Performance of Communication Network for Monitoring Utility Scale Photovoltaic Power Plants

The grid integration of large scale photovoltaic (PV) power plants represents many challenging tasks for system stability, reliability and power quality due to the intermittent nature of solar radiation and the site accessibility issues where most PV power plants are located over a wide area. In order to enable real-time monitoring and control of large scale PV power plants, reliable two-way communications with low latency are required which provide accurate information for the electrical and environmental parameters as well as enabling the system operator to evaluate the overall performance and identify any abnormal conditions and faults. This work aims to design a communication network architecture for the remote monitoring of large-scale PV power plants based on the IEC 61850 Standard. The proposed architecture consists of three layers: the PV power system layer, the communication network layer, and the application layer. The PV power system layer consists of solar arrays, inverters, feeders, buses, a substation, and a control center. Monitoring parameters are classified into different categories including electrical measurements, status information, and meteorological data. This work considers the future plan of PV power plants in Saudi Arabia. In order to evaluate the performance of the communication network for local and remote monitoring, the OPNET Modeler is used for network modeling and simulation, and critical parameters such as network topology, link capacity, and latency are investigated and discussed. This work contributes to the design of reliable monitoring and communication of large-scale PV power plants.