London Borough of Merton
Energence has been monitoring the PV panels and wind turbine installed by Big Yellow in their Merton storage unit since 2008.
The EMC data-logger uses GPRS telemetry to send the data to the Energence server which can then be viewed by Big Yellow and Merton Council on a secure web-page.
Developers should monitor their renewables if only to track their Return On Investment and CO2 reductions.
“As a developer, operator and owner of self storage buildings, borough councils and other developer types must be aware that renewable energy technologies are still relatively recent innovations, especially in terms of applying them to suit their own buildings and business operations, in an infinite variety of locations.
Big Yellow were happy to have their renewables monitored because it provided a knowledge base about what equipment works best in what configuration, For example, we found that solar PV was best for Big Yellow because it provided a good percentage of electricity for lighting during the day when we are operating stores with minimal window area (protecting high value goods from UV – sunlight).”
Paul Donnelly, CSR Manager, Big Yellow 2011
Left: Quiet Revolution 5 turbine inverter with Energence (Energy Monitoring Company) data-logger on the left.
The 5 channel logger (with multiple remote channels) is monitoring the parasitic loads as well as the generation to give a true indication of the turbine efficiency.
Click images to enlarge
The PV array was installed by Solarcentury. The SMA inverters are located in the roof space and the data is transmitted to the data-logger via a small auxiliary out-station – pictured.
Any PV panel or inverter failure triggers an automated email alert to Big Yellow.
Below is a visualization of the PV and QR5 data.
Data is displayed either collated or as individual devices.
Combined Photovoltaic and turbine data
The vertical axis turbine has a parasitic load – a mechanism that starts the turbine spinning when the on-board computer senses the wind is at the correct speed. Both the kWh generation and kWh parasitic load are monitored in order to identify the efficiency of the turbine.
