South Bank Innovation are proud to announce that Researchers Dr. Maitreyee Dey, Dr. Soumya Prakash Rana, Mr. Clarke Simmons and Prof. Sandra Dudley have been awarded "The Best Paper" at CUE2020 Conference.
Their paper focusses on research undertaken with the Sustainable Innovation programme in collaboration with SME Neuville Grid Data. The collaboration aimed to utilise machine-learning for the task of monitoring outputs and predicting behavioural changes in solar farms.
Solar Farms are large-scale installations of photovoltaic (PV) cells, which harvest solar energy to create renewable electricity. Due to the nature of solar energy, these farms are prone to experiencing both voltage dip and voltage spike events, but deconditioning of the PV cells can lead to inefficient outputs. The traditional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system often faces challenges for the poor quality and low-resolution data, making it hard to identify specific events in a timely manner. For this purpose, high-resolution and high-precision data is collected to measure the condition of solar generation performance.
Sustainable Innovation's project worked to overcome these limitations by:
- Adapting a key tool for electric systems (micro-synchrophasor measurement unit)
- Integrating this unit with a power quality monitor to improve an operator's visibility on the grid network
- Measuring high quality, accurate time-stamped data needed by analysts to measure and improve solar farm performance
- Applying machine-learning methods to this data to automatically detect faults, forecast events, and identify priorities for operational tuning.
Read the paper "Solar farm voltage anomaly detection using high-resolution PMU data-driven unsupervised machine learning" to find out more about the project and its results here. The authors have received their award at CUE2021's opening ceremony.
CUE2020-Applied Energy Symposium 2020: Low carbon cities and urban energy systems, is an international conference organised by Elsevier, a non-profit which aims to inspire innovative learners in all disciplines.
Sustainable Innovation provides London's cleantech SMEs with access to facilities, grants and expertise. Find out more at www.sustainableinnovators.com
