With a few clicks of the mouse in the control room, the drone takes off on its own, flies to the designated photovoltaic area under the guidance of the intelligent control platform, collects images, identifies faults, and automatically generates a report after completing the inspection. This is a scene in the daily work of the first batch of 10 million kilowatts of large-scale wind and solar base projects in the country - the pilot optical storage power station (hereinafter referred to as the "pilot optical storage power station") of the new energy base project in the central and northern part of Ordos in the Kubuqi Desert.
▲ Control room of the pilot optical storage power station Photo by Xu Qiang and Ma Guanpu
Located in the hinterland of the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia, the pilot photovoltaic storage power station has a total installed capacity of 1 million kilowatts, and will be connected to the grid for power generation at full capacity on December 29, 2023. The project covers an area of 32,000 acres, equivalent to the size of 3,000 standard football fields. The vast area and the intricate internal roads of the site greatly increase the difficulty of inspection by the operation and maintenance personnel of the power station.
▲ A corner of the pilot photovoltaic storage power station
"More than 2 million key equipment such as photovoltaic modules and inverters have been installed in the photovoltaic field area of the power station. If an inspection is carried out manually by traditional means, it is expected to take 180 days. Shi Stone, the person in charge of the pilot optical storage power station, said: "Now using drones, you can complete the refined inspection of all equipment in the field in one month. ”
▲ UAV inspection of photovoltaic panels
UAV intelligent inspection liberates manpower, greatly improves inspection efficiency, and also ensures the accuracy of inspection. Equipped with two image capture modes, high-definition visible light shooting and infrared thermal imaging shooting, the drone is able to identify faults and defects in photovoltaic panels more accurately. At present, the accuracy rate of UAV intelligent inspection and identification of faults is more than 95%.
▲ Inspection drone capture screen
▲ The inspection drone leaves the nest and goes to the inspection area
Not only in the photovoltaic field area, UAV intelligent inspection has the ability to inspect daily equipment such as collector lines and booster stations. The operation and maintenance personnel of the power station also use drones to inspect the roads of the site twice a day to ensure that there are no foreign vehicles and personnel entering the roads, so as to escort the safety production work.
▲ UAV inspection of collector lines
The drone inspection function is powerful, but in order not to "get lost" in the 32,000 acres of pilot optical storage power station, the help of the satellite navigation system is also needed. According to the operation and maintenance personnel of the power station, the drone can accurately obtain the location of each photovoltaic panel and each equipment by using the positioning guidance of satellite navigation, so as to complete the inspection task.
▲ UAV inspection of booster station equipment
At the pilot photovoltaic storage power station, Liu Chang, a professional from the Science and Technology Innovation and Digitalization Department of the Three Gorges Onshore Energy, and his colleagues have been optimizing and debugging the UAV inspection system. Liu Chang introduced that the intelligent inspection of UAVs is only the first step in the construction of the intelligent operation and maintenance system of the pilot optical storage power station. In the next step, the power station will deploy industrial cameras, rail robots, and various sound and light sensors to obtain the operation status of the power station equipment in real time, and upload the monitoring data to the AI algorithm platform, Internet of Things platform, and big data platform deployed in the cloud for real-time analysis and processing.
▲ On-site technicians are debugging drone equipment
In Liu Chang's office computer, the entire architecture of the intelligent operation and maintenance system of the pilot optical storage power station has been built and is about to enter the full implementation stage. The system is composed of intelligent inspection module, intelligent maintenance module, production assistance module, AR module and other parts. Under the collaborative work of multiple modules, the power station operation and maintenance mode of "intelligent diagnosis, unmanned duty, and remote centralized control" is finally realized.
Bi Ligetu, head of the power production department of the Three Gorges Mengneng Company, said that the new energy base project in the central and northern part of Ordos in the Kubuqi Desert (hereinafter referred to as the "Kubuqi base project") has a total installed capacity of 16 million kilowatts, and plans to build 22 220 thousand volt booster stations, with a total area of more than 2 million mu, including wind power, photovoltaic, thermal power and other forms of power generation. In the future, the experience of the construction and operation of the intelligent operation and maintenance system of the pilot photovoltaic storage power station will be extended to the construction of the entire project. "In the end, the Kubuqi base project will be built into the country's first wind, solar, thermal storage intelligent operation and maintenance demonstration project with extensive interconnection, comprehensive perception, cloud-side collaboration, intelligent interaction, flexibility, safety and controllability." Biligetu said.
The author of this article: Xu Qiang, Ma Guanpu