Wind Power Plant Remote Monitoring

Overview

In recent years wind power plants are widely developing as an alternative energy source used to generate electrical power without adding to global warming. To guarantee a sustainable and safe power supply, wind turbines must reliably produce energy every day under extreme conditions and therefore should be controlled and monitored efficiently and in a real-time basis. Ensuring reliable communication and remote control of hundreds of wind turbines located in large areas becomes even more difficult when considering the severe environmental conditions and temperature variations under which they operate.

The Wind Farm Manufacturer recently opted to use Korenix networking switches to overcome all these difficulties while integrating the devices into a large Ethernet network infrastructure.

For each wind turbine tower, JetNet 2005f-w unmanaged switch is used, which collects the data from the PLC through copper medium used in the control box and converts it to optical fiber for extending data transmission to the ground. The base of the wind turbine tower employs JetNet 6059G-w managed switch, which is designed with 5Giga SFP combo ports to connect widely dispersed wind turbines with giga fiber connectivity, and uplink 100Mbps Fiber to the JetNet 2005f-w in the tower control box. With their rugged enclosure, ESD, surge protection and wide temperature the switches further resist the extreme environmental conditions in wind farms.

By employing the MSR redundancy technology of JetNet 6059G-w, administrators form up to 4 rings, including fiber/ copper giga and 100Mbps rings in a large wind farm to ensure the uninterrupted data transmission with less than 5ms recovery.

Using their gigabit copper ports, the switches further uplink the high-bandwidth data to the JetNet 6524G stackable managed Layer3 switch installed in the control room. The JetNet 6524G is chosen by the network system constructor for its complete layer 3 functionalities to manage routing between different IP subnets and extended groups. Moreover using the wire-speed internal L3 unicast / multicast switching between different lower subnets, the traffic of the lower ring can be transmitted to different rings without data loss or blocking.

Besides, as the JetNet 6524G supports Access Control List, the SCADA or other systems of the control station can be secured in specific subnet by allowing only the permitted users listed in ACL to access the systems, resulting safer network connectivity.

Using Korenix’s complete networking solutions wind power plant integrators are capable of remotely controlling the wind turbines while providing real-time, efficient transmission. .