The new facility will also offer training for plant start-up and shutdown, monitoring and control during normal as well as emergency situations, and for safety procedures. The training simulator will be of high added value to CSP plant owners because it will help to train their personnel in optimised operation of the high-value components of solar plants.
CSP plants operate under fast changing transient weather situations like passing cloud trains or morning mist and dust. Against this background, highly qualified personnel is a must to operate a solar plant reliably and most efficiently.
The SPPA-S3000 simulation system has been developed by Siemens Energy and Sun to Market Solutions for intensive and continuous training of power plant personnel. The simulator provides a functional full-scale replica of a control system used in a CSP plant based on the original engineering data of the power plant.
The new solar SPPA-S3000 solution combines the proven SPPA-S3000 emulator from Siemens and Sun to Market validated process models. The emulator comprises both of the automation controllers and the input/output level. The process covers technological process simulation for a solar field and thermal storage system.
“Combining all features from solar field to grid in a simulator will allow power plant owners to run their CSP plants on minimum risk and maximum performance from day one and during the entire operational life. Because it ensures that the personnel is trained in a most professional way before startup to operate the high-value equipment smoothly,” said Karlheinz Springer, Chief Executive Officer Instrumentation, Controls & Electrical at Siemens Energy.
“We’re very proud to have been chosen by Siemens to supply our high-quality process models for CSP plants,” said Ralf Wiesenberg, managing director of Sun to Market Solutions. “This is a new milestone in our proven track record of developing and providing sophisticated process models for the solar thermal power industry around the globe.”
Sun to Market Solutions is a rapidly growing CSP design and optimisation firm with offices in Madrid, Bangalore, and Sunnyvale in California. Sun to Market´s process model for the solar field and the thermal storage system, is one product in a suite of tools that they have developed for the CSP market, which also includes the STP4, ESOM, Solar Solver 2.0 or solar resource forecaster software. This dynamic plant optimisation software is the first of its kind.
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