pv Europe: Recently, you equipped the 3 MW solar park Abuzaderas from Tauber-Solar in Spain within a three-quarter day at a fixed price with a more powerful monitoring system. What are the benefits for you customers?
Jens Wening: The customer sends us the information about his plant and the existing monitoring system and we offer him a fixed price, including working time and travel expenses. We take the risk and install the system on site and take it into operation. On the other hand, competitors offer a retrofit dependent on expenses, which involves a higher risk for customers. Our complete package also includes free software updates for our data logger. In the future, these can also be exchanged individually, if necessary, without re-upgrading the entire system.
How much were the retrofitting costs for the plant in Abuzaderas? And when and how quickly does it pay off?
The fixed price for the hardware, installation and travel costs was 1.95 euros / kWp. A general statement about the return on investment (ROI) is difficult. This is because our monitoring can detect both inverter faults, which can be remedied very quickly, as well as, for example, the reduction of a string, the elimination of which is slower. However, in the case of the failure or the reduction of a string, the probability is higher that it does not occur only once. As a rule, our service is pays off for the retrofitting of larger plants above 500 kWp.
Have you been offering fixed-price offers for the retrofitting of PV monitoring systems for a long time?
We have been offering this since September because we have seen that the retrofit market is interesting to us, not only in Spain, but also in Italy and Germany. Many manufacturers of inverters, who used the monitoring system earlier, have disappeared from the market in recent years. Even smaller local IT companies, which often equip PV parks with monitoring systems, especially in southern Europe, are often no longer on the market. Often the plant operators do not even know with which software the monitoring runs and they have problems to get upgrades. This often leads to very unstable data communication and increasing disturbances in the bus system, which gives rise to a new monitoring solution. In many cases, it may also be worthwhile to add existing monitoring systems, such as monitoring cameras, to a monitoring system.
Can existing systems and monitoring systems from different manufacturers be easily retrofitted with your data loggers?
Yes, our data loggers are compatible with a broad range of different systems from different manufacturers, which is a great customer advantage. They can monitor and control different inverters as well as batteries, can also take over the feed-in management and the active and reactive power as well as special circuits, for example, the activation of fans in the inverter space. Frequently existing sensors or energy meters can also be integrated into our system. On the other hand, many other providers, such as Huawei or SMA, have their own monitoring systems that are not interoperable with other manufacturers' products.
How do you manage to retrofit installations in such a short time as in Abuzaderas?
An important factor here is that the technology of our products is modular and scalable. In this way, we can integrate data loggers into the existing IT environment without great effort and re-assemble the data in the monitoring portal into a complete system. We network the existing stations with our data loggers over a conventional Ethernet network. For cable lengths of more than 100 meters, we use glass fibers, but we always try to use the existing communication technology as far as possible. If there is no internet connection in individual cases, we use mobile radio or satellites for the communication connection.
Do you also offer the operational management of solar plants?
Meteocontrol does not offer the operation itself, but we can offer this service through our large network of partners in all countries. In addition to retrofitting, we also see a growing market for new systems with self-consumption in Spain and Italy.
Interviewed by Hans-Christoph Neidlein
Stay informed, get our free newsletter twice a week. Register here: http://www.pveurope.eu/Newsletter
Related news:
https://www.pveurope.eu/planning/solar-power-generation-our-insight-stories-glance
