Renewable Energy Taiwan
Project Introduction: The Hsinta Power Plant is a large thermal power station located in the Yong-an township of Kaohsiung County. To take advantage of its geographical position in southern Taiwan, Hsinta has begun developing an expansive solar power facility with a 1 megawatt capacity as part of the government’s effort to tap into new renewable energy technologies.

System Requirements:
This project aimed to install over 4,500 solar panels, with a total generation capacity of 953.19 KW. The Taiwan Power Plant was looking to develop a system to oversee the metering and analysis of sunlight data, power generation data, and controlled grid-connection, specifically data metering, equipment control, and power conversion to the grid. The collection and analysis of data was also very important, such as sunlight strength, overall direct current power, average energy conversion efficiency of the solar cell modules, alternating current power output of the power converters, average conversion efficiency of the power converters, direct current power ratio, total system operation hours, accumulated carbon dioxide reduction, and accumulated direct and alternating current power generation.

In order to collect the accurate data of sun-light and evaluate solar panel effectiveness, the system needs to have four requirements: first, robust and compact controller for power plant control inquiry, second, more analog signals measurement requirement in solar power process and equipments, third, needs fast data sampling , recording and analysis, four, remote configuration , troubleshooting and maintenance.

Project Implementation:

	ADAM-5550KW	Micro PAC with XScale CPU
	ADAM-5017	12-ch Analog Input Module
	ADAM-5053	24-ch Digital Input Module
	ADAM-5056	24-ch Digital Output Module

System Diagram:

System Description:
Advantech’s PAC products serve as power controllers because of their outstanding performance in metering, recording, control, storage and remote maintenance functionalities, which are excellent for solar power applications. ADAM-5550KW is particularly remarkable in its capacity, providing multi-functional data acquisition modules. SoftLogic, also provided by Advantech, allows the engineers to program with ease.

Analog input modules are used to measure the solar panel temperature, as well as sunlight and shading temperature. Digital input modules are used to sensor the status of the equipment, such as temperature and voltage, and detect abnormal situations happening to the system, such as fires, circuit breaker tripping and low voltages of DC and AC power. Digital output modules are used to control the status of the gas circuit breakers and carry out the connections in the solar facility with the utility power grid.

The ADAM-5017 is an analog input module used to collect weather information, such as temperature on the solar panels, the amount of sunlight, and the shading temperature. It also meters and analyzes the power storage and energy conversion at the solar cells and recording data of current and voltage. The ADAM-5550KW is used as the control host, with fast computing capacity overseeing the DC to AC conversion process, analyzing equipment efficiency, and detecting the service life length of voltage converters. The ADAM-5053 is a digital input module which collects critical alarms, temperature sensors, thermal overshoot, IGBT over Temperature, contactor, CT, MOV, and VAC sense circuits. The ADAM-5056 acts as a digital output module to precisely control status of gas circuit breaker switching and power connection to the utility grid.

Conclusion:
In this solar panel power generation application, Advantech’s PAC products, with their fast and powerful capacity in metering, recording, controlling and saving, and outstanding features in remote maintenance and multi-function data acquisition modules, along with provided professional software pack, proved an excellent choice.