Digitaria

Gestore dei Servizi Energetici (GSE) is using the SES satellite broadband platform to capture, monitor and process a wide range of data from Italian renewable electricity production sites (RES).

Once the full network is being deployed GSE plans to collect production and environmental data from around 5000 plants scattered around the country, all owned by different operators, in order to improve prediction capabilities of produced energy from RES.

The Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system remotely reads the meters installed at the plants and feeds the data to a satellite station in the plant. These are constantly connected with the SES central hub system and the system works independently from terrestrial telecommunications services that are unable to reach many of the remote plants.

The meters are all interconnected with the dedicated backbones to give high transmission reliability via a dedicated IP network. This allows the system to be accessed remotely by one or more control centres so that the data can be fed into GSE’s databases.

The project is managed by a consortium of SES, Digitaria - the service distributor in Italy - and Calzavara, a system integrator specialising in telecommunications with extensive experience in the renewable and alternative energy sectors.