Solar Energy Plant Visit

Our visit to CPFL was really informative and interesting! I was surprised because CPFL not only works with solar energy, but it also creates and distributes energy from wind, biomass, and hydropower plants. CPFL controls the generation of the energy and distribution of the generated energy. We began our visit at the headquarters of the company, moving through the control room and the smart meter room, and then traveled to the area with the solar panels. 

The control room (shown above) was full of people working on computers tracking the use of the energy that was created. The screens were used to track energy use and storms in order to prevent energy outage. It was very interesting to see the prevention methods used to ensure that a team of people can come if something goes wrong with the energy distribution. When I was looking at all of these systems I kept thinking back to when the power would go out in my house and how I would get frustrated waiting for it to be fixed without thinking about all of the different steps that needed to be taken to locate the outage location and send a team to fix it. 

The next room we went into was the room where the people worked with Smart Meters to collect data from homes. This was used mostly to gain information of pricing and how much to charge people for energy. The reason these are known as Smart Meters is because they collect information, but they also allow for remote access to control the power. If someone did not pay their energy bill one month, CPFL could shut off their power without having an employee go to the house and turn off the energy. The other innovative aspect of the Smart Meters was the way that they connected to the server. The information from the Smart Meter used access points (yellow triangles) to connect back to the server, but if an access point lost connection than the Smart Meters would reconfigure themselves to find another route. This allows for a constant flow of information even if access points were offline or broken. 

We then drove to the solar plant, which was a bit smaller than I expected. The solar plant had different types of solar panels, gathering information from them for research purposes in addition to harvesting the energy. Some of the panels had hinges allowing them to rotate with the sun causing an 11% higher productivity. The other panels were stuck in one position because of the high price of hinge technology for the panels. 

There were a couple panels of different types on a lower elevation ground with a small wind mill for research purposes. I thought it was really cool how they compared the energy generated from various types of solar panels along with the wind mills to gather data and see which one was the most efficient. We were also able to drive in an electric car (below), which was so quiet and smooth. I think I may want to get one of these cars when I am older if they are able to install chargers in more locations.