Requirements for Wind and Solar Farm Communications: An Overview of Communication Needs and Technical Specifications

Abstract

The thesis analyzes the communications requirements and technical specifications that would facilitate the integration of wind and solar farms into the power grid in Finland which is in the process of transformation regarding efficiency, security, and reliability. As Finland moves towards achieving its 2035 carbon neutrality goal, the growing shares of variable renewable energy (RE) should enhance the significance of effective communication infrastructures between plant owners, transmission system operators (TSOs)/ distribution system operators (DSOs), service providers and other stakeholders. The study is based on interpretivist, inductive, and mono-method qualitative design and relies on secondary data sources on peer-reviewed literature, industrial reports, international standards (e.g., IEC 61850, IEC 61400-25, DNP3, Modbus, OPC UA), and European interoperability frameworks. Thematic analysis reveals that there are five important themes, namely functional communication requirements needed in monitoring, control, protection, and forecasting; (2) non-functional requirements, such as latency, reliability, scalability, and cybersecurity; (3) protocol and standardization frameworks to enable semantic interoperability; (4) architectural patterns and multi-stakeholder data governance; and (5) technological trends, including IoT, edge computing, 5G, cloud-based control, and hybrid RE systems. The results indicate that the Finnish wind and solar communication is tightly functionally separated, and safety-related telemetry, operational surveillance, and forecasting have varying performance and semantics requirements. The non-functional attributes are closely interdependent, i.e., the qualitative improvements in cybersecurity, data granularity, or scale may be accompanied by the trade-offs in the latency, redundancy, and the capacity of the system. Standards also offer an essential base of interoperability and must be supported by both governance and certification and legacy integration strategies to be effective in practice. Finland Finnish RE communication architectures are progressively synthesizing centralized oversight and decentralized liberty as well as encapsulating data provenance, data access control, and data liability mapping into communication paths. In general, the thesis concludes that realizing the Finnish carbon-neutral goals requires critical treatment of communication infrastructures as socio-technical systems that offer in real-time, interoperable and resilience-focused coordination of increasingly complex and distributed renewable energy ecosystems.