Smart Energy Photovoltaic Power Station: Cellular Gateway Breaks Through Monitoring Dilemma of IEC 61850 and 4G Communication
At a photovoltaic power station in northwest China, Mr. Li, the operation and maintenance team leader, has to drive 20 kilometers to the power station every morning to manually record the power generation data of 3,000 photovoltaic panels. When the headquarters requests an analysis of the degradation rate of components in a specific area, he has to spend 4 hours exporting Excel spreadsheets and then combining and analyzing them via email. By this time, the marketing department has already received customer complaints due to delivery delays. This scenario is repeating itself at 60% of photovoltaic power stations across the country, exposing three core pain points in the industry:
Protocol Barriers: Photovoltaic power station equipment uses a variety of protocols, including IEC 61850, Modbus, and IEC 104, among others. Data from inverters, combiner boxes, weather stations, and other equipment cannot be interconnected, forming "protocol silos."
Communication Faults: Fiber optic coverage in remote areas is less than 30%. Traditional GPRS communication has a delay of up to 3-5 seconds, failing to meet the millisecond-level response requirements for AGC/AVC frequency modulation commands.
Operation and Maintenance Black Holes: In a 50MW power station, manual inspections account for 42% of annual operation and maintenance costs. The average time to locate equipment failures is 2.7 hours, resulting in unplanned downtime losses exceeding 2 million yuan.
"We don't lack data; what we lack is the ability to make data flow," lamented the CIO of an energy group, highlighting the core contradiction in the digital transformation of photovoltaic power stations—how to build a bridge between the IEC 61850 protocol and 4G communication through a cellular gateway to enable silent equipment data to speak.
As an international standard in the field of substation automation, IEC 61850 solves equipment interoperability issues through three major innovations:
Object-Oriented Modeling: Equipment functions are abstracted into logical nodes (LNs). For example, a photovoltaic inverter is modeled as "MMTR" (measurement node) and "ZINV" (inverter node).
Hierarchical Service Architecture: Defines a three-tier architecture consisting of the station control layer, bay layer, and process layer, supporting GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event) messages for millisecond-level control.
Service Mapping Independence: Maps ACSI (Abstract Communication Service Interface) to protocols such as MMS and TCP/IP through SCSM (Specific Communication Service Mapping). Practical experience at a wind farm shows that equipment integration cycles are shortened by 65% after adopting IEC 61850.
At a 300MW photovoltaic power station in Golmud, Qinghai, the 4G network covers a radius of 15 kilometers. Through carrier aggregation technology, it achieves:
Uplink Bandwidth: 100Mbps (theoretical peak), supporting synchronous data uploads from 500 inverters.
Latency Optimization: Using QCI 6 priority guarantee, end-to-end latency remains stable at 80-120ms.
Reliability Improvement: Through dual-link backup and ARQ retransmission mechanisms, the data packet loss rate is reduced from 3.2% to 0.07%.
Comparative tests by an energy enterprise show that, compared to fiber optics, the 4G solution offers:
A 72% reduction in initial investment
A deployment cycle shortened from 3 months to 2 weeks
An 89% reduction in expansion costs (no need for re-cabling)
Among numerous cellular gateways, the USR-M300 stands out with three core advantages:
Supports 12 protocols, including IEC 61850, Modbus TCP/RTU, IEC 104, and DL/T645, enabling direct connection to:
Inverters: Huawei SUN2000, Sungrow SG125HV
Combiner Boxes: TBEA TB-HLX-32
Weather Stations: Vaisala WXT536
Electricity Meters: Linyang DTZ710
Practical experience at a 50MW power station:
Achieved unified conversion of 32 equipment protocols
Increased data collection completeness from 78% to 99.97%
Shortened protocol development cycles from 2 months to 3 days
Equipped with a quad-core 1.2GHz processor, it can run lightweight AI models:
Intelligent Alarms: Predicts component degradation through LSTM neural networks, providing 15-day advance warnings of failures.
Data Cleaning: Automatically filters invalid data (such as constant values and sudden changes), reducing cloud load.
Protocol Conversion: Encapsulates IEC 61850 into MQTT within the gateway, reducing communication bandwidth usage by 42%.
Application case at a desert power station:
Improved sandstorm warning accuracy to 92%
Achieved an 88% accuracy rate in inverter failure prediction
Reduced annual operation and maintenance costs by 37%
Passes multiple rigorous tests:
Electromagnetic Compatibility: Passes IEC 61000-4-6 conducted immunity test (10V/m field strength).
Protection Rating: IP67 metal casing, dustproof, waterproof, and salt spray resistant.
Redundancy Design: Dual power inputs + 4G/WiFi dual-link backup.
Practical experience at an offshore photovoltaic project:
The gateway operated faultlessly for 2 years in a salt spray environment.
Withstood vibration from a Category 12 typhoon (acceleration ≤ 5g).
Achieved data backhaul from offshore platforms via satellite communication.
Establish a three-dimensional model:
Physical Layer: Record equipment model, interface type, and installation location.
Protocol Layer: Annotate communication protocol, baud rate, and register mapping.
Data Layer: Define collection frequency, data type, and alarm threshold.
Through this model, a power station discovered:
45% of equipment supports the IEC 61850 protocol.
32% of equipment requires data collection via Modbus RTU.
23% of old equipment requires the addition of IO modules.
Select topology based on network environment:
Wired Priority: Deploy industrial switches in the control room and connect gateways via RJ45.
Wireless Supplement: Use 4G/WiFi dual-mode gateways on tracking brackets.
Hybrid Networking: Key data travels via fiber optics, while auxiliary data travels wirelessly.
Hybrid networking case at a mountainous power station:
High-slope data is transmitted via fiber optics (latency < 1ms).
Valley data is uploaded via 4G (bandwidth 80Mbps).
Environmental monitoring data is backhauled via LoRa (power consumption < 50mW).
Configure three core parameters:
MQTT Broker: Alibaba Cloud/AWS/private deployment address.
Topic Design: Adopt a hierarchical structure of /power station/area/device/data type.
QoS Strategy: Use QoS 2 for control commands and QoS 1 for status data.
Example of Topic design for a group monitoring platform:
/qinghai/golmud/inverter1/power (QoS 1) /qinghai/golmud/meter1/reactive (QoS 1) /ningxia/yinchuan/scada/control (QoS 2)
Build a three-tier analysis system:
Operational Layer: Real-time monitoring of equipment OEE, PR (Performance Ratio), and fault codes.
Management Layer: Analysis of power generation loss composition and operation and maintenance cost proportions.
Strategic Layer: Prediction of electricity market prices and optimization of energy storage charging and discharging strategies.
Application effects at a power station:
Reduced light abandonment rate by 18% through power prediction models.
Optimized cleaning robot paths based on energy consumption data, saving 42% of water.
Increased power generation from tracking brackets by 12% using AI scheduling systems.
As the USR-M300 gateway continuously injects photovoltaic power station data into the cloud, the energy system will evolve new capabilities:
Digital Twins: Construct a mirror image of the power station in virtual space to enable component-level fault simulation.
AR Operation and Maintenance: Overlay equipment data onto real-world scenarios through devices like Hololens.
Autonomous Decision-Making: AI agents based on reinforcement learning automatically adjust bracket angles and inverter parameters.
A leading enterprise has already achieved:
A 98.7% prediction accuracy for photovoltaic power station digital twins.
A 65% reduction in equipment maintenance time through AR guidance.
A 19% increase in power generation through AI scheduling systems.
Driven by the "dual carbon" goals, photovoltaic power stations are shifting from scale expansion to quality improvement. The USR-M300 cellular gateway, through the integration of IEC 61850 and 4G communication, is helping enterprises:
Break through data silos, achieving three-level connectivity from equipment to power station to group.
Lower technical barriers, enabling traditional operation and maintenance personnel to master industrial internet technologies.
Mine data value, transforming silent equipment data into productivity.
When operation and maintenance personnel at a desert power station can view the power generation efficiency of every photovoltaic panel in real-time via a mobile app, they finally understand: "Photovoltaic power stations can be as smart as smartphones. " This may be the most beautiful aspect of energy digital transformation—making every photovoltaic panel intelligent and generating value from every kilowatt-hour of electricity.
