The market trend indicates an evolution in portfolio management. Currently, the integration of monitoring solutions indicates the real need to manage portfolio´s assets from a unique platform, the so called “one central solution”.
At GreenPowerMonitor, at DNV GL company, we offer the integration of our solutions in order to guarantee the best management experience possible, based on the concept of a single central solution.
The integration among GPM monitoring solutions allows greater efficiency in the configuration, monitoring and even in the detection of incidents in a device, in the plant and even in the portfolio.
Besides, the flexibility of GPM solutions allows the integration with third parties through the development of specific programming to comply with the required communication protocols and data flow.
Sometimes third-party hardware and software are not robust or reliable enough to meet certain requirements and standards. However, the GPM engineering team can fill these gaps by developing new functionalities to meet the project´s needs.
The integrating monitoring challenge
Project description: 4 plants built in Egypt with a capacity of 50MWac (64MWp) each for a total of 200MWac (256MWp). The solar energy produced by the 4 plants will prevent the emission of 311,500 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and will save $ 31.5 million in fossil fuel and 680,300 m3 of water per year.
Requirements: To monitor the project is required a system able to integrate plant control services with asset management ones.
In addition, the client also needed specific software able to work with an external PPC provider in order to have full control of the plants, even remotely.
GPM solutions to the challenge
GPM offered the installation of its GPM SCADA and GPM Horizon solutions to monitor and control the plants.
GPM SCADA is our local management solution used to control individual devices, execute all the plant’s commands, and extract in real-time data for all parameters.
GPM SCADA can be integrated easily with the GPM Horizon online platform, whose multi-technology design allows managing mixed portfolios.
The integration of both solutions allows obtaining high quality data and synchronizing easily the information between the Data Acquisition System (DAS) and the SCADA system with the asset management platform.
Integrating third party data
The integrated solution proposed by GPM allows also the integration with third parties Power Plant Controller providers. It has been developed a specific software program to comply with the communication protocols and the data flow which enable the compliance with Egypt’s network code and EETC regulations.
GreenPowerMonitor currently manages 581MW and 14 plants in Egypt, included in the 1.7GW portfolio of the MEA & India region.
DNV GL acquired GreenPowerMonitor in June 2016, with the aim of putting together its experience in the wind sector with GreenPowerMonitor’s photovoltaic energy monitoring and asset management solutions. GreenPowerMonitor is currently managing more than 32GW (between Solar and Wind energy) in 72 countries.