ABB has reached the cumulative 5-gigawatt (GW) mark in providing Programmable Logic Controllerbased (PLC) solar plant automation solutions in India.
In a regulatory filing to exchanges, the company said the milestone is an outcome of many solar power projects that it has won across the country for its Utility-Scale SCADA and String Monitoring Solutions.
ABB’s SCADA system - an automation control solution, helps in the efficient running of solar plants and enables plant operators to seamlessly monitor and analyze relevant solar project data in one place. It addresses the needs of the renewable energy industry and supports ABB's efforts to develop technologies that help secure a sustainable future.
“This milestone reinforces ABB’s next level strategy of driving the renewable energy revolution with market-focused technologies. The recent measures unveiled by the Indian government in its annual budget will boost local manufacturing, encourage new investments, and address the challenge of availability of funds for setting up solar plants in India,” said A R. Madhusudan, President - Drive Products, Motion, ABB India Ltd.
“This is a positive move for the industry and will catalyze India’s plans of generating 100 gigawatt (GW) of solar power by 2022. We, at ABB, will continue to play a key role in achieving this target,” he added.
As solar power contributes to the increasingly growing share of the energy mix, the system component technology is continuously evolving to lower the cost of energy production. Some of the crucial requirements from solar plant operators are constant supervision of the production, maximization of the solar energy yield, real-time information about the system status, and grid code compliance.
Delivered as a part of ABB’s Drive Products offering, the Utility-scale SCADA solutions reduce the cost and risk of investment in operating photovoltaic (PV) power plants. In most utility-scale solar PV projects, string boxes are fitted with monitoring systems that perform different protection, performance and efficiency monitoring. ABB’s string monitoring solutions reduce downtime and increase productivity while improving PV panels’s safety, and the entire plant.