A tool for the performance evaluation and failure detection of Amareleja PV plant (Acciona) from SCADA

Póster presentado a la 17th European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications, EPE-ECCE Europe. Ginebra (Suiza), 2015.This paper describes a tool developed for the performance evaluation and failure detection in a 45.6 MWp PV plant installed by the company Acciona in Amareleja (Portugal). The paper describes the PV plant configuration and its SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), the measured variables and the main functionalities of the software. Some of these functionalities are the automatic and accurate PSTC (Power under standard test conditions1) calculation for each generator and for the whole PV Plant, the reference production that would be delivered by the PV plant assuming a 100% availability, the hierarchy of SCADA alarms, the detection of long-term trends and degradation in PV generators, possible hidden problems in the different equipment and systems composing the PV plant, etc. This tool entered into operation in 2011 and is working properly since then.This work has been partially financed by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission with the project PVCROPS (Photovoltaic Cost Reduction, Reliability, Operational Performance, Prediction and Simulation – Grant Agreement no: 308468) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant DPI2013-42853-R