Solar Power Plant Monitoring System
Our client is an energy company based in Europe operating a portfolio of solar and wind power plants distributed across multiple sites.
They approached us with the need to build a centralized, real-time monitoring platform that would give their operations team a single source of truth across all facilities. This would allow them to replace fragmented data silos and manual reporting with a unified, always-on system.
Client location
Europe
Industry
Energy
Duration
Ongoing
Team
3 members
Challenge
Managing a distributed fleet of solar and wind power plants means dealing with a large number of heterogeneous data sources, such as inverters, transformers, substations, weather sensors, and SCADA systems. Each has its own protocol, format, and refresh rate.
Before this system existed, the operations team had no unified view: monitoring happened across disconnected manufacturer tools, and any cross-plant analysis required significant manual effort.
The client needed a platform that could ingest data from every device and object in real time, provide actionable visibility at a glance, and support a 24/7 dispatch team with instant alerts when something went wrong.
Critically, the system also had to interface with external energy market data to track forecast accuracy and calculate hourly imbalances - a regulatory requirement with direct financial consequences.
Solution
Four Ages built the Unified Monitoring System from the ground up as a Grafana-based web interface backed by a custom database server and a broad integration layer connecting all plant objects.
Multi-Protocol Data Integration
The core engineering challenge was connecting dozens of disparate sources — sensors, PLCs, inverters, and SCADA systems — into a single normalised data pipeline.
Where direct integration was not possible, the team routed data through SCADA as an intermediary. This layer feeds a centralized database that drives all dashboards and analytics in real time.
Generation Monitoring and Forecasting
The platform displays real-time energy production for every plant and compares it against two external forecast services — Enercast and Meteologica — as well as the team's own internal forecast model.
Planned hourly output is submitted to the energy market operator in advance; the system then calculates the imbalance between the submitted forecast and actual generation for each hour, feeding directly into financial reconciliation.
Equipment Health & Alarm Management
The system monitors the status of every transformer substation (KTP), inverter, and connection point across all sites. Device-level connection states are tracked individually — operators can immediately see which KTPs are active and which have lost connectivity.
Real-time alarms are surfaced in an integrated alarm view (via NetEco), categorised by severity (Critical, Major, Minor, Warning), with device type and plant attribution. All alerts are also displayed on large screens at the client's 24/7 dispatch centre.
Financial and Operational Analytics
The platform supports daily revenue and consumption tracking using prices published by the market operator and NEC Ukrenergo.
Financial modelling - including IRR, NPV, and payback period calculations - is handled in parallel workflows; CO₂ and ESG reporting is performed annually using certified local tooling.
Continuous Development
The system wasn’t planned as a one-time delivery. It is a living platform that constantly gets monitored and updated. The three-person team continues to extend it as new plant objects are onboarded, new data sources are connected, and operational needs evolve.
Impact
The client's operations team now has a single interface covering all solar and wind assets in real time.
Connection loss events, inverter faults, and generation anomalies surface instantly, reducing the time from incident to response.
The integration with energy market forecasting services enables accurate hourly submissions, minimising imbalance penalties.
Dispatch operators work from one screen instead of switching between multiple manufacturer tools, and plant performance data is always available for reporting and analysis.
Responsibilities
Custom backend architecture and database design
Multi-protocol data integration (direct and SCADA-mediated)
Grafana dashboard development and configuration
Alarm and notification system
Energy market forecast integration (Enercast, Meteologica)
Imbalance calculation and reporting
Ongoing feature development and platform maintenance
Technologies
Grafana
PostgreSQL
SCADA Integration
Node.js
Python
REST APIs
Enercast
Meteologica
NetEco
Author:
Maria Roy
