DCS solar thermal plant ccp Kathu (South Africa)

Case Study
Project objective

It is a 100 MW solar thermal power plant using Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology with parabolic trough collectors and molten salt storage.

A distributed control system (DCS) has been designed for this plant to control the following areas:

  • Electrical distribution system
  • Control of molten salts
  • Auxiliary systems
  • Communications with the turbine DCS
  • Communications with the solar field DCS
  • Communications with the SmartGrid

The distributed control system is based on Siemens technology (PCS7 V8.2):

  • It consists of 5 redundant AS410-H controllers.
  • The supervisory system (WinCC) consists mainly of: 1 redundant server, 3 operator stations, 1 Process Historian, 1 Information server, 1 Web server, and 2 OPC servers.
  • DCS communications are based on two high-availability Industrial Ethernet rings.
  • Communications with other equipment are carried out using the Modbus TCP protocol.
  • Communication with the grid manager is done with DNP3 protocol.
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