Some system errors, such as an outage of an inverter station, can cause 100 or more alarms. Can you quickly glance at the list to find the ones that are relevant, or do you need to sift through all of them? Has just a fuse been tripped or are you dealing with a burning inverter station?
Operators and technical asset managers today are faced with their share of daunting challenges when it comes to alarms:
- Quality expectations are steadily increasing when it comes to critical repairs and response times. System failures must be resolved even more quickly and economically than in the past.
- Many false and redundant alarms are produced by the systems, and the manual evaluation of each alarm is too time-consuming. These efforts must be cut drastically.
- Alarm configuration needs to be simple. Due to the fast-growing market, many new colleagues are joining the industry and O&M teams. Less experienced team members should not be expected to invest a lot of time in configuring alarms: the machine needs to take over.
- Renewable portfolios are growing rapidly and need to be scalable. Effective alarm solutions can help double and triple your portfolios without increasing your team size.
Alarms are already an essential feature of the VCOM Cloud; they help you to pinpoint problems leading to yield losses and to trigger corrective actions. Now, we have taken alarms one step further. VCOM Smart Alarms revolutionize how alarms are generated and how they are interpreted and processed.
In many industries today, big data and machine learning go hand in hand. This evolution is apparent in PV systems too: machine learning can now reliably identify how best to process alarms. The latest data management and machine learning technologies allow us to understand the normal behavior of inverters in a PV system. This data provides insight into the behavior of the entire system, allowing potential losses and their root causes to be detected more intelligently.
Let VCOM do the tedious work for you and quickly identify the alarm that matters. That way, you can decide whether you need to call the fire department or just a technician to replace the fuse.
An alarm for every scenario
You may be used to setting up alarms at the individual system level, which requires a lot of time as well as expertise. Now, VCOM provides centralized management of alarms for your entire portfolio. Furthermore, VCOM offers a range of sophisticated alarms designed to suit your individual needs.
Alarms are configured in the system settings. Once you have set up your alarms, you can transfer the settings to other systems. Depending on the alarm type, you can define 3 different severities (normal, critical, and high) and an alarm delay, which only triggers an alarm in case in case of persistent incidents. Automatic alarms during short downtimes are thus avoided, and the system generates only alarms that are relevant. You can choose whether to trigger the alarm 24/7 or only between sunrise and sunset of your time zone. Additionally, the optional Autopilot feature automatically closes alarms if the same error does not occur again after a defined period.
Alarm types
VCOM provides the following alarm types:
- Misproduction alarms
- Communication loss alarms
- Sensor alarms
- Total outage alarms
- String alarms
- Data outage alarms
- Battery state of charge alarms
- User-defined static alarms
- User-defined comparison alarms