It’s time to add up the cost of your new solar plant. Even with continuing decreases in cost, your modules will make up the biggest item on your capital expenditure (CAPEX) bill. Other installation materials, including trackers and balance of plant, will add another big chunk of CAPEX.
Then, you’ve got the cost of labor, land, inverters, interconnection, civil works, permitting, and a long etcetera. The name of the game is to get each of these costs down as far as possible without compromising the integrity of your project. And with so many big-ticket items to deal with, it can be easy to overlook a critical part of the project that is often taken for granted. Accounting for only around 0.7% of total plant CAPEX, the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is so financially irrelevant that it usually doesn’t even show up in industry cost breakdowns. As a result, there is a danger you could assume the SCADA system is unimportant. That would be a mistake, as you could soon find out once you start operating your plant.
Your SCADA system is your solar plant’s nervous system, giving you access to data that can be critical in improving production. The data is valuable when you get it and remains so thereafter: an incomplete picture of plant performance can hamper your ability to sell or refinance a project in the future. SCADA systems are usually mandatory for utility-scale solar plants. But that doesn’t mean all SCADA systems are the same. On the contrary, there is a wide range of systems on the market, and trying to get by with the most limited models could have a significant impact on your plant operations and management (O&M). Take inverter malfunctions, for example. In around 30% of cases, these can be resolved simply by resetting the inverter.
But if you have to send out a technician to reset the inverter then you could face a bill of hundreds or thousands of euros for the truck roll, not to mention the cost of lost production while the fault is waiting to be fixed. An advanced SCADA system would allow you to reset the inverter remotely, saving money and safeguarding production.
According to our calculation based on a 40 MW PV plant, a SCADA that offers integrated monitoring and control could reset a remote recloser within an hour, compared to a six-hour delay for a traditional O&M setup. This simple feature could result in savings of $9,000 per event. Not all SCADA systems can do this, though. Plus, there are numerous potential faults that can be avoided through careful SCADA system selection.
If someone cut through your data network during vegetation clearance, for example, a SCADA system with redundant fiber-optic loops would be able to auto-reconfigure communications so you could carry on operating the plant as usual. Similarly, if you lost irradiation readings from a pyranometer, then a good SCADA system might be able to complete your data set using information from other pyranometers or even satellites.
Beyond what happens in the event of a fault, a high-end SCADA system can help improve the profitability of your plant by carrying out analytics to identify sources of under performance or areas for preventive maintenance. Essentially, a good SCADA system can go much further than simply acting as your eyes on the ground. It can help you reduce O&M costs and make intelligent decisions around how to improve production and profitability.
By now, it should be obvious that differences across SCADA systems mainly relate to the availability of added functionalities and redundancies that help to de-risk your solar operations. The cost of these extras is not that great in the scheme of things. But skimping on them can have expensive consequences. That is why it is important to take an active role in the selection of your SCADA system and not just accept the first option available.
So, what should you look for in your SCADA system? Here are eight things to watch out for:
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In addition to these SCADA platform characteristics, you should pay attention to the following points during the design and installation phase of your solar plant:
What’s this all worth? At Inaccess, we estimate that identifying performance issues and minimizing unexpected downtime could result in a 2% performance ratio improvement, adding around $280,000 in revenue a year for a 100 MW.
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