Renewable energy + industrial sustainability
a CX5330 Embedded PC with two CPU cores. Miquel Coca, involved in sales at Beckho Spain, comments: “Beckho regularly expands its portfolio of industrial PCs and embedded PCs with more powerful variants, at the same time ensuring the long-term availability and easy scalability of its control computers.” Battery storage as a dynamic control reserve The PPC monitors and controls multiple BCIs and is responsible for coordinating all power blocks in a plant as a key element. Here, Power Electronics relies on a CX2033 Embedded PC with an AMD Ryzen TM processor. “In one project, we have already
In its solar and battery storage projects, Power Electronics benefits from the openness and broad scalability of Beckhoff’s control hardware and software, and uses CX5120 Embedded PCs, for example, for the battery controller interfaces.
coordinated 160 BCIs with the embedded PC and have not yet come close to its power reserve,” says David Dobón. The PPC records and processes the information from each BCI via the ADS communication protocol and provides them with the operating setpoints. “ADS is very fast, it’s flexible, and enables communication via the plant’s Ethernet network,” says Miquel Coca. Expansions are also planned for the PCC software, with a CX2043 Embedded PC featuring four CPU cores set to be used in future. Openness facilitates system integration “The use of a control PC with an open operating system enables the integration of .Net code, which is a major advantage for us,” says Hector Ortega, highlighting an important feature of PC- based control from Beckhoff. This enabled Power Electronics to implement the DNP3 telecontrol protocol used by many energy suppliers for communication between the higher-level SCADA system and the substations. In addition, .Net is used to manage the databases and develop the visualisation. “The TwinCAT real-time task management, together with the powerful embedded PCs, is essential in ensuring the short response times of the solar plants and battery storage systems,” notes Agustin Cano. What’s more, the diagnostic tools provided by TwinCAT are especially helpful for monitoring the execution time of each task across all cores and cycles. The compatibility of the hardware and software was another criterion for choosing Beckhoff as a supplier. Furthermore, cooperation between the teams at Power Electronics and Beckhoff in clarifying technical issues was quick, smooth, and efficient.
support services,” says David Dobón, Applications Engineering Manager at Power Electronics, emphasising the importance of high-performance control technology. The advantage for the operators is that they can sell the energy fed into the grid at a higher price point. “Initially, we were able to switch our systems from consuming 150 MW of power to delivering 180 MW in 130 ms, for example. Now we can do that in as little as 110 ms,” adds Agustin Cano, Team Leader Control Systems at Power Electronics. Such short switching times require a fast and sophisticated automation system, which Power Electronics implements using hardware and soware from Beckho . It can thus control all three power block variants: solar, battery, and hybrid. The challenge of hybrid power blocks “The most sophisticated scenario arises when the inverter of a BCI manages solar modules and batteries at the same time,” says Hector Ortega, Team Leader Soware at Power Electronics. These hybrid power blocks then function as small autonomous solar plants and must essentially manage themselves to maintain an energy balance. Power Electronics uses Beckho CX series Embedded PCs with TwinCAT 3 PLC (TC1200) to control the various battery controller interfaces. “Depending on the configuration of a power block, a CX5120 or CX5240 Embedded PC with an Intel Atom® processor is used, for example,” explains Javier Menchén, Technical Support at Beckho Spain. The BCIs communicate with the inverters, batteries, and other components via Modbus TCP and execute sophisticated control algorithms with very short cycle times. TwinCAT 3 PLC HMI Web (TF1810) is also installed as a visualisation system on the embedded PCs of the controls. This enables service personnel to access the parameters of the connected devices directly on site or remotely via a web interface. Future functional enhancements and soware optimisations are expected to require additional computing power. In this case, performance can easily be adjusted by switching to
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MARCH 2026 Electricity + Control
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