Intelligent monitoring across plant portfolio through new Fleet Manager
Berlin, 15 September 2016. skytron energy, the global leader in utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) monitoring, today announced a further enhanced version 2.4 of the renowned PVGuard® Supervision Platform. Focusing on fleet management, the new version will allow system owners and operators to monitor the technical performance of all PV power plants, inverters and alarms across their entire fleet in a single view, which they can filter or sort to suit their individual needs.
“We already operate more than 100 PV power plants, with new sites being added to our fleet almost weekly,” said Mike Loeser, Senior Manager of Asset Management at Strata Solar. “Through our close and professional collaboration with skytron energy, we can guarantee our customers a very high level of plant availability. As we approach 1GW of installed solar, the new portfolio management features of PVGuard will be of enormous benefit to our team, and help us to surmount our increasing workload.”
The new features of PVGuard provide a completely new way of obtaining a summary view of an entire fleet. All of a customer’s monitored inverters can be seen in one place, irrespective of plant. The graphical display can be sorted according to the performance ratio of each individual device. In this way, any poorly-performing inverters become obvious immediately. Added to this, the alarms from all power plants under supervision can be brought together and processed in a single place. Using proven drill-down techniques the view’s perspective can be refined, bringing in further detail.
“This enhanced version of the SCADA software, allows our customers to keep their maintenance and operations costs low for increasing portfolio sizes, yet still obtain high quality and efficient system monitoring,” said Hendrik Hoffmann, Director Software, Service and O&M at skytron energy.
The Fleet Manager is being made available in both the PVGuard Supervision Platform and in the PVGuard Mobile Apps. As a special bonus, a separate HTML version will also be available that can be embedded on a big screen in a control room or on a tablet PC. In particular, this will benefit operators providing on-call services for power plant fleets with the essential at-a-glance information they need. Access to the HTML application can be found at www.pv-guard.com.
About skytron® energy
skytron® energy has been developing integrated monitoring, control and supervision systems since 1977. Now one of the leading suppliers in the industry, specializing in utility-scale and commercial power plants, it has installed monitoring and control systems in more than 1,000 plants with a total capacity of 7.3 GWp. The company’s core competencies are plant condition monitoring, power plant control, remote plant supervision, system migration of existing power plants, operation & maintenance and PV asset management. As a technology leader, it has received a number of prestigious awards, including the highly coveted Solar Industry Award for the skylog® Data Logger System and the InterSolar Award for the PVGuard® Supervision Platform and for the StringGuard® string current measurement system. skytron® energy is a subsidiary of First Solar, Inc. For more information, please visit www.skytron-energy.com.
