Santerno, an Italian company, has developed an indoor photovoltaic power plant controller (PPC) for utility-scale power plants. This controller provides a single, integrated control and monitoring point while reducing costs. Santerno is showcasing this technology at booth 746 at SolarPower International (SPI) 2013.
“By developing our own power plant controller, we can unify the management of Santerno solar inverters and other power plant monitoring and data acquisition and monitoring (SCADA) systems onto a single interface,” said Franco Valentini, Marketing Director of Santerno. “When you add support for our online network management portal, you have a complete controller solution, including remote monitoring.”
SanternoPPC is a complete control solution that provides a single access point for the power plant's SCADA control system, including all photovoltaic inverters, data loggers, and ancillary services, eliminating the need for a separate management system for solar inverters.
The solution also provides an automatically adjusting proportional-integral (PI) controller that operates at the plant level to ensure all inverters match grid code requirements.
Typically, a trial-and-error approach is used to match standard PI regulators because the power parameters are pre-configured using power plant data and power characteristic data from network points of contact (POIs), automatically matching international grid code requirements. However, unlike other systems, SanternoPPC does not employ this approach.
PPC is an optional configuration used to control the static var compensator (SVC) or static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) at the network interface, which enables the power plant to expand its power capacity or to enable flexible AC transmission system functions.
The solution also features digital control capabilities, including closed-loop active power reduction, closed-loop inactive power control, closed-loop PIO voltage control, and P(f) reduction control.
