SolarQuarter India magazine had an exclusive interview with Ashoka D. M., CEO and Managing Director, EnerMAN Technologies Pvt Ltd and learned about the key business highlights of the company, the importance of real-time remote monitoring of solar plants and the IoT based monitoring solutions the company offers. He also told us about the recent technology advancements and future growth plans of the company.
1. What have been some key business highlights for EnerMAN Technologies in the past year?
Despite COVID-19’s impact on our business, we have successfully installed our IoT SCADA (ETi-SOL) products in the countries –Sri Lanka, Nepal, Dubai, Rwanda and Poland through online support. We have also installed our IoT SCADA product in some of the prestigious Govt organizations like BHEL, BEL, NTPC, HAL, MES, NFC, AIIMS & IISc.
ETi-SOL is deployed over 250+MWp capacity in 45+ PV Plants/rooftops in 2021.
The total deployment to date crossed 1,200MWp (1.2GWp).
2. Please tell us how important is real-time remote monitoring of solar plants?
The performance of Solar Power Plants needs to be monitored in real time to ensure the maximum yield of the Solar PV Plant and notify the breakdown of equipment. To ensure that all the equipment at Solar Plant is performing as per the design, to get energy generation as expected to achieve the desired ROI. Real-time Remote Monitoring is essential to maximise the plant performance, which provides equipment ranking, performance reports and guidelines to the onsite O&M team to schedule maintenance activities, spare parts management, and module cleaning activities.
3. How important is IoT as a technology in the solar industry? Could you explain your IoT-based monitoring solutions offerings in brief?
IoT technologies help in digitizing Solar PV plants (Digital Twin) and get real-time data to cloud platforms or Servers at HQ. The expert team at HQ can analyse the Solar plant and equipment performance data and come up with guidelines to improve the plant performance, reduce the breakdowns, spare management, Energy scheduling and inputs to new plant design for optimal performance of Solar PV plants.
We provide all types of products and solutions to Solar PV plants/rooftops for Performance Monitoring, Controlling, Analysis and Reporting at an affordable price using in-house developed Hardware, Firmware and Software. Our Software product is hardware agnostic; it can work with 3 rd party Datalogger.
ETi-SOL is a cloud-based software product that collects data from the field IoT devices for Monitoring, Controlling, Analysis and Reporting of Solar PV plants/rooftops.
ETi- EDGE is a software product that can be installed in Local PCs/Servers at PV plants/Rooftops and can collect data from the data loggers connected to the PV Plant equipment to Monitor, Control, Analyse and Report the Solar PV plant’s performance.
ETi-PPC is a Power Plant Controller Software product that can be installed in Local PCs/Servers at PV plants/Rooftops. Interfaces with Solar plants equipment and controls active and reactive power and power output based on the set rules/SLDC guidelines.
ETi-CONNECT is a CMS Software product that can interface ETi-SOL/ETi-EDGE and with a third-party Plant, SCADA using REST API or FTP data access.
ETi-LOG is an IIoT Datalogger, which collects the data through RS 485 (RTU/TCP) from PV plants’ end equipment and sends data to Local PC/Servers or to the cloud Servers through RS485 (RTU/TCP) or RF or Wi-Fi. We will ensure that there is no data loss through local storage in our ETi-LOG IoT data logger during any communication issues at the plant.
4. What are some of the recent technology advancements EnerMAN Technologies have made?
We have developed a software product, ETi-SLDC, which can be installed on local PCs/Servers to collect data from the Solar PV plant’s equipment and can send important processed clean data to SLDC in a few seconds as per SLDC guidelines.
We have developed another software product, ETi-ZES, which will ensure Zero exports from Solar PV plants / Rooftops to Grid, as per DISCOM policy guidelines, to avoid penalty. This product collects the data from Solar PV plants’ end-equipment and controls/limits the out-power of Solar Inverters based on its load/consumption.
5. What are your business development and growth plans for 2022?
We are planning to expand the entry of our products to more countries in Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, and increase our product deployment by 100% in 2022.
