skytron® energy, a subsidiary of First Solar, has equipped 700MWp of Strata Solar power plants with its latest monitoring and supervision systems. Strata Solar, ranked among the top ten solar providers in North America, will entrust more than 1.4 GWp to the German PV plant expert by mid 2016. The almost 200 projects include retrofits as well as newly built plants, ranging from 1MWp to 80MWp.
An existing fleet of Strata Solar plants with a capacity of 535MWp has already been outfitted with SCADA software PVGuard®, the heart of skytron energy's system solution. While the interface PVGuard Com allows Strata Solar to integrate third party data from the PV system into the supervision platform PVGuard, the data server PVGuard ComBox automatically fetches the information stored on the plant's data logger. With it, large amounts of data can be stored locally, a must-have capability for plant owners in the U.S. All of the installed components have been especially designed for retrofits, so all PV power plants can be operated on a single platform, resulting in large efficiency gains for operations management.
"skytron energy's monitoring and supervision technology enables us to have the entire plant portfolio and all relevant plant data available at all times on a single software platform, increasing the efficiency of our plant supervision," explains Markus Wilhelm, CEO of Strata Solar. "Our initial goal was to optimize our existing plants, which we successfully managed with the support of skytron energy's SCADA system. We will now continue to integrate the system into our rapidly expanding portfolio of new plants and offer it to our partners as part of our developing O&M service portfolio. We are very pleased to have such a competent partner by our side."
Strata Solar has also commissioned skytron energy to install the PVGuard supervision platform in new PV plants with a total capacity of 165MWp. The plants were also equipped with the skylog® Data Logger System, which can read and save data from a variety of terminal devices, irrespective of their make. Furthermore, its power supply cannot be interrupted and provides electricity to all other monitoring components, ensuring operation even in the event of power failure. In areas with unreliable Internet connection, local data storage is secured by skylog's substantial data buffering capacity. The installed skyCONNi-Sun Universal Weather Unit is capable of integrating a number of different weather sensors into the plant's communication network, which enables the measurement of a wide range of weather data relevant for the operation and revenue of a PV power plant.
"The demand for solar power in the U.S. is on the rise, and Strata Solar is one of the most successful providers in the industry," notes Jörgen Klammer, Managing Director of skytron energy. "We truly value the partnership with Strata Solar and enjoy working with their highly professional teams. With our customized monitoring and supervision solution, we make even existing PV plants more flexible and profitable. Plant operators and owners worldwide entrust us with their utility-scale plants because our products and services are reliable and we deliver quality."