The Importance of Monitoring Renewable Energy Plants: Three Case Histories

Many renewable energy plants are put into operation without providing a monitoring system to evaluate their performance over time. Then if is often difficult to realise the bad working of the system and the loss of efficiency results in an economic loss. In the Author’s experience as designer or supervisor of such plants, he came across various examples that pointed out the advantages of having installed a monitoring system, of course with a careful data analysis. Problems sometimes arose from poorer performance than anticipated in the design, but more often from inefficient plant operations after some months or years from the starting. Three quite different examples, derived from the Author’s direct experience, are reported to illustrate how real performance can be lower than designed due respectively: 1. To bad settings of the parameters; 2. To a hurried commissioning that did not reveal the mistakes in the design of the plant; 3. To a failure of a single component over time.