PV installations are usually installed at remote areas, requiring maintenance teams to spend vast amounts of time to travel to the site. Furthermore, if the cause of problem could not be identified during the first visit or if the personnel did not bring the right spare parts or tools, another trip would be needed. This can be extremely time consuming, causing loss of productivity.

With Phoenix Contact’s PV monitoring system, this can help to minimise the downtime as we are able to monitor the PV plant in real time and obtain comprehensive data. Examples of equipment and readings that can be monitored are: inverters, energy meters, weather condition and even down to every string of the PV panel. If there is any anomaly, an alarm notification would be send to personnel via SMS or email. This is made possible by incorporating a 3G/4G router which can also allow access to the system from other parts of the world.

Samples of data tables

Another reading which has been requested by many owners of solar plants is historical trends with regards to the efficiency of their plant. To store such a large amount of data at the local controller is not a good idea, furthermore security and performance issues which would possibly affect the local controller could arise.  By having the data pushed to cloud storage, it is possible to send the entire plant’s data into the cloud. From the cloud’s database, the data can then be re-organised into trends for further analysis.  The historical trends are useful for optimising the productivity of the solar energy plant. For example, we could see the amount of energy generated with respect to the weather condition. From these sets of data, we will be able to tell if the PV Panel is generating the expected energy output. Any anomalies in the respective PV Panels can then be identified immediately.  With the implementation of such data, the inefficiency of the solar plant would be minimised.

Samples of trend data

Interested to find out more? Feel free to contact us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg!