Power Quality Metering for Renewables

June 13, 2024

PROJECT: Wind Farm

INDUSTRY: Energy, Utilities, Renewables

LOCATION: Queensland, Australia

 

Power Quality Metering for Renewables

The Challenge

A customer renowned for delivering sustainable infrastructure solutions and renewable energy projects worldwide engaged CSE Uniserve to support its multi-billion-dollar Wind Farm project, slated as one of the largest onshore wind farms globally.

The project required a robust solution for collecting and analysing power quality data at multiple points across the wind farm, including the connection point to the power grid.

Given the project’s scale, the solution needed to be of a high functional quality and deliver reliable data, facilitated through local technical support and service capabilities.

Renewable power generation comes with a unique set of challenges. Therefore, analysers are essential in these applications, because they provide the necessary insights and data to ensure network stability, support higher renewable penetration, prevent downtime, avoid equipment deterioration and achieve standard compliance.

The Solution

To meet these challenges, CSE Uniserve deployed 40 Elspec G4430 Power Quality Analysers. The G4430 is one of the most advanced power quality analysers on the market, featuring a compression algorithm for continuous high-resolution waveform recording and high accuracy real-time monitoring.

These analysers enable operators to predict, prevent and troubleshoot an incident at their site of deployment, without the need to set any trigger or threshold to capture a specific event. This ensures a reliable and consistent energy supply while identifying and managing peak demand.

Implemented in conjunction with the analysers is the Sapphire Enterprise Software solution, which provides real-time overview, analysis and reporting of power quality parameters. The PQSCADA Sapphire software serves as a comprehensive, vendor-free platform, integrating data from various sources such as protection relays, fault recorders and smart meters into a single database for easy management and analysis.

The successful setup and continual operation of this solution not only addressed the needs of the project, but also fostered a positive relationship between CSE Uniserve and the customer, paving the way for future collaborations.