Smart Assistance, Solar Partner Guards the Revenue of New Energy Power Station

The following article comes from Century New Energy Network, wrote by Haiyu

In this special period when enterprises are faced with many difficulties such as reduced personnel and poor traffic, TBEA Sunoasis realizes many of such “impossibilities” against the odds, sticks to the path of “intelligence” and “high efficiency” and finds its own “philosophy”- at Anywhere Anytime, making each operation and maintenance act supported by data. TBEA Sunoasis believes that data is the most powerful speaker.

Break the limit of time and space, intelligence is to replace manual operation

After anti-dumping and anti-bribery investigation of Europe and America in 2012, domestic solar industry has been developing rapidly with the issuance of series of positive policies and as of the end of 2019, reserved solar plant scale has exceeded 200GW. With the huge increase of solar plants, digitalization and scale development become the reality for domestic solar plants, which also impose higher standard for operation and maintenance of power station, i.e., solar plant shall not only operate normally, but also in an efficient manner.

“Traditional operation & maintenance and monitoring will not even satisfy the normal running of a power station.” said one of TBEA Sunoasis’ technicians.

As limited by many aspects, traditional solar plant has lots of pain points that have not been addressed effectively, such as high operation & maintenance costs, high malfunction rate of equipment, low generation rate, low informatization management level, low support for decision-making, etc. Many factors affect the normal running of solar plant. If such limits can be known in advance and addressed accordingly, then everything will be better.

“Such difficulties must be solved in a better way,” said one of TBEA Sunoasis’ technicians.

Against such background, TBEA launches the “Solar Partner” Solar Plant Data Service Integrated Solution.

As told, this solution includes “TB-eCloud intelligent solar operation & maintenance cloud platform” and “TB-eCloud intelligent solar monitoring and analysis system” as well as “TB-eCloud intelligent solar power forecast system”. The former fully realizes operation & maintenance functions including remote monitoring of equipment status, remote inspection, remote handling of malfunction and remote intelligent diagnosis. The latter utilizes analysis of big data, optimizes the operation & maintenance works of plant and helps power station reduce waste, increase revenue and realize refined and intelligent operation & maintenance. The power forecast system targets at grid assessment which is reduced by 15-20% each year.

“Solar Partner completely breaks the limit of time and space and replaces human brain with intelligence and science with labor.” said the technician.

If TB-eCloud breaks the limit of time and space for operation & maintenance of power station, the utilization of UAV intelligent detection system makes everything stereoscopic.

The “UAV solar plant intelligent inspection system” successfully solves the recognized technical difficulty in inspection of solar plant, including the identification and location of malfunctioned modules and is applicable to all types of solar plant, such as plain, hill, mountain, water surface, complementary project between agricultural and solar, and complementary project between livestock and solar plant.

In the meantime, TBEA Sunoasis found via professional analysis that in the solar plant, the malfunction rate of combiner box accounts for 56.12%, that of part, inverter, oblique uniaxial support and connector 33.50%, 2.54%, 3.40% and 3.72% respectively. Solar area is the one with high malfunction rate in solar plant and traditional method of mainly monitoring the booster station can’t effectively solve this issue.

To solve this particular problem, TBEA Sunoasis combines intelligent system with intelligent UAV system and provides all-round intelligent protection that transcends time and space for solar plant.

Break the restrictions of labor and material and embrace high efficiency

If intelligence counts as one of TBEA Sunoasis’ edges, high efficiency will be its another benefit. Power station runs smoothly at high efficiency. “Stopping power station from working for one day, you lose the day and can’t never make it up for the lost power; so if you want more profits, you need more power stations to generate more power.” said one of TBEA Sunoasis’ technicians. TB-eCloud intelligent solar operation & maintenance cloud platform breaks the traditional dilemma of strong reliance on manual labor for site monitoring, inspection and malfunction handling.

Take the 20MW solar plant as an example, during operation & maintenance, manual inspection requires examination of 4,480 branches by square matrix and takes 60 hours; an engineer needs 2 hours to look for and record abnormal branches and if it’s a 320MW solar plant, the time would be 4 days, increasing by huge amount. And such calculation is made for technicians familiar with the process and without considering the influence of other factors such as weather. If other factors are considered, the time spent will no doubt increase further.

TB-eCloud intelligent solar monitoring and analysis system solves the tough issue of traditional monitoring and analysis system in an efficient manner. Compared with traditional system, this system is more efficient and clear and relevant personnel can grasp the important information within a short period of time.

For example, it separates the monitoring of solar area and booster station to focus on key areas, key equipment and at the same time divide alarm by area, type and level to solve the urgent matter firstly and make clear the small matters..

Solar plant intelligent operation & maintenance cloud platform, as shown in actual practice, can improve the automation of equipment and system defect alarm and malfunction positioning, reduce site inspection of equipment and lower the costs in operation & maintenance. And the utilization of this system improves the generation of solar plant by 3% and its revenue by 1%.

Intelligent UAV system greatly improves the efficiency of operation & maintenance. The ability of 7WM@single row - 15WM@double row /UAV/time for 60min further ensures the long-term and stable operation of the solar plant and effectively improves its generation and profitability.

Take TBEA Sunoasis Yamansu Solar Plant as an example, the intelligent UAV, while spending 41 hours collecting data, completes the 150MWp inspection of plot 3 of this plant. During that time, UAVs took off for 41 times, completed 31 air lines in 31 areas, and examined 427,426 modules and 23,169 series (2,596 series for serialization of 22 modules and 20,573 series for serialization of 18 modules), with effective suggestions on elimination and rectification of defects proposed. Compared with manual examination and generalization, it no doubt improves efficiency to a level unparalleled for manual operation.

From this example, we can infer the whole picture. TBEA Sunoasis has been marching ahead in the solar industry, and the same effort applies to wind power.

Regarding the mid-to-long strategic objectives, TBEA Sunoasis will rely on its advantages in primary business, with its product design closely integrated with businesses like engineering, generation operation and equipment manufacturing to provide whole-set of software product and data service solution. Explore the software and new service mode related to future clean energy and become world leading data service provider in this regard.

Nowadays, when “intelligence” and “efficiency” have become the goals and labels for most enterprises in the area of new energy, TBEA Sunoasis practices them in an honest and low-profile manner, just like the character of Northwest China.

(Forwarded from Century New Energy Network)