Ulkatcho Energy Corporation planned a 3.8 MW solar power plant in Anahim Lake to generate renewable electricity, reduce carbon emissions and limit reliance on fossil-fuel generation. The project forms part of the BC Hydro Sustainability Renewable Energy Integration program for Non-Integrated Areas.
• The solar plant needed to integrate with the existing Siemens microgrid controller at the Anahim Lake generator station.
• The solution needed to coordinate solar generation with diesel generators and a battery energy storage system.
• The project required secure monitoring and control of the solar plant and visibility of production data.
• The customer required engineering, testing, site commissioning and training support.
• The solution needed to support reliable operation of the first solar power plant in a BC Hydro Non-Integrated Area.

Siemens supplied a photovoltaic plant controller and monitoring solution based on SICAM applications. The controller acts as the main control layer for the solar power plant and communicates with the higher-level microgrid controller at the Anahim Lake generator station.

The solution includes a SICAM A8000 CP8050 Photovoltaic Plant Controller, SICAM SCC monitoring and human-machine interface, a SICAM A8000 substation controller, a Siemens RUGGEDCOM industrial Ethernet switch and a SIPROTEC 5 protection relay. Siemens also provided the associated software, engineering, technical documentation, factory testing, site acceptance testing, commissioning and training.

The controller collects and processes information from the photovoltaic inverters, protection equipment, power meters and weather station. It manages active and reactive power, ramp rates, power-factor control and power curtailment, while passing relevant plant data to the microgrid controller. The monitoring system provides plant dashboards, alarms, events, trends, reports, weather information, production data, performance indicators and calculated avoided carbon dioxide emissions.

The system uses standard communication protocols, including IEC 61850, Modbus TCP and IEC 60870-5-104, to connect field assets, the photovoltaic plant monitoring system and the microgrid controller.