ABB Crosses 5 GW Milestone for Providing Solar Plant Automation Solutions in India

ABB has reached the cumulative 5GW mark in providing Programmable Logic Controller-based solar plant automation solutions in India.

ABB has reached the cumulative 5-gigawatt (5GW) mark in providing Programmable Logic Controller based (PLC) solar plant automation solutions in India. The firm stated that this milestone is an outcome of many significant solar power projects that it has won across India for its Utility-Scale SCADA and String Monitoring Solutions. 

ABB’s SCADA system – an automation control solution – helps in the efficient running of solar plants and enables plant operators to seamlessly monitor and analyse relevant solar project data in one place. It addresses the needs of the renewable energy industry and supports ABB’s efforts to develop technologies that help in securing a sustainable future.

“This milestone reinforces ABB’s next level strategy of driving the renewable energy revolution with market-focused technologies. The recent measures unveiled by the Indian government in its annual budget will boost local manufacturing, encourage new investments, and address the challenge of availability of funds for setting up solar plants in India,” said A R. Madhusudan, President – Drive Products, Motion, ABB India. 

“This is a positive move for the industry and will catalyse India’s plans of generating 100 GW of solar power by 2022. We, at ABB, will continue to play a key role in achieving this target,” he added.

Delivered as a part of ABB’s Drive Products offering, the Utility-scale SCADA solutions reduce the cost and risk of investment in operating photovoltaic (PV) power plants. In most utility-scale solar PV projects, string boxes are fitted with monitoring systems that perform different kinds of protection, performance and efficiency monitoring. ABB’s string monitoring solutions reduce downtime and increase productivity while improving the safety of PV panels, and the entire plant.

With tracking devices, the energy production of a solar PV plant can increase up to 30 percent in optimal locations. ABB’s AC500 PLC, part of the automation solution, uses high-precision solar algorithms to ensure all type of trackers precisely align and follow the movement of the sun with exceptional accuracy.