Operators of a 22MW photovoltaic park in the Naxçivan Autonomous Republic in Azerbaijan can control all its 8000 solar panels from one SCADA interface, which is designed to be easy and intuitive to use.
The control system has been configured so that it is simple routine to accommodate extra equipment as the facility grows over the coming years.
Naxçivan solar plant is located between Turkey, Iran and the Caspian Sea and has steadily been modernising its infrastructure and developing its economy in recent years. In order to foster a healthy and vibrant economy which is also sustainable, the government is pursuing a policy of developing an integrated electricity grid. This is based in a large part on balancing renewable generating sources, including wind, hydro, thermal, biofuel and solar.
The Naxçivan solar plant is the largest photovoltaic installation in Azerbaijan and plans are in place to grow it further, in stages as demand increases.
One of the key characteristics of the SCADA system is its ability to instantly identify faults and autocorrect them wherever possible. If a fault cannot be autocorrected an alarm is triggered to alert the operators so that they can take appropriate action promptly.
The control system is based on Progea’s Movicon.NExT platform. This is a modular SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system that can be expanded and adapted to meet the changing needs of the plant it is controlling.
To enhance this futureproofing, Movicon.NExT is also ‘open’ so can be integrated with control equipment and field devices from a wide range of different manufacturers. At the Naxçivan photoelectric park, the Movicon NExT is installed in a central control room and has been designed so that one single bespoke interface is used to monitor and control the whole site.
The network includes inverters, network analysers, protection equipment and sensors to monitor plant status and production output. It also checks and records environmental conditions, such as sunlight levels, temperature, wind speed and direction so that full performance analyses of the plant can be carried out.
A plant the size of the Naxçivan photovoltaic park naturally produces enormous quantities of data collected from its field devices, in this case about seven million separate pieces of information a month. Therefore, the Movicon.NExT system has been configured to reprocess information at regular intervals by means of the SCADA’s scripts and MySQL procedures and centralised it in optimised database tables. These tables are then used to manage data analysis and produce reports on long term operations.
