IIoT Technology for Efficient Management of Commercial Solar Power Plants

Commercial solar farms are typically distributed across remote locations, requiring operators to manage various assets such as solar inverters for DC-to-AC conversion, power meters for energy measurement and quality monitoring, and weather sensors for forecasting power generation capacity. Industrial IoT (IIoT) technology has become a preferred solution for efficiently monitoring and managing these geographically dispersed assets.

To implement IIoT in a solar farm, an IIoT gateway is essential for collecting Modbus data and transmitting it to a cloud-based energy management system. In many deployments, a local energy management system is also required for on-site maintenance. Therefore, the IIoT gateway must support Modbus TCP server mode to enable simultaneous data transmission to both cloud and local systems.

Given the typically low initial return on investment (ROI) in solar farm operations, operators are hesitant to develop custom IIoT solutions from the ground up. Instead, they prefer a ready-to-deploy IIoT gateway that fulfills all functional requirements with minimal configuration effort.

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System Requirements

• Ready-to-run IIoT gateway that integrates with Azure cloud to simultaneously manage both power assets and the local energy management system

• Data preprocessing at an edge IIoT gateway

• Remote device management to optimize operations

• Reliable data transmission to ensure data completeness

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Solution

Moxa AIG-100 Series ready-to-run IIoT gateways come with an intuitive UI to configure all the parameters required to collect and preprocess field data. The cellular capability enables transmission of data from the remotest site to the cloud.

The AIG-100 IIoT gateways can act as Modbus TCP/RTU master/client to collect data from field devices and as Azure and AWS IoT devices to transmit the data to the cloud. Moreover, the gateways support the Modbus TCP server mode to enable integration with local energy management systems. To prevent data loss and ensure completeness of data in power applications, such as billing and asset management, the gateways come with store and forward function and a datalogger for buffering data and resuming transmission when the connection is restored. Built-in data preprocessing functions help quickly extract relevant data for transmitting to the cloud saving on LTE communication costs and programming efforts.

Moxa Device Management service can be used to remotely access the gateways after which operators can use built-in diagnostic functions to check the connection status, monitor traffic, and capture data packets for analysis and troubleshooting. With all these built-in functions and capabilities, the AIG-100 can help you quickly set up and run an efficient IIoT system with minimum efforts to reduce operation and maintenance costs.

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Why Moxa

• An edge device which is both a Modbus TCP server and an Azure IoT device, capable of simultaneously transmitting field data to local and cloud-based energy management systems

• Provides data preprocessing functions to eliminate programming efforts

• Moxa device management service support to remotely manage the IIoT gateway

• Store and forward function to prevent data loss

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Moxa Product

• Built-in network traffic monitoring and diagnostic tool for easy troubleshooting

• Data buffering using store and forward function and a data logger

• Seamless integration with Moxa ioLogik /UPort devices to easily extend I/O and serial interfaces to connect more devices

• Built-in data preprocessing functions to eliminate programming efforts

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