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The recent growth of the PV market leads to a more complex and challenging grid integration of PV plants. Compared to the market situation a few years ago, plant operators and O&M managers are more often confronted with restrictions of production by grid operators or aggregators to ensure grid stability in power transmission lines or simply to respond to market orders on site.

Therefore, it is important for our customers to have a simple and transparent overview of all power control relevant information in the daily business of plant operation.

For plants that are being curtailed by grid operators, a new Power Plant Controller (PPC) dashboard summarizes all information relevant to power control at the grid connection point and its impact on the plant's production. The dashboard include new standard charts as well as tabular evaluations of the curtailments.

• All important power control information in one place
• Keep an overview or dive into the details
• Yield loss calculation due to curtailment made easy

An important KPI for O&M is the number of systems and installed capacity that an employee can efficiently monitor. With VCOM Cloud Automation, tasks can be digitalized and automated, resulting in a major benefit for the efficiency and scalability. Each automated task can increase the number of systems monitored and therefore revenue. At the same time, VCOM Cloud Automation can get the most out of CMMS and automatically create and send tickets and work orders.

• Streamline your processes
• Get rid of repetetive tasks
• Set up once, profit forever

We are already pushing forward with the development of battery storage system monitoring, next we will introduce a feature to alert the state of charge of a battery. Maintaining the specified SOC range is critical to the health and life of any stationary battery. The new SOC alert is the easiest way to ensure that no event is missed where the state of charge moves outside the acceptable range. This makes it clear when countermeasures need to be initiated.

The alarm details can be used to get an overview of the SOC development on each day the alarm was triggered.

There is much more to come - look out for all battery related news in the VCOM Release Notes!

• Easily configurable standard alarm
• Automatic detection of SOC anomalies
• Managing a major aspect of battery health with ease

The blue'Log XC is certified for Spain and thus verifiably fulfils all grid connection regulations for the islands (NTS SENP) and the mainland (NTS SEPE).

According to EU requirements, a Power Plant Controller must be capable of reacting to frequency changes within two seconds and be capable of adjusting the active power feed-in of the generating system accordingly. However, a reaction time of 500 milliseconds is expected in some EU member states and in mainland Spain. On the Spanish islands, Power Plant Controllers must be capable of responding to frequency changes within just 150 milliseconds.

As in other European countries, a certificate is required in Poland for the components used. We are therefore currently working on the certification of the controller blue'Logs XC to ensure grid-compliant feed-in in Poland as well.

We have added the so-called Frequency Sensitive Mode (FSM) in the blue'Log XC. This mode can also be activated and deactivated via Modbus. In FSM mode, the active power is adjusted depending on the measured grid frequency to ensure grid stability by providing primary control reserves.

We have also further refined the level of security: With the firewall, you can define which device has access to blue'Log, or connected VLANs.  At the end of 2022, the IP Allowlist was introduced as the first step in this direction, with which you can prevent unknown IP addresses (devices) from accessing via Modbus TCP. All rules from the IP Allowlist are adopted and retained during the firmware upgrade.

The growing complexity of systems as well as potential cyberattacks require the logical separation of system parts such as grid operators, devices and the internet. For this purpose, the option of using virtual networks (so-called VLANs) was initially developed. These allow for a physical separation of the networks via a corresponding network switch, as well as the central administration and communication management within these networks via VLANs in blue'Log^®.

If no meter can be installed at the grid connection point for economic or technical reasons, the meters available on the low-voltage side can be aggregated to form a virtual meter. The measured values of the various meters are added up or averaged accordingly. The virtual meter is monitored like a physical meter and the data can be exported to the VCOM Cloud.

With our new "Bumpless Switchover" feature, it is possible to change the control parameters during ongoing operation while minimizing the associated negative effects on active and reactive power control. The smooth change of control parameters is especially important for large PV plants producing close to their maximum power in order not to negatively influence grid stability.