Revamping of the plants and technological solutions for monitoring and maintenance of the plants allows us to optimize the managing of our portfolio of photovoltaic plants and maximize its production, generating value and contributing to the development of the industry.
REVAMPING, LONG LIVE PV PLANTS: THE VENUSIA CASE STUDY
By revamping we mean a modernization of a tech plant aimed at prolonging its operational life, recovering its maximum efficiency. In the photovoltaic industry, this activity allows the operators to avoid economic losses, consistent ones too, caused by decreases in productivity due to the degradation of the main components.
The inverter is one of the main components of a photovoltaic plant not just in terms of technology but also under the economic one too, due both to the cost of this device and to the economic losses that can incur from its malfunctioning. The decrease in efficiency and operational availability of the inverter leads to, in time, losses in productivity.
Our photovoltaic plants portfolio includes about 800 inverters of many different brands, for which we are developing a general plan of modernization and unification, based on our experience in the field, such as the one with the Venusia plan, in Latium.
Venusia plant began operations in 2011, composed of 34.500 polysilicon modules, for 1,150 strings connected to 16 centralized inverters. It has a total power capacity just above 8 MW. The original inverters soon turned out to be unreliable due to numerous breakdowns of their internal components, such as the controller card, the IGBT card, the cooling fans and AC meters.
These flaws have determined a progressive and irreversible decrease in performance through 2014 and 2015, leading to a loss of 1,110 MWh.
To solve the issue we planned the revamping of the most seriously flawed units: the solution was to substitute these inverters with the one of a different brand, with a new stringing of the photovoltaic modules.
Following substitution operations of the original units, we measured an increase in efficiency of those section of the plant between 10% and 18% on average per year. This increase is due both to a raise in availability of the new machines during operations and to the increase in transforming performance.
Revamping of the plants and technological solutions for a proper monitoring and maintenance of the plants, such as aerial thermography or electroluminescence, allows us to optimize the managing of our portfolio of photovoltaic plants and maximize its production, generating value and contributing to the development of the industry.