Onshore Power Supply – OPS
PowerCon A/S
A major accomplishment of the Danish engineering company PowerCon has been to present an economically competitive land-based system for supplying clean electrical power to ships during their stay in ports.
PowerCon aims to pursue a major market opportunity by demonstrating and further commercializing a competitive Onshore Power Supply (OPS), to provide electricity for large sea-going vessels when docked at the pier. The OPS system not only reduces the consumption of fuel and the associated air pollution but also eliminates acoustic noise and vibrations from the running engines.
The high capacity of the OPS will supply electricity to cruise ships of all sizes and with any type of electrical design, which will allow them to switch off their engines and reduce emissions of polluting substances during stops.
The cruise ships have a different voltage and frequency than the normal power grid on land, and most tend to have 60 Hz electrical systems. Other land systems require high-cost converters to accommodate ships with a frequency of 50 Hz. In addition, this expensive technology has to be installed, both on the ship and on the dock.
The OPS system complies with the international standard CEI / ISO / IEEE 80005-1 (cable connection between ships and land for medium voltage). It can supply voltages of 6.6 and 11 kV for a frequency range between 50 and 60 Hz. The novelty of this new compact design is that it has been adapted from a renewable energy system with wind turbines, which means that it is much more competitive than other comparable power supply systems.
PowerCon Embedded as a sister company of PowerCon, collaborated on the full-stack web development on the OPS project. Developers from PowerCon Embedded handled all development and design tasks with regards to the web platform. This includes both the development of the frontend and backend side of the web platform.
Thanks to this web platform the customer can monitor the OPS solution, to see how the ships are charging, monitor if everything is going well and to configure different parameters such as voltage, frequency and phase. The web platform provides logging temperature, pressure, current, voltage values, which are valuable for the customer.
Aside from development tasks, support & maintenance are also provided.
Furthermore, PowerCon Embedded helped with the software for controlling the converters.
PowerCon Embedded has clear expertise in the development of a hardware/software control framework for voltage/frequency regulation, accompanied by a web platform for monitoring and control.
Working with PowerCon Embedded was (and continues to be) an outstanding experience.
Their high experience in software control and flexible collaborations on the web platform software development was essential to deliver the OPS project on time and within budget.
Christian Krogh
Head of Engineering, PowerCon
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