Hydrocomm were asked to carry out a site survey on a large solar farm in the north of Scotland. The site consisted of over 16,000 solar panels and over 60 large inverters, all of which need a reliable network connection to function correctly and allow the energy to be exported to the grid.
We gave the client a time scale of seven days to completely renew the entire network infrastructure, and as far as possible, this had to be achieved without causing any downtime in energy production.
During the work, we laid out over 1km of new communications ducting, and pulled in over 7.5km of our specialist dual PE layered solid copper core cable. This cable is designed to withstand extreme temperature changes, and will not go brittle and break in low temperatures.
As part of the install, we swapped to a star topology for the network, with the 60+ inverters split into 3 managed hubs and no longer daisy chained. By then fitting our new data cabinets, managed Ethernet switches including dedicated 1000 Mbps fibre cards (all with lifetime warranty), and UPS back-up systems in each hub – we created super fast, and ultra reliable fibre network backbone for all of the connected devices.
The changeover to this new network was carried out on the final day over a four hour period, keeping production downtime to a minimum.
