Challenge
Sunrock needed to monitor their solar assets with an interval of seconds and control or curtail the inverters and batteries to optimize revenue.
Use case | Sunrock
Creating a smart solar grid
Sunrock is the largest solar energy company in The Netherlands. They play a leading role in the evolving energy landscape. The volatility in supply that solar energy inevitably brings in the Dutch climate, demands a fundamentally different approach to operating in the energy market. It needs smarter and more local grids. We implemented our smart energy middleware solution to monitor and control the solar farms in the best way possible.
Solution
Helin's Smart Solar Solution: a managed ecosystem with add-on features for curtailment of inverters and control battery setpoints.
Results
Sunrock took charge of their energy production management. This led to higher revenues and allowed Sunrock to focus on their core task – energy optimization.
Challenges
Sunrock faces 3 main challenges when creating a smart solar grid in a fast-evolving industry:
Unification
The renewable energy industry is evolving quickly, which means adapting quickly to innovations too. And at the same time, Sunrock wants to manage all their telemetry data in the same, unified way.
Security
Bridging the gap between Sunrock's solar farms and batteries on the one side (OT) and the business logic and energy management on the other (IT) makes the highest level of security essential. This means securing all the infrastructure plus data encryption, as well as the encryption of control inputs and applications.
Care-free infrastructure
As Sunrock is growing quickly, they want to put all their resources into what they are best at: managing solar energy. They need to be able to focus on energy management, while data and the control infrastructure is provided for them, in a fully managed approach.
Solution
We pre-configured our platform, so that all the interfaces matched the inverter brands and the pipelines and security were integrated with Sunrock’s energy management system. A solar farm control module was developed as well, to manage the inverter curtailment and changing battery set points.
Solar interfaces
Our platform is equipped with pre-configured interfaces for common solar farm protocols, including Sunspec for Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP. This covers inverter brands like SMA, Sungrow, Huawei and more.
Curtailment & Control
The Solar Control module enables the curtailment of the inverters and changing setpoints of the batteries. The energy management system (EMS) controls the solar farm in line with its energy strategy via an AIP.
Infrastructure security
A complete set of security measures was implemented, including encryption and monitoring of pipelines, modules and data. Our public key infrastructure (PKI) ensures continuous oversight and renewal of asynchronous keys.
Results
Our Smart Solar Solution puts Sunrock in charge of their solar energy management. Integration with their asset management increases uptime. Control over inverter and battery management increases revenue by trading at spot market prices.
In charge
Sunrock Is fully in charge of their energy strategy, while the middleware is managed for them.
Maximum security
Our platform's enhanced cyber security covers the security gaps that otherwise might occur in this fast-evolving, innovative industry
Increased revenues
Curtailment of the inverters and peak-shaving (including batteries), increases solar energy income significantly as you can trade at spot market prices.
Managed service
The whole solution is provided as a managed service, resulting in minimum overhead for Sunrock and fastest time to value.
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