‘Big brother’ system designed to monitor solar plants

Using a network of synchronized sensors, a new system provides energy and meteorological data every tenth of a second to more accurately predict the performance of solar plants.

Solar plants do not always provide energy. Rather, they do so only when they can, as they depend on the weather. A single cloud, for example, can cause a drop in production.

To address the uncertainty inherent in solar plant operations, the Instrumentation and Industrial Electronics research group at the University of Cordoba has developed a new monitoring system that uses a variety of sensors to provide more detailed, precise, and synchronized information about solar plant performance. This is a Big Brother-style monitoring system designed not only to observe and predict these plants’ performance, but also to adjust the auction that sets energy prices to more realistic conditions.

The research is published in the IEEE Sensors Journal.

The goal was to analyze how solar plants generate energy in relation to weather conditions. To achieve this, the team utilized devices that have been on the market for several years, to which they applied new implementations. Thanks to these devices, the collection of equipment, which they have named Extended Phasor Measurement Units, can gather energy (such as current, voltage, and frequency) and meteorological (such as solar radiation) data.

The key is that this data is collected every tenth of a second, in great detail; so detailed, in fact, that they generate around 2 to 3 gigabytes of data each month. Furthermore, because the devices are synchronized with each other and located in different areas, including nearby solar plants, the information they provide allows us to see what has happened, and anticipate what is going to happen.

As UCO researcher Víctor Pallares López explained, “It’s about closely monitoring the systems to gather as much information as possible and being able to react to any negative effects that could affect the stability of the electrical grid.”

The more closely they are monitored, the sooner action can be taken to isolate the system from potential disturbances by disconnecting it and preventing their spread.

The sensors have been fine-tuned, tested in both the laboratory and at two Pozoblanco plants, and all the errors have been reviewed, so the team is now immersed in the second phase of the project: analyzing all the data generated.

This work is currently being conducted as part of the national project “Edge management of photovoltaic plants based on an analytical architecture with near-perfect temporal precision,” with reference PID2024-158091OB-C21.