iPPC (power plant controller) for Renewable Generation Plants launch

Aug 16, 2022

The Pow­er Plant Con­troller (PPC) Han­dles the reg­u­la­tion of active and reac­tive pow­er while con­tribut­ing to fre­quen­cy and volt­age sup­port. Fast and accu­rate con­trol at the Point of Inter­con­nec­tion (PoI) is pro­vid­ed by a pow­er qual­i­ty analyser that mon­i­tors the rel­e­vant Point of Inter­con­nec­tion and pow­er plant data/measurements dur­ing this process.
The renew­able gen­er­a­tion plant and its grid con­nec­tion (LV/MV sub­sta­tion) can be tied to a Super­vi­so­ry Con­trol and Data Acqui­si­tion (SCADA) sys­tem, which in turn can incor­po­rate an Auto­mat­ic Gen­er­a­tion Con­trol (AGC) algo­rithm for com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the TSO.

Pow­er Plant Controller

  • Ensures grid code compliance
  • Receives set­points from AGC: set by TSO, set by Dis­patch CC or default values
  • Man­ages active & reac­tive pow­er, volt­age, frequency…
  • Master/Slave archi­tec­ture for oper­a­tion in Hybrid RES plants
  • Con­trol of Ener­gy Stor­age systems
  • Oper­a­tion at 50 Hz or 60 Hz

Runs over sev­er­al platforms:

  • Embed­ded solu­tions: iBU, iRTU, iGW and iRTUcompact
  • Serv­er solu­tions: iGW-VM, both over Win­dows and Linux
  • SCADA sys­tems: iControl
iPPC Brochure

Cus­tomiza­tion
All ser­vices pro­vid­ed by the PPC have been devel­oped mod­u­lar­ly, mak­ing it easy to add or mod­i­fy them depend­ing on the require­ments of each grid code and pow­er plant.

Algo­rithms
It is pos­si­ble to use dif­fer­ent algo­rithms to obtain the reac­tive pow­er set­point depend­ing on a series of con­di­tions. Cur­rent­ly imple­ment­ed reac­tive pow­er reg­u­la­tion algo­rithms are;
Reac­tive pow­er as a func­tion of voltage
Pow­er fac­tor as a func­tion of active pow­er output
Reac­tive pow­er as a func­tion of volt­age, fol­low­ing a reac­tive Pow­er-Volt­age Droop curve at the PoI

Master/Slave Archi­tec­ture for Hybrid Renew­able Gen­er­a­tion Plants
The mas­ter-slave archi­tec­ture allows oper­a­tion in hybrid pow­er plants, where the ener­gy gen­er­at­ed by the PV part may be dif­fer­ent from that gen­er­at­ed in the wind part. Each gen­er­a­tion unit (PV, wind, …) is con­trolled by its own PPC, which behaves as a slave PPC receiv­ing orders from a mas­ter PPC. The mas­ter PPC will receive a glob­al set­point from the AGC algo­rithm, dis­trib­ute the set­point among the dif­fer­ent slave PPC algo­rithms and con­trol over­all out­put from the com­plete plant while the slave PPC will con­trol its seg­ment of the hybrid plant only.

Scal­a­bil­i­ty
iGrid’s PPC mas­ter-slave archi­tec­ture makes it suit­able for oper­a­tion in large gen­er­a­tion plants scat­tered in large geo­graph­i­cal areas, where dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion units may gen­er­ate dif­fer­ent pow­er lev­els, for exam­ple areas in the shad­ow in PV plants or gen­er­a­tion units stopped for maintenance.

Ener­gy Storage
iGrid’s PPC allows con­trol of Ener­gy Stor­age sys­tems, thus con­tribut­ing to fre­quen­cy con­trol by storing/retrieving ener­gy from the Ener­gy Stor­age System

Auto­mat­ic Gen­er­a­tion Con­trol (AGC)
AGC func­tion­al­i­ty is includ­ed in iCon­trol SCADA sys­tem. It com­mu­ni­cates with the TSO via 60870–6, TASE.2 (ICCP), IEC 60870–5‑104, DNP3 … allow­ing oper­a­tion as a Del­e­gate Office. It receives and trans­mits dai­ly sched­ule to mar­ket reg­u­la­tor, receives set­points from TSO every 4 sec­onds and trans­mits mea­sure­ments to TSO accord­ing to leg­is­la­tion. It also fea­tures Oper­a­tion Zones, allow­ing a sin­gle iCon­trol SCADA to behave as a Del­e­gate Office for dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion plants simultaneously.