Santerno developed the PV power plant controller in order to provide a single access point for plant supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) control systems.

Santerno (Imola, Italy), presents its new Santerno photovoltaic (PV) Power Plant Controller (PPC), a utility-scale solar power system controller that consolidates management of PV power plants, at SPI.

Santerno developed the PV power plant controller in order to provide a single access point for plant supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) control systems, including all PV inverters, the data logger, and auxiliary services. This eliminates the need to integrate a separate management system for the solar power inverters, the company notes.

"By developing our own Power Plant Controller we are able to consolidate management of Santerno solar inverters with other plant monitoring and SCADA systems into a single interface," stated Franco Valentini, Marketing Director of Santerno.

New PPC includes self-tuning POI to accommodate international grid codes

The Santerno PPC also provides a single, self-tuned, modified proportional internal (PI) controller which operates at the plant level to accommodate international grid codes, without the need of the trial-and-error approach.

The power parameters are set in advance using the plant data and the electrical characteristic data for the Point of Interconnection (POI) so it automatically matches international grid code requirements.

PPC can control SVC or STATCOM at the POI

It also can be optionally configured to control static VAR compensator (SVC) or static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) at the POI. This enables the PV plant for Extended Power Capability or Flexible AC Transmission System functions.