meteocontrol has become a partner of Arkolia Energies to equip all of the solar parks operated by the French solar-energy company with a uniform monitoring system and to facilitate electricity feed-in.
meteocontrol will integrate the existing PV systems into the manufacture-independent monitoring platform VCOM. For its new systems, Arkolia Energies plans to use the complete monitoring solution offered by meteocontrol, including hardware components. meteocontrol also developed the necessary interface with Enedis, a French grid operator, for this purpose.
Arkolia Energies has a solar portfolio of about 150 MWp of installed power. More than 400 MWp is currently in the development phase as well. To ensure that the solar systems can be efficiently and securely monitored, the company decided to work with meteocontrol. The flexibility of the monitoring system is what sold Arkolia Energies on meteocontrol: The existing systems equipped with a broad range of different monitoring systems can be imported into the VCOM monitoring portal without any hardware changes. Arkolia Energies can now monitor and manage all systems in VCOM.
“We entered a partnership with meteocontrol for one main reason: Its monitoring solution is a system with open interfaces that can be modified to meet our needs,” said Guillaume Bringard, the O&M Manager at Arkolia Energies. In 2015, the French grid operator Enedis imposed requirements regarding the management of feed-in active power (P0) and reactive power (Q0) on energy producers. meteocontrol developed the interface that enables Arkolia Energies to meet these needs.
VCOM – all systems at a glance
meteocontrol has designed the central monitoring platform VCOM with flexibility in mind. As a result, the measurement data of components made by the widest range of manufacturers can be integrated and processed for analysis and visualization. “This is a cost-efficient solution for system operators, one that also generates real savings in operation management,” said Martin Schneider, the Managing Director of meteocontrol. “The management of large system portfolios in particular becomes much more effective, error analysis easier and response time to system failures faster.” meteocontrol also adapts software applications to the individual system and is developing additional remote-monitoring features for Arkolia Energies.
meteocontrol also offers a special monitoring and control solution that is designed to meet French market requirements regarding dynamic reactive power (DEIE). This solution will be used in future projects with Arkolia. “We are really excited about this partnership,” Martin Schneider said. “Together with Arkolia Energies, interesting projects and new challenges will arise, and they will significantly increase our presence in the French market.”