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Due to a growing demand for electricity people started to look for new forms of energy production, especially from renewable sources. The OZE (Renewable Energy Sources) Act, which aims to provide the conditions for the development of enterprises producing clean energy in Poland, will probably influence a dynamic development of this market sector. One of the most popular and the most effective forms of exploitation of renewable energy sources for power generation are hydropower plants. Hydropower plants can be divided according to the amount of generated electricity: pumped storage power plants, impoundment power plants, tidal power plant, small hydropower plants. The biggest amount of electricity is generated in the pumped storage power plants.

The process automation system for electricity production in hydropower plants can be completely based on the iMod industrial computer. This type of a computer can be used both in the newly created hydropower plants and the ones which are being modernised. The computer serves as both an automatic control system and a telemetric module collecting the transferred data. Such a solution enables a safe operation of the whole turbine set. The iMod device enables using the latest technical solutions and allows remote control and monitoring (by radio or via the Internet) of the hydropower plant resources. This solution enables productivity, stability and safety increase together with economic efficiency of the whole system.

All the processes and alarms in the hydropower plant might be presented both locally and remotely. The integrated Modbus protocol support enables the local data access – this allows you to connect any HMI panel supporting this protocol e.g., TPD-280. The NXDynamics package and a built-in web service offer information sharing and remote presentation of the system processes. This solution enables a fully remote access to the hydropower plant parameters in the form of a visualization via the Internet. Communication between the NPE/iMod industrial computer and the GW-7433D converter is carried out via the Modbus RTU protocol. The converter enables a quick connection of slaves to CANopen and masters to Modbus. This is why you can connect a lot of devices to a network, you can control and monitor the devices and you can archive data from the devices with the NPE/iMod unit. The data received from CANopen are sent to the NPE/iMod industrial RS485 converter computer. Thanks to the built-in functionalities, the computer can transmit information to network users via the Internet, GPRS or via SMS text messaging. In addition the NPE/iMod can perform functions of a controller – the user has a total control of the devices connected to the GW-7433D converter via the CANopen bus. The devices can be controlled and monitored also via a web browser – with the built-in NXDynamics interface or with any HMI panel, e.g., TPD-280, directly connected to the NPE/iMod. Due to a growing demand for electricity people started to look for new forms of energy production, especially from renewable sources. The OZE (Renewable Energy Sources) Act, which aims to provide the conditions for the development of enterprises producing clean energy in Poland, will probably influence a dynamic development of this market sector. One of the most popular and the most effective forms of exploitation of renewable energy sources for power generation are hydropower plants. Hydropower plants can be divided according to the amount of generated electricity: pumped storage power plants, impoundment power plants, tidal power plant, small hydropower plants. The biggest amount of electricity is generated in the pumped storage power plants.