Monitoring & Controlling of Western European Wind farms from Distribution Center using SYNC2100 – Case Study

Customer: Western European Wind Farm Company

Industry: Electric power generation based on renewable sources

Solutions: Monitoring of Windfarms in real-time, collecting the fault files automatically, and analyzing the same in real-time, all these functionalities done via SYNC2100

Business Case: 

The European windfarm company was responsible for electrical energy production using renewable resources including hydro, wind, photovoltaic, biomass, and thermo-solar and natural gas electricity. The wind farms were targeted to produce 28-gigawatt hours of electricity annually. The requirement was for the wind farm to be connected to the DSO Dispatch Center, using the IEC 104 protocol for compatibility with the DSO’s SCADA system. Additional DSO requirements included automatic upload of fault records from Interconnection Protection Relays (IPR) in COMTRADE format, as well as sending the fault records to the DSO’s protection system department’s IT system via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The wind farm company wanted to have both a compact and cost-effective solution.

Solution Components:

• Kalkitech SYNC 2101 was used for collecting data via its digital/analog inputs.  The commands were also used to trigger the digital outputs. These included analog measurements (voltage), digital signals (Interconnection Protection Relay Trip and active settings group, breaker status, auxiliary power failure), and commands (protection relay settings group exchange).
• SYNC 2101 was used to collect additional measurement parameters from Protection Relay (GE F650) via Modbus TCP.
• The complete data was exchanged with DSO’s Dispatch Center over the IEC104 protocol from SYNC2101 – a total of 12 DI & DO.
• Flexibility for PLC programming available in SYNC2101 was also used to evaluate interlocks while executing commands.
• The automated collection of fault records from Interconnection Protection Relays was achieved using the Modbus TCP (GE-Modbus) protocol with SYNC 2101 RTU converting records to a common format, COMTRADE, and renaming files according to IEEE format.
• The COMTRADE files were automatically pushed to the central DSO and protection management systems using secure FTP protocols for fault analysis.

Key Benefits:

• The solution was able to eliminate the need for a maintenance crew to periodically visit the wind farm site to manually retrieve fault records.
• DSO’s protection engineers had near real-time access to fault record files to conduct fault analysis rather than having to wait for manual fault file retrieval. 
• The time stamp on fault record files was available for accurate post-fault analysis.
• The solution enabled Real-time remote monitoring to identify the location of fault areas, reducing fault detection times, improving service quality, and reducing operating costs.

Webinar Link: Webinar on the complete Solution