Remote Service Centers for Renewable Energy

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Remote Service Centers for Renewable Energy

Marc Antoine*, Gabriele Nani**, Sarala M. Naidu***

ABB Power Systems, Baden* (Switzerland), Genoa** (Italy)

ABB India Development Center, Bangalore*** (Bangalore)

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly important for investors and owners of renewable power to monitor and manage machinery in order to improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. This can be especially important when plants are geographically widely spread, such as Solar PV plants or Wind parks. A simple solution may be to add a web server to the existing plant in order to view the data via the Internet, but this can make the plant vulnerable to cyber security threats. However, by using the remote services model, with data delivered over the cloud, the cyber security risks can be properly addressed.

This enables the customer to focus on the plant issues without the need for specialized IT setup and support, or time consuming involvement with connections, firewalls, and different types of network or wireless configurations.

Fingerprints of plant equipment, or of an entire fleet, are the base for tracking and reporting Key Performance Indicators of the plant, and taking proactive actions. This is used to run full plant maintenance activities from remote Service Centers. The approach is also used to improve lifecycle management on the customer side. Moreover, cyber security itself can be monitored and optimized remotely. This approach provides a powerful solution for advanced Operation & Maintenance of renewable power. Service engineers and plant process specialists can profitably cooperate from the remote Service Center by monitoring maintenance and process KPI’s in order to optimize the O&M activities.


1 Introduction

Today, the justification of plant budgets is not only based on engineering criteria related to Operation and Maintenance (O&M), but they have become increasingly more focused on Return On Assets (ROA). The primary task of asset management is to reduce costs by identifying performance problems, improving predictive maintenance, extending asset lifecycles, and most of all, developing solid business plans for investments. This requires services for lifecycle costing, which implies cost minimization starting with the initial investment, continuing through the lifecycle of the equipment, and ending with recycling or evolution to the next equipment generation. These services typically consist of:

Monitoring the condition and identifying performance problems performance of assets.

Improving predictive maintenance (reducing downtime). Optimizing asset lifecycles and evaluating the impact of asset failure.

Having access to service engineers and product experts.

Ensuring compliance to safety and security regulations. Using state-of-art automation, web and cyber security technologies, it is possible to offer and implement such services from remote Service Centers. Such remote services optimize the operation and maintenance activities by providing proactive solutions which avoid production downtime and improve performance. Remote services also provide significant benefits by making it possible to connect the best (or most familiar) service engineers to the customer quickly and determine the necessary actions efficiently. The benefits of an on-site visit are extended. This paper illustrates basic aspects and advantages of remote Service Centers for renewable energy plants.

2 Remote plant maintenance

Remote monitoring and plant maintenance is an increasing demand, specifically for unattended or remotely located power plants. The Remote Service platform is connected to fleet of remote renewable energy plants and collects real-time process data, handles alarm and failure detection, provides data reporting and ensures that the plants are meeting their performance targets (Figure 1).

In addition to guaranteeing the plant performance ratio, this service has a number of compelling benefits, which explain its rapid impact on the PV market. The PV plants are monitored from dedicated remote PV Service Centers, which use high-speed and secure data transmission connections and are manned solely by accredited technicians. Besides collecting and storing real-time and historic data on all critical plant equipment, the service continuously analyzes the data and monitors the KPI’s to ensure the plant is operating at its stipulated performance ratio. If the plant isn’t meeting its production target, an engineer at the Service Center is automatically informed, and then performs a detailed diagnosis to identify the cause of the problem. The Service Center can then rectify the problem by remote, or dispatch a service team to the plant if necessary.


Figure 1: Remote plant maintenance.

In addition to monitoring energy production at the plant, the service also forecasts energy production over the next 24 hours. Algorithms combine historic weather data and next-day meteorological forecasts with the plant’s configuration to calculate the next day’s production.

An additional service, to unload the customer from tedious data management tasks, consists of backup of system data and production data at the Service Center. These backups can be used to restore the system at site in case a crash recovery is unavoidable. The backups are used for restore tests at regular intervals, in order to prove the backup quality.

The main features of these remote services are:

Management of plants from the same web portal.

Automatic notification of faults or significant events.

Automatic and manual schedule of interventions.

Details about interventions and results. Knowledge database of interventions according to plants.

Automatic reports on production and operators’ actions.

Integration of video surveillance systems.

Spare parts management.

Periodic and automatic recovery of backup from the remote service server.

Remote operator available 24/7 on the replica of local operator station for:

Management of the field operator’s first intervention.

Management of specialist’s corrective maintenance actions.

Diagnostic analysis with the technical team.

The benefits of this approach are:


Online remote monitoring of plant KPI’s improves plant performance.

Avoiding penalties due to low-performance.

Fast response when emergency support is needed.

Automated diagnostic tools and remote experts reduce resolution time.

Analysis possible across a plant fleet.

3 Remote secure access

The Remote Service platform provides remote connection security between the Service Center and the customer site. This platform enables secure, real-time remote monitoring and control of devices located at customer sites (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Secure access to remote sites.

The remote site and the Service Center perform two-way authentication prior to initiating communication. To provide end-to-end security, Remote Service utilizes standard secure communication protocols with encryption. The customer can set granular permission on remote activities. Such activities include data collection, desktop sharing and file transfer. Secure data transmission begins at the source, with control over the types of data being collected for transmission. The Remote Service platform is configurable, in that data access can be enabled or disabled based on the asset owner's security policy.

4 The remote connection point

ServiceGate is a remote-enabled service interface that provides process automation systems an on-site connection to the Service Center. It serves as the entry point to the remote site and connects to the Service Center via the Remote Service platform (Figure 2).With fully user-defined security features, this on-site node acts as a “service coordinator”. It supports system


configuration, preventive and corrective maintenance management, system diagnostics, condition monitoring, corrective implementation, and service scheduling (Figure 3). As an additional option it can handle work order tracking and spare parts. ServiceGate is a single point for service solutions, the portal through which proactive remote services can be delivered quickly and cost-effectively.

Access between the plant network and ServiceGate is through a secure tunnel and can be controlled by the customer. The benefit is to have service applications running on-site, readily accessible to the staff in the Service Center without the lost time or travel costs of getting a service expert on-site.

Figure 3: The remote connection point (ServiceGate).

5 Monitoring agents

The diagnostics collection for remote monitoring and service is based on an agent model. The agents collect diagnostics information for analysis from a local or remote node in a distributed LAN system. The data is packaged into compressed cabinet (.cab) files that are attached to the reported problem for further analysis by service engineers or experts. This enables diagnostics information gathering from several products in a consistent way. This speeds up the problem resolution process performed by the service organization. The main functions in data collection are as follows:

• Collect diagnostic data from node(s) in a distributed system: o System diagnostic data. o Process data, alarms/events. o Log files. o System report.

• The data collected by the agent software are in turn used as follows: o Explore the contents of the collected data. o Analyse relevant parts of the collected data. o Dashboard report generation. o Statistics, etc.

Service engineers do not have to call customers and have them manually select nodes and


enable these agents. They just need to view and analyze the data that is sent by these collection agents remotely. Around the world, expert engineers are available to diagnose and fix issues remotely. In case an agent is not up and running to transfer data, the collected data will be kept on the remote node until the agent is up and running again.

These remote service technologies save time and help reduce tedious, unproductive work. That means customers have more time to concentrate on business, and service teams have more time to address customer’s most critical operating issues.

The agents are separated into two categories: Systems related and Process / KPI related.

5.1 System related agents These Agents are targeted at collecting information about the operating system of individual nodes on the automation plant network, such as e.g. Environment variables, Windows error reports, event logs, installed software, dump files, etc.

5.2 Process- and business-related agents for PV plants and Wind parks • Aggregated alarms:

An alarm matrix agreed during the ServiceGate configuration defines which types of alarm/event conditions are needed for the O&M activities, e.g. tracking PV panels faulty conditions warning.

• Predictive maintenance agent located on the ServiceGate: Definition of the O&M alarm matrix (matrix agreed with the customer containing the maintenance conditions) and KPI’s to monitor. Based on configuration information it is possible to correlate the occurrence of an alarm condition with its return to normal state. This means the aggregated information about the duration of the native alarm condition is calculated and handled for maintenance purposes.

• Predictive maintenance agent located at the Service Center: 1. Agent located at the Service Center to process long-term data across multiple

plants or equipment types, in order to generate fleet KPI's (e.g. cross-correlations etc.).

2. Agent located at the Service Center to analyze alarms/events messages ( fleet KPI's for predictive maintenance): alarm/event (native and/or aggregated) messages are grouped by types and/or devices over a selectable time period to provide the number of occurrences of a faulty condition which can be used to estimate the remaining life time of the device. At this level it is possible to order the device list by number of errors descending thus showing the most critical devices (with the highest number of errors) for maintenance planning.

5.3 Operation & Maintenance log book The O&M log book collects tickets with O&M activities and tracks operator actions, start- and End-date (Figure 4).


Figure 4: O&M Log Book example.

6 The web portal

The web portal represents the final and unique interface through which the renewable plants “communicate” with the external world.

6.1 Web access The customer can access his plant through a web browser (Office PC, private Laptop, mobile device, etc.) and he can manage all plants from the same web portal. The login (Figure 5) provides different levels of authorization based on roles defined in IEC-62351, for example:

• Service Manager: can assign plants for maintenance. • Administrator: can use all functions and tools. • Operator: can operate at plant level (by inserting the O&M activities/actions in charge). • Engineer: can operate the plant and can modify the configuration details of the plant. • Intervention Planner: can plan all O&M interventions, and can read all other functions.

Figure 5: Role-based login to the web portal.

6.2 Alarms and Notifications The system, besides alarms from the plant, can also generate new alarms (Figure 6) defined by the customer, like “Low KPI Value”, generated by an agent or a calculation on the captured data.


The system provides a preliminary diagnosis of possible operational failures and immediately notifies the responsible personnel through SMS/email (Figure 7) about potential (or current) problems in the plant in real-time.

Figure 6: Additional alarm or early warning.

Figure 7: Alarm notification.

6.3 Data collection presentation Maps (Google-based) showing the geographic location of the renewable plants using icons (Figure 8). Another frame, close to the map, contains a list of available plants with dynamic traffic lights and icons summarizing:


• Contractual KPI's status (e.g. production KPI). • Presence of open maintenance tickets. • Status of the connection to the ServiceGate.

Figure 8: Map representation of top-level data and locations.

7 Business applications

The business applications belong to the Business Intelligence (BI) layer implemented in the Service Center and are value added features for the Service Center. One of the key applications for renewable energy plants is the energy production forecast.

Renewable energy is a valuable resource in order to respond effectively to national obligations following the Kyoto protocol and the shortage of domestic sources. In order to reduce the high costs of energy imbalance that is inevitably produced from renewable sources, as non-programmable, to the system of the electric network, an energy production forecasting tool becomes increasingly important. The comparison between the ideal and the real energy production enables continuous improvement of the maintenance strategy and actions.

This tool is based on automatically received data from a high-resolution weather forecast provider. The information is processed by the tool, that focuses its analysis on the most significant parameters of the weather forecast (e.g. for PV, the solar radiation, temperature, etc.) and on the plant configuration. The result is the forecast of energy production within the next 24 hours. The system is based on self-learning algorithms (neural networks, nonlinear/linear system modeling,…). As the data stored in the database increase day by day,


the margin of forecasting error decreases. Furthermore the forecast data (stored in the database) are ready for the transmittal every day to the grid operator.

7.1 Production and performance cockpit(s) Other business applications, such as Performance Ratio monitoring, Equipment condition trending, Fleet analysis, etc. are shown in dedicated dash boards of the web portal (see Figures below):

Figure 9: Typical PV real-time cockpit for current production level and relevant KPI’s.

Figure 10: Online performance monitoring.


Figure 11: Real-time equipment trending.

Figure 12: Historical data dashboard for fleet analysis.

7.2 Reporting and ticketing system The Remote Service platform stores data of renewable energy plants and the web portal uses these data to automatically generate specific reports, such as:

• Production reports. • Interventions and Operators’ actions reports (Figure 13). • O&M log book (Figure 4). • Executive level reports with information necessary to manage the plants (Figure 14).


• Business analysis level reports. • Predefined reports with structured information.

Figure 13: Example of an Intervention Report.

Figure 14: Investors monthly business report.

8 Health checks

Equipment health checks consist of Fingerprint diagnostics. These services identify equipment performance and reliability issues through data collection and analysis.


Fingerprints generate both a system benchmark and an improvement plan which can be delivered either on-site or remotely, using the Remote Service platform.

Fingerprint tools are available for a variety of plant equipment, e.g.

- for the automation system and related software or hardware components;

- for cyber security settings;

- for electrical process equipment;

- for mechanical process equipment.

Based on the fingerprints, improvement recommendations are determined and scheduled for implementation, to start a continuous optimization process [1]. Improvements may be completed all at once or scheduled to be completed incrementally over a period of time. In either case, the implementation ensures that changes can be made and maintained remotely with steady progress toward the performance goal.

9 Conclusions

The essential elements for efficient operation of renewable energy plants consist of early diagnosis of problems in plant equipment, and optimization of maintenance activities. Diagnosis helps to detect and avoid disturbances or degradation at an early stage. Maintenance activities for individual components can be optimized according to economic production criteria.

Plant managers are expected to maximize generated output while keeping costs at the minimum. Whereas some plant managers are tempted to reduce maintenance expenditure to gain an immediate improvement in bottom-line profitability, the long-term effects can be the exact opposite.

In addition to predictive, preventive and corrective maintenance, process analysis/support and remote diagnostics, the Service Center room can now provide remote operational control. For example, solar PV energy production is forecasted based on the weather forecast and other equipment condition data. The ability to analyze, fine-tune and control energy production remotely, is an added value for grid operators.

It is also an open solution that can be implemented in power plants using equipment from different suppliers, provided the field information can be received via common communication standards. The result for investors and plant owners is enhanced plant performance, reduced O&M costs and improved availability.


10 References

[1] “Improving operations and maintenance through remote optimization”, M. Antoine, G. Nani, PowerGen Europe 2012.

[2] “Information Security for Power System Control Operations”, IEC-62351.

11 Acronyms

BI Business Intelligence KPI Key Performance Indicator O&M Operation & Maintenance PV Photo-Voltaic ROA Return On Asset

Remote Service Centers for Renewable Energy

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