Leading German meteorological sensor maker, OTT Hydromet confirmed its presence in the upcoming Intersolar Europe 2024 with its latest offerings in Solar PV weather monitoring station with a class A pyranometer coupled with its innovative soiling monitoring tool. The full MET station is configured with the latest SMP 12 Class A pyranometer, WS600 smart weather sensor, DustIQ soiling monitoring system, and RaZON+ all-in-one irradiance measurement tools, according to the company. Full MET stations' different measurement tools are branded under the name of either Lufft or Kipp & Zonen.
The weather monitoring of a large solar PV installation is critical to determine whether a small variation in the plant output is due to the weather or any serious hardware related issues. Its met station's latest Kipp & Zonen SMP 12 spectrally flat Class A pyranometer with integrated heating feature is capable of measuring global horizontal irradiance (GHI), plane of array (PoA) irradiance, and albedo. Along with irradiance measurement, the company has configured an all-in-one weather monitoring station, the Lufft WS600 with its Met station. The WS600 station measures temperature, relative humidity, dew point, type with intensity and amount of precipitation, air pressure, and direction with speed of wind – all critical real-time metrics to assess the cause of variation in plant output. The soiling loss, one of the major contributors in reduced plant performance ratio (PR %) or output performance, can be measured in real-time with OTT Hydromet's innovative Kipp & Zonen DustIQ internal light source based soiling measurement tool, an integral part of the MET station. The DustIQ soiling measurement works on internal light source based optical soiling measurement technology (OSM), eliminating the need of sunlight to make the measurement, explained OTT Hydromet. For measuring accurate GHI, diffuse horizontal irradiance (DHI) coupled with direct normal irradiance (DNI) required to know the exact ratio of power generated to the solar energy available on site, the company has integrated its latest RaZON+ all-in-one solar monitoring system. OTT Hydromet explained that its RaZON+ solar monitoring system with integrated pyrheliometer, shaded pyranometer, digital data processing, GPS receiver and data logger, gives the stored averages value of DNI, DHI and GHI irradiance in W/m2, sunshine duration in hours and energy in kWh/m2.
Apart from its latest sensor series, the company will also display its existing CMP series pyranometers. All interested visitors can have a physical experience of OTT Hydromet's Full MET station configured with the latest sensors and measurement tools at Booth no. B3.139 between June 19 and 21, 2024.