Tridium helps control solar energy in Spain
Aldesa Renewable Energy Group has improved the performance and availability of its solar PV plants with the help of Tridium’s universal software framework NiagaraAX. It has helped resolve the challenge of multiple communications protocols and provides Aldesa with control-system access via a web browser to significantly reduce maintenance costs and improve operational efficiency. Aldesa currently manages 38 MW of solar PV power from nine plants across Spain.
To provide information about the status of its plant in real time so that events and alarms can be acted on quickly, Aldesa introduced an autonomous solution that can integrate the various control systems at each plant to a common platform to enable centralised remote monitoring of key variable and alarms. There was also a need to detect loss of communication with the main control system and retrieve historical data.
Each solar plant has a Tridium JACE control unit running the NiagaraAX Framework. Key variables that are monitored include ambient temperature sensors, solar-panel temperatures, solar-energy meters and inverters. A synchronisation service based on oBIX saves a copy of all daily data stored in the JACE equipment.
Supervisory actions that can be carried out via a secure Internet connection include data viewing, collection, trend logging and archiving, centralised operation and adjustment of subsystems and equipment maintenance, fault finding and time scheduling.
