The importance of monitoring renewable energy plants: three case histories

Abstract

Many renwable energy plants are put into operation without providing a monitoring system to evaluate their performance over time. Then if is often difficult to realise the bad working of the system and the loss of efficiency results in an economic loss. Three quite different examples are reported to illustrate how real performance can be lower than designed due respectively: 1. To bad settings of the parameters; 2. To a hurried commissioning that did not reveal the mistakes in the design of the plant; 3. To a failure of a single component over time.