Solar Array Batteries Use a Network To Talk With The Grid!

As more and more companies look to solar energy for power many new challenges come along that need a solution for it to all work. In this case The Rock River Lumber and Grain Company had installed solar panels to help reduce energy costs. After installing their solar panels, they decided to a battery array to both store energy as well as sell power back to the utility grid but in order to do that it needed to securely connect with the utilities network.

How Twin State Got Involved

Enter Twin State Technical Services company located in Davenport, Iowa. Rock River Lumber and Grain were already a client of Twin State Technical Services providing IT and networking services. They explain the situation and Jake Thompson, a network engineer works with them to solve a series of challenges and ultimately create a network that gets them access to the internet so they can send power out over the utility grid.

 Jake Explains that the company installed the solar panel in Prophetstown, Illinois where they are headquartered. The project was one of the largest of its in Whiteside County at the time.

 They have a grain facility out in Sterling that operates as a rail terminal where they offload all their grain. They put the solar system in to offset their energy costs and get some energy for themselves. About two years after the installation Moxie and recommended installing a battery backup array we can install on your site. The solar panels can charge those batteries during operation. When the grid needs power, it can pull that energy off the batteries in a stored format pushing it out to all the local residences, businesses, to the grid.

 In order to do that, someone has to come into the network and say, hey, I want that power, and that you do that over the Internet to communicate what is needed and what is available and to track all the actions.

Challenges

The challenge s included the size of the property, which was very large, multiple buildings all around an active rail yard. The solar array was at one end, the battery was in the middle, and they had to be connected somehow to the DMark, which is where we send our Internet out to the world. The way we did that, we had to mount devices called Point to point. It basically is a wireless connection between where we want to send data to the solar panels or to the battery backups. You just mount this radio antenna up as high as you can so there's no interference, and you point it as close as you can.

We worked with one of the solar panels to look at that data, and then we had to run another point to point to the other end of the property to look at the batteries. When we can see the data the n we can get it out to the internet.

We had some firewall changes and policies that we had to put in place so that we could have security on it. No outside world could get into it, only the organization that wants to control those batteries and those were put in place as well.

Jake Thompson is a Network Engineer for Twin State Technical Services : Twin State Technical Services