The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) announced the Digital Solar Plant testbed. The testbed is led by IIC members LTI, a global technology consulting and digital solutions company, and GE Digital and will deploy in multiple phases at an L&T Solar plant in Rajasthan, India, beginning in early 2018.
The Digital Solar Plant testbed includes LTI’s solution framework for solar plants with GE Digital’s Predix platform integration. It provides the necessary insights and dashboards for plant status, forecasting and data analytics.
“Testbeds are the major focus and activity of the IIC and its members,” said IIC Executive Director, Dr. Richard Soley.
“Our testbeds, including the new Digital Solar Plant testbed, are where new technologies, applications, products, services and processes - the innovation and opportunities of the industrial Internet - can be initiated, thought through and rigorously tested to ascertain their usefulness and viability before coming to market,” Soley continued.
The testbed will collect data from various equipment within the solar plant on both dc and ac sides and monitor for anomalies in real-time. The testbed will implement a rule-based analysis engine to recognize the anomalies in the readings, and showcase the dashboard showing various KPIs for stakeholders like plant operators, investors, and analysts.
The testbed will implement analytics for prediction of energy that would be generated based on the historical data, equipment status, weather information and various other parameters. Analytics will also provide alerts in order to improve the capacity utilization factor.
Predictive maintenance is another key aspect of this solution, which will reduce the unplanned shutdowns of the plant and reduce the maintenance expenses.
“Utility companies face several issues as global interest in solar energy soars – from mitigating operational and regulatory risks to maintaining efficiencies and improving capacity utilization,” said Rohit Kedia, Chief Business Officer, Manufacturing and ERP, LTI. “With LTI’s expertise in IoT solution deployments coupled with GE Digital’s Predix platform, utility companies now have a technology proving ground to successfully manage the growing demand for solar energy.”
“Renewable energy is a transformative solution that will meet energy as well as economic challenges globally,” said Shyam Varan Nath, Director, Technology Integrations, IoT/Industrial Internet at GE Digital.
“We’re excited to partner with the IIC and LTI on this intelligent platform to help solar plant utilities forecast energy requirements. Using real-time data analytics, utilities can also ensure that all of their assets are working properly and that their plants are running efficiently,” concluded Nath.
