a dashboard with only error parameters from all your solar PV sites. This dashboard provides a lot of ease to your team as they do not have to keep moving between sites to know their fault status. Also, the Comparative Analysis feature allows you to select the parameters for different types of equipment (inverters, WMS etc.) for comparison between them. eg. compare Active Power of 2 inverters vs Solar radiation.
Plotting data of an inverter power generation or a pyranometer on separate line charts does provide an understanding of the system but when you can plot the two graphs together you get an insight about plant generation in correlation to solar radiation. Now, this is an insight we get possible through a comparative analysis.
Comparative analysis of data gathered is also useful in the following situation, 2 same size inverters’ performance of different brands, which will help companies to know which brand works better in a particular situation.
- Site Reports
remote monitoring solution collects data of your solar PV systems over a long period of time. Using that data, it allows you to generate Daily/Monthly/Yearly reports for billing purpose as well as to keep a track of energy production and performance etc. These reports not only provide you site level but inverter level performance and generation parameters too. Accuracy of these reports is quite important since you make a lot of decisions based on these reports.
TrackSo is an IoT based solar PV monitoring and analytics platform to track performance, spot or predict failures and provide proactive maintenance of your assets, giving you complete control without actually being present there. Coupled with our smart IoT gateways, you can connect, visualise and analyse all your assets with ease.
And we are brand agnostic. As a solar PV installer, you deal with various brands and models of solar panels, inverters, energy meters, weather stations and all other components used in the solar PV system. Trackso allows you to communicate with all such components irrespective of their brand and type.
