Smart Solar Power Plant Monitoring

Smart Solar Power Plant Monitoring

1. The Challenge

Solar farms are often located in remote, harsh environments with extreme temperatures. Maintenance teams need a reliable way to collect data from various on-site devices (inverters, weather sensors, meters) and transmit it to a central cloud for analysis while ensuring the system remains stable during power fluctuations.

2. The EC312 Solution Architecture

The EC312 serves as an intelligent gateway and local computing node, bridging the gap between field hardware and the management platform.
Data Acquisition: Using the Device Supervisor Agent (DSA), the EC312 collects real-time data from solar inverters and meters via Modbus RTU (Serial) or Modbus TCP (Ethernet) protocols.
Expansion Capabilities: If the plant uses specialized sensors, the EC312 can utilize expansion modules like the NAAD to monitor 4-20mA analog signals from irradiance or temperature sensors.
Edge Computing: With its Cortex-A53 processor and 1GB RAM, the EC312 runs Docker containers to process data locally. This reduces bandwidth costs by filtering and aggregating data before sending it to the cloud.
Robust Connectivity: The device uses high-speed 4G/5G LTE for primary communication, with dual SIM capability to ensure a backup link is available if one carrier fails.
3. Key Hardware Benefits for Energy Sites
FeatureBenefit to Solar Operations
Wide Temperature Range

Operates reliably in desert or winter conditions from -20°C to 70°C.

Power Protection

Supports a wide DC input of 9V to 48V, adapting to various site power setups.

Built-in Supercapacitor

If site power is lost, the EC312 stays powered for 20-30 seconds, enough time to send a power-down alarm and perform a safe shutdown.

Industrial Design

Fanless cooling and IP30 protection ensure longevity in dusty environments.

4. Remote Management with DeviceLive
Since the plant is remote, the EC312 connects to the InHand DeviceLive cloud platform. This allows engineers to:
      Perform remote batch firmware updates without visiting the site.
      Remotely access the terminal for network diagnostics.
      Monitor the health status of the device, including CPU and Memory usage.