End User: Kerala State Electricity Board, India 

The Renewable Energy & Energy Savings (REES) department of KSEB is responsible for exploring and developing renewable energy sources in the state so as to meet the electricity demand in the future and to save the electrical energy through energy efficiency measures and demand-side management. 

The Solar PV plants in the state are increasing day- by day by number and capacity. As the number increases it becomes important to monitor these solar PV power plants at a higher level. PV plants are associated with several parameters and conditions which affect the plant performance. To make it efficient and productive, REES department planned to implement a Renewable Energy Management Centre (REMC) to monitor the Solar PV Plants in the state centrally. 

Challenges 

The solar PV plants are distributed throughout the state, and each of the plants is different in terms of its capacity ranging from 5 kW to 50 MW this makes challenging to consolidate the data from each plant to enable efficient visualization and analysis. Furthermore, the plants are constructed, operated, and maintained by different EPCs/ O & M contractors. So, the data collection from each of these sites was tedious as the local control systems are from multiple vendors and integrated into State Load Dispatch Centre through hybrid communication methodologies.  

System Description 

We have offered IIoTNext Perpetual License which is installed on servers at KSEB’s data center.  

• IIoTNext Platform plays a key role in Data Collection, Historization, and Visualization.  
• The platform has an inbuilt high-performance time-series historian to store the collected data.  
• The data visualization and deeper analysis are done using interactive dashboards and reports. The dashboards are built with smart widgets which visualize the data from different sources in the required format.  

• The interactive Geo map helps the customer to drill down and analyze the performance of individual plants.  
• The customer can get alerted on critical alarms and events from the dashboards and send alerts during configured events.  
• The platform can be accessed by the KSEB officials from the Operator stations and the video wall installed in REMC. Additionally, the officials can log in to the platform from the computers and desktops connected to the KSEB network using login credentials. 

Benefits 

• REMC helps KSEB to analyze the performance of renewable energy generation inside the state more precisely in real-time and manage grid operations better. 
• The system provides complete visibility of PV plants assets distributed within the state and forecasts the Energy from renewables in the future. 
• The officials get alerts when a plant is underperforming or faulty. It helps to identify the underperforming plants and take necessary maintenance actions to improve the performance and ROI.