Data monitoring for Renewable Energy

Speaker: Peter Sullivan, Sales Manager, Grant Instruments

Peter Sullivan: OK. Data monitoring using data loggers is extremely important in the renewable energy sector for a number of reasons during the planning stage. For example of a project, data loggers are used to assess the availability and the variability of resources such as wind or sunlight. That information is vital when designing and planning a plant that's going to give you the optimum performance when it comes to manufacturing components for a renewable energy project. For example, wind turbine blades, then temperature control is extremely important in that manufacturing process. Wind turbine blades are generally composite materials and the composite curing process is very temperature dependent has to be controlled very accurately. And data logging plays a vital role in that area.

Peter Sullivan: When you're considering uh data acquisition equipment for a renewable energy project, then it's important to consider what sort of inputs. What's what, what are you actually measuring? What physical parameters is it temperature, uh sunlight voltages, currents and so on. So those sorts of information, that sort of information is really crucial when it comes to deciding what uh what sort of data acquisition system you want. Um Also you need to consider the frequency of measurement and the duration of measurement. How long is it going to run for? How much data are you going to collect? Do you want to have access to that data in real time? You know, do you want to be able to log into it from a remote location and see what's happening or do you want that data streamed continuously to uh to a remote location so that you can, you know, make changes immediately? These are the sorts of things you should consider also the environment in which the uh data acquisition equipment is going to be used, you know, is it um in a desert or uh uh the Arctic circle or whatever, you know, uh uh this sort of information is absolutely crucial as well.

Peter Sullivan: Grant instruments has a very long history in temperature control and monitoring. Fundamentally, the products are very accurate and reliable, whether it's water baths, refrigeration units or data acquisition equipment. The products, the data acquisition products uh are extremely useful in this area in renewable energy uh monitoring. Because of the flexibility of what they can measure, they can, you know, be used with lots of different types of sensor, temperature sensors, uh light sensors, air flow sensors, pressure sensors and so on. Uh And one unit can actually measure a number of parameters simultaneously. So gives you very good flexibility in that respect. But fundamentally, the data that's collected is very accurate and it's reliably collected and it's very secure. So that really is, you know, in essence, what's grant is all about is that is that sort of level of performance.