REVITALIZATION OF SMALL HYDRO POWER PLANTS – INTEGRATION INTO THE SMART GRID CONCEPT

With on-going high penetration of intermittent renewable power sources, like wind and solar, increases significantly the importance of hydro energy. Due to permanent rising of flexible hydro energy price, the investments in increasing the energy efficiency and availability of existing small power plants are justified and encouraged. In this paper, the development of a small hydro power plant (SHPP) control system is presented. The control system hardware is based on programmable logic controller (PLC) platform, which is highly flexible industrial-grade equipment, together with original equipment manufactured (OEM) devices, such as measurement’s transducer, primary equipment controllers and synchronization units. The goal was to obtain a control system which can interface with equipment of different generations and follow new trends in control and smart grid concept. The system is installed and in operation in SHPP “Raška”.