Development of communication systems for a photovoltaic plant with battery energy storage system and all-sky camera

The efficient operation, monitoring, and maintenance of a photovoltaic (PV) plant are intrinsically linked to data accessibility and reliability, which, in turn, rely on the robustness of the communication system. As new technologies arise and newer equipment is integrated into the PV plants, the communication system faces new challenges that are described in this work. Newer integrated equipment in PV plants includes the battery energy storage system (BESS) that transforms the PV plant into a dispatchable plant and the all-sky camera (ASC) that enables the prediction of shading events. In this paper, two communication systems were developed using only open-source software, in which the first was designed for seamless communication between the PV and BESS equipment, while the second was tailored to collect photographs from ASC devices. The requirements of the communication systems were defined based on the applications that control the PV plant, and on the industry-standard IEC-61724-1 norm for PV data. After being developed, the communication systems were installed in a PV plant, and the interaction between the data obtained from these two systems is discussed and presented.