Swiss giant ABB has reached the cumulative 5 GW mark in providing programmable logic controller (PLC) based solar plant automation solutions in India. The company attributes this milestone to many significant solar power projects that it won across India for its utility-scale supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and string monitoring solutions.
ABB’s SCADA system, an automation control solution, helps in the efficient running of solar plants and enables plant operators to seamlessly monitor and analyze relevant solar project data in one place.
“This milestone reinforces ABB’s next level strategy of driving the renewable energy revolution with market-focused technologies. The recent measures unveiled by the Indian government in its annual budget will boost local manufacturing, encourage new investments, and address the challenge of availability of funds for setting up solar plants in India,” said AR Madhusudan, president-drive products, Motion, ABB India Ltd.
“This is a positive move for the industry and will catalyze India’s plans of generating 100 GW of solar power by 2022. We, at ABB, will continue to play a key role in achieving this target,” he added.
As solar power contributes to the increasingly growing share of the energy mix, the system component technology is continuously evolving to help lower the cost of energy production. Some of the crucial requirements from solar plant operators are constant supervision of the production, maximization of the solar energy yield, real-time information about the system status, and grid code compliance.
Delivered as a part of ABB’s Drive Products offering, the Utility-scale SCADA solutions reduce the cost and risk of investment in operating photovoltaic (PV) power plants. In most utility-scale solar PV projects, string boxes are fitted with monitoring systems that perform different kinds of protection, performance and efficiency monitoring. ABB’s string monitoring solutions reduce downtime and increase productivity, while improving the safety of PV panels, and the entire plant.
With tracking devices, the energy production of a PV plant can increase up to 30% in optimal locations. ABB’s AC500 PLC, part of the automation solution, uses high-precision solar algorithms to ensure all type of trackers precisely align and follow the movement of the sun with exceptional accuracy.
ABB has a strong footprint in the solar segment and has partnered with major EPC firms that are building projects across India, including Sterling Wilson, BELECTRIC, Vikram Solar and Mahindra Susten.
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