Automotive factory near Tatabánya boosted with self-regulating solar power plant - video

In a first for the country, the Siemens Zrt. complex control solution was used for the first time at the AGC Glass Hungary Kft. site around the country, a solar power plant with nearly 9,000 solar panels on a 5-hectare site, which manufactures rear and side glass for the automotive industry.

The investment, with a capacity of 4.002 MWp DC and an annual energy production of 4.8 GWh, could cover the annual energy consumption of approximately 1,900 households. The solar power plant was designed, built and operated by E.ON Energiatermelő Kft., which selected Siemens as a partner for the development of the solution at the design stage

- according to a press release from the latter company.

More and more industrial companies in Hungary are taking serious steps to green their energy consumption. But they face challenges in integrating weather-dependent solar power into their systems in a cost-effective way. Currently, industrial end-users are not allowed to feed energy from their solar power plants that is not used locally back into the domestic public grid. It is therefore mandatory to provide backwatts and islanding protection for these self-consumption reduction systems.

Industrial companies can provide themselves with predictable green energy

In its summary, Siemens explains that for both types of protection, an established technical solution has been developed for smaller power plants. For backwatts protection, data loggers are most often used on the inverters that convert the DC to AC and this is complemented by a meter. In the case of islanding protection, a dedicated protection device usually monitors the presence of grid voltage and shuts down the plant if this is lost due to a system fault. However, for larger plants, the design of systems such as the above can be problematic. For example, a large number of data loggers would be required, or the power generation and power supply may be at different voltages, and the size of the plant alone may result in a distance of several kilometres between the detection and the location of the intervention.

The German company is now providing an alternative to these conservation and regulatory challenges, as well as to the monitoring of large power plants, by combining substation data collection with advanced substation protocols with its new software-based solar power plant control solution.

They emphasise that this intelligent, automated system thus addresses backwatts protection challenges primarily through regulation, affecting up to hundreds of inverters. It also serves as a backwatts protection intervention tool for the communication network. The solution provides complex monitoring at the field level by collecting information from the power distribution equipment and inverters of the power plant sections. It also transmits the necessary data from the field level to cloud-based aggregator monitoring systems, enabling remote plant and power distribution monitoring, even for multiple plants.

The system can provide a solution for sites that want to combine multiple renewable energy generation assets (e.g. with wind integration), but can also manage energy storage in addition to solar inverters and wind turbines, among others, they point out.

How the solar power plant works

As such a self-consumption reducing control in a large industrial environment has never been done before in Hungary, the AGC Glass Hungary Kft. project in Hungary is a pioneer.

The 34 100 kVA inverters Siemens, responsible for capturing solar energy and converting it from DC to AC, are monitored and controlled by the SICAM Photovoltaic Plant Control application, developed for the integration and intelligent automation of renewable energy sources. In addition to instantaneous control, the software also performs power plant monitoring functions, such as monitoring electricity generation using sensors that measure temperature, wind speed, humidity and light irradiance.

The system, which will be delivered at the end of 2023, will transmit the collected data to the cloud infrastructure operated by E.ON, which will allow remote control of the solar farm's production, forecasting and scheduling the amount of electricity to be generated.