The establishment of solar farms continues to grow in South Africa, with Eskom’s renewable statistics page indicating that 2787 MW of solar generating power is connected to the grid. Of this capacity 2287 MW are from PV photovoltaic (PV) plants, while a further 500 MW comes from concentrated solar plants (CSPs).
However, it is important to note that solar farms are not a silver bullet solution to South Africa’s energy crisis. While they can play a significant role in addressing the country’s energy needs, they are unlikely to completely replace traditional forms of energy generation soon.
Instead, a combination of renewable energy and traditional energy sources may be the most effective solution. Here renewable sources such as solar farms must be implemented correctly from the get-go to ensure they effectively contribute to the country’s distributed energy resources (DERs).
Enter process automation
With any project there are several issues that come into play when establishing a solar farm. One is process automation, which plays a vital part in ensuring solar farms are reliable and efficient over a long period of time. Importantly, process automation reduces time to market and cost of solar projects, with optimised engineering and design, and simpler installation and commissioning that are compliant to grid codes and standards. This in turn maximises revenue and optimises operations, with a focus on people and asset safety, system reliability, operational efficiency and security against cyberattacks.
The benefits of process automation in solar farming
To contextualise the important of process automation in the establishment and running of farms, we need to unpack the benefits.
Process automation provides insight into how energy is being used and how it can be optimised. Some of its benefits are:
• Tracks how the PV energy produced is consumed by the loads, stored, or injected to the grid.
• Follows and analyses the trends of the PV production alongside the loads’ consumption.
• Calculates economic benefits related to the reduced consumption of energy from the grid.
• Assesses PV system performance by detecting drifts or malfunctions, with immediate fault notification.
• Provides information on power quality disturbances, especially harmonics and unbalance, since inverters can affect the power quality of the electrical installation.
Process automation also provides insight into grid-connected PV production and offers the following important control functions:
• Limits PV production to avoid injection of power to the grid.
• Manages power factor at the point of grid connection to avoid penalties.
• Shifts loads to the period of PV production to maximise self-consumption.
• Participates in demand response, especially when storage or generators are also part of the installation.
Lastly, together with advanced cloud-based analytics, solar plants can benefit from the optimised usage of local electricity production, which generates additional economic savings. By considering complementary criteria such as changing electricity tariffs, weather forecasts and expected consumption, advanced analytics provide the optimal system configuration.
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