Design considerations of wireless monitoring networks for concentrated photovoltaic power plant applications

Advanced monitoring systems of smart grids (SG) present significant growth potential for renewable energy generation whilst low-cost and miniaturized wireless sensor nodes bring opportunities to replace large and expensive monitoring equipment. Renewable power systems required complicated monitoring and control. For example, a concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) power plant requires temperature, electric current and component faults monitoring. All of these can be provided by wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, the practical implementation of WSN solutions for CPV application remains largely unexploited. A gap exists in the research of SG WSN monitoring system. Power system researchers lack understanding of the capability of state-of-the-art WSN systems, whilst the WSN researcher lack on understanding of the detailed application area of SG. This paper addresses the practical issues encountered during the design of a SG WSN and an insight how this knowledge gap can be bridged. It starts with introduction of WSN system with the concept of constrained resources in wireless communication, energy and data processing capability. Then, it presents the CPV WSN design architecture and issues ranging from network scalability, topology, sampling rate to sensor selection based on the constrained resources in WSN. The target application scenario is 1MW scale CPV power plant with 40 CPV panels. Overall, this paper presents valuable design considerations along with an analysis of trade-offs for power plant level CPV monitoring system implementation based on IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor platforms.