For project managers and developers, the process of establishing protection relay settings can be confusing and often overlooked as part of the project planning process. This post is intended to clarify the process and persons involved to support better planning.

Retrofitting a legacy solar site with a new monitoring or control system can bring both uncertainty and risk to the daily operations and business reporting functions. Having performed hundreds of retrofits with our own Acuity platform, we've developed a guide for new customers to reduce the retrofit migration risk by supporting proper planning.

Due to the potential danger associated with faults at these high voltages, one of the equipment types used is called a protection relay. If you've never heard this term before, you may have heard a related name, "recloser." While these names are not the same, they are related and are often used interchangeably, incorrectly.

The power of high quality data, managed alarming capabilities, pre-calculated KPI values, and access to high interval trend data for analysis purposes cannot be overstated. These benefits alone are game-changing improvements to daily operations and critical reporting activities for many of our clients, but there is still additional benefits. Real time fleet-wide awareness.

Normalization and pre-calculated KPIs are part of the secret-sauce that differentiates Acuity from other SCADA or cloud-monitoring solutions, where the data collection and analysis pipeline is architected to support the needs of the end users who rely on information to support critical operational and reporting requirements.

When solar modules are manufactured, they are tested and labeled with a nominal power rating. For example, 445W. To determine this rating, each solar module is tested using a special device that simulates sunlight at a specific level and measures the temperature while the electrical charge characteristics of the module are measured and recorded. All of this information and the nominal power rating is based on an agreed upon reference point called Standard Test Conditions (STC).

By eliminating many of the root causes associated with high quality data collection in the Acuity edge computing platform, a breadth of processing and analysis efficiencies become possible. First, alarming.

To understand whether your solar generation is working properly or whether you have a problem that should be addressed falls into the domain called ‘Performance Engineering’. Performance engineering refers to both the activity and persons responsible for determining if a system is operating properly when exposed to specific conditions.

The ability to make timely and informed decisions is the difference between success and failure. For owners and operators of renewables, poor data can lead to insurmountable lost opportunity costs as well.