Solutions for SCADA system communication reliability in photovoltaic power plants

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are used in photovoltaic (PV) power plants for monitoring, control, remote communication purposes. The ingredient of SCADA system in PV power plants is introduced in this paper. In order to improve security and reliability of the SCADA system in PV plants, this paper provides two effective solutions, security access control strategy and redundancy mechanism. The proposed security access control strategy adopts some measures, such as security authentication, data encryption, as well as role-based access control. These measures can solve communication security issues between the SCADA system remote terminal units (RTU) and SCADA configuration server. Furthermore, Device and network redundancy is presented in the SCADA system. And redundancy switching mechanism has been implemented through four redundancy services. The availability of the SCADA system can be validated through SCADA configuration server.