OMEGA-X is developing an energy dataspace to enable sovereign exchange of data and services that will reduce the operational expenditure and facilitate the integration of photovoltaic energy in smart grids.
During the recent decades the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of photovoltaic (PV) energy has significantly decreased driven by a reduction of both capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX). In fact, thanks to new digital operational and maintenance services, the maintenance strategy for solar power plants has shifted from a preventive to a predictive maintenance strategy. In this sense digitalisation is fundamental to implement a predictive maintenance strategy. In fact, it is necessary to have an adequate supervising system based on physical, data driven or hybrid models able to characterize the State of Health (SoH) of the different elements, trigger some alerts in case of significant underperformance and provide some recommendations on the maintenance activities to carry out. The reliability and accuracy of these supervising systems will be determined by the quality and time and spatial granularity of the input data fed to the model. However, these services are currently developed with limited data from a single company that usually covers specific operating conditions. As a consequence, the generalization capacity of these data analytics services is limited and usually does not behave well when the operating conditions change.
OMEGA-X aims to break the existing silos by creating an Energy Data Space to enable different PV owners to exchange data with different predictive maintenance service providers. This way service providers will have access to a large volume of data collected from several portfolios with different technologies (fixed and tracking systems, monofacial and bifacial, etc.) and operating conditions which will enable to develop more robust services that can improve the performance of existing services and further reduce the OPEX for PV plants.
Use case renewables in Granollers (Spain)
Besides, due to the reduced LCOE, the penetration of PVs has significantly increased especially at the low voltage part of the grid. Hence, it is getting more difficult for DSOs to maintain the security and quality of electric power supply. OMEGA-X will generate data space technologies, to enable sovereign exchange of data and services amongst different actors of the smart grids (prosumers, DSOs, aggregators, service providers, etc.) to enable a seamless integration of distributed PV power plants into the smart grids. On the one hand, OMEGA-X will leverage the exchange data and services to optimise the operation on the distributed energy sources. On the other hand, it will develop planning services to ensure the future integration of PV systems into distribution networks promoting a more informed and coordinated approach to PV integration.