With the entry of new energy into market-oriented operation, the practical demand for power stations to move from extensive management to lean management has surfaced. On the other hand, thanks to the traction of information technology, digitalization and intelligent technology, especially the promotion and application of intelligent equipment in power stations in recent years, the unattended power station has finally "dreamed of becoming a reality".
The essence of the "unattended" state is to realize remote operation on duty, regional maintenance standby, and on-site unattended, and its essence is to reshape the management mode of new energy power stations, break the "station" as the management unit, give full play to the scale effect of the region, and make the operation of new energy assets more intensive and flat, in the final analysis, around how to reduce costs and increase efficiency, the main theme of industry development to carry out changes.
Smart Devices - "Robot Engineers" at the Station End
New energy power stations have a large number of high-frequency work, which is crucial to the safe and stable operation of assets, which mainly relies on the visual observation of engineers at specific points, such as booster station inspections and photovoltaic module inspections, but these high-frequency tasks confine a large number of valuable human resources to the station.
The intelligent equipment applied at the station end, such as the camera, can achieve a considerable degree of replacement or even upgrade for the special work with fixed scenes, relatively single skill requirements and strong repetition - the inspection scope is larger, the viewing angle is wider, and the efficiency is higher, which can avoid blind spots and reduce errors, which greatly improves the comprehensiveness, accuracy and safety of the inspection. At the same time, it frees up the ability of engineers to do more important, complex work.
In the 4 wind farms in a certain area of Concord O&M = using intelligent perception terminals such as rail robots and thermal imagers, the original offline regular inspection of the booster station by 4 people per day was upgraded to 24*7 online real-time monitoring and inspection by the platform, which effectively guaranteed the safety and reliability of unattended assets.
Orbital robot booster station inspection
A more powerful, round-the-clock "robot engineer" is the new infrastructure to achieve unattended.
Centralized Control Center - the "Smart Brain" of Regional Sharing
The new energy operation and management mode can be transformed from the traditional "single-point decentralized" to "multi-point centralized", thanks to the application of the centralized monitoring mode.
The centralized control center is a smart brain built by digital technology combined with actual business scenarios and needs, and the operation duty personnel perform the operation duty and dispatching response responsibilities of each power station in a unified manner through the centralized control platform, and achieve high-precision and scientific remote management with the support of high-precision algorithms, so that the on-site operation duty personnel are completely unnecessary.
The centralized control platform integrates the operation data of multiple stations, including power prediction, fault alarm and work order tracking, statistical reports, expert knowledge base, etc., to help managers intuitively grasp the operation status and problems of all power stations and equipment in the region, and transform a single power station relying on personnel experience into relying on objective data comparison and analysis, so as to formulate a more scientific and efficient equipment operation strategy.
Centralized control center
Concord O&M adopts the centralized control mode for the four wind farms in the region, forming a scale effect, reducing the number of people on duty by 12, greatly improving the personnel efficiency and saving personnel costs. In the future, with the larger the number of accesses, the marginal benefits will be more prominent.
Regional Maintenance Centers – "Equipment Doctors" with Hands and Feet
Compared with the traditional mode, each power station has its own "dedicated" maintenance team, in the centralized control mode, the separation of operation and inspection work can also effectively reduce the need for specialized engineers to be assigned to each station.
When the unattended station equipment fails, technical personnel are still needed to go to the site to deal with the fault, and the regional maintenance center can radiate multiple power stations within a certain driving distance to uniformly deploy and manage the maintenance forces such as personnel, vehicles, and materials, with higher flexibility and efficiency, and the scale advantage is highlighted.
In addition to the maintenance capabilities of electrical and mechanical equipment, the maintenance team must also have the analysis and use ability of the digital platform and the keen data insight ability, so as to form a professional organization with outstanding special skills, comprehensive capabilities and flexible implementation to support the equipment maintenance of multiple power stations in a region. Therefore, the construction of talent organization will also be optimized in the direction of professional omnipotence.
Concord O&M's maintenance center in the region not only has skilled and experienced maintenance engineers, but also high-tech plug-ins that can better assist in "fighting monsters and upgrading". The maintenance team used drones to inspect power transmission and transformation lines, and it used to take 4 people and 45 days to complete a line inspection, but now it only takes a team of 2 people to complete the inspection for 15 days, and the efficiency has been increased by 6 times.
Drone tower patrol
The exploration and implementation of the mode of "centralized monitoring + regional maintenance + unattended station" has become the "three-board axe" to improve the human efficiency ratio of the Concord operation and maintenance area by about 35%. At present, Concord O&M has successively implemented this model in eligible areas, and the next step will be to replicate it in more regions to improve the efficiency of power station operation and management to a new stage.
In the future, whether it is to benefit from scale, the "Shagehuang" base will improve the operational efficiency to a new height, or the distributed energy resources with smaller and more decentralized operations, and the economic accounts must be settled, or to solve the contradiction of the aggravation of the shortage of service talents during the production and operation of new energy, the realization of unattended stations is the answer to the problem and the common goal that the current practitioners are striving for.