Remote operations control centers can bring plant operations, engineering, maintenance, monitoring, diagnostics, and training into a more connected operating model. In a recent Ovation Users’ Group session, Maria Thorpe, Controls Engineer for Renewable Projects in Emerson’s Power and Water Solutions business, and Emily D’Alessio, Senior Engineer also in the Power and Water Solutions business, explained how utilities can match the architecture, graphics, and alarm strategy to the needs of each fleet.
Why It Matters
A remote operations control center, or ROCC, is more than a room with remote consoles. Its value comes from giving operators and support teams a consistent way to monitor, control, and troubleshoot assets across sites. That consistency becomes especially important as fleets add solar, wind, hydro, battery storage, and conventional generation, often with different control platforms. The technical design must also account for network reliability, cybersecurity, local operating needs, and future expansion.
Key Takeaways
- Start with operating requirements, not a single reference architecture. ROCC designs can range from one-to-one remote workstations to multi-network fleet systems.
- Standard graphics and alarm practices help operators recognize abnormal conditions and move from fleet view to plant detail with less context switching.
- Local and remote capabilities should reflect the consequences of a lost network connection, especially at hard-to-reach sites.
- Existing third-party controls can be incorporated through an interface, allowing the remote center to present a more consistent operator experience.
Choose the Architecture Around the Fleet
Maria and Emily described several approaches. A remote desktop connection can serve as an initial step, but it does not provide fleet-level human-machine interface graphics and alarms. Ovation over Wide Area Network supports remote operation and engineering with a dedicated operator station rather than remoting into an active plant workstation. Ovation Multi-Network adds local and remote engineering, fleet-level alarms, and scalability for larger deployments. The presentation notes that it can connect up to approximately 300 sites or database servers while allowing sites to use different software revisions.
The physical and logical connection typically includes encrypted virtual private network routers at the remote center and local site, plus a wide area network for communications. Redundant routers and high-availability or hyperconverged infrastructure can be used where continuous operation and resilient data access are required. The examples also showed that local systems do not all need to be native Ovation systems. A supervisory control and data acquisition interface can connect third-party controls while operators at the ROCC work within a common Ovation environment.
Balance Central Visibility With Local Independence
The right balance between centralized operation and local capability depends on the asset and the network. One hydro river group selected a multi-network design, so each site retained full on-site capability even if wide area communications were unavailable. At the same time, the engineering center could provide centralized history, security and engineering support, and issue start, stop and dispatch commands across the group.
Renewable fleets have additional choices. Ovation Green software and automation solutions can collect wind, solar and battery data at the site and make it available at an enterprise level. Some smaller sites may send data directly to the remote center, while others use local data collectors to preserve data quality and support local troubleshooting. Wind sites can run Ovation Green in parallel with original equipment manufacturer systems or receive selected data through those systems. For solar fleets, a consistent solar plant SCADA system can give operators fleet-wide visibility while retaining the level of local control the application requires.
Make Graphics and Alarms Part of the Design
Connecting sites is only the foundation. Operators also need a consistent view of what is normal, what is abnormal, and what requires action. High-performance graphics use restrained color so abnormal conditions stand out. From a fleet overview, an operator can open a pre-filtered alarm list, review related alarms, or access start permissives without searching across several screens.
Alarm design matters even more when many sites report into one center. The session outlined how to use characteristics and priorities to group alarms by equipment, process area, and urgency. Summary points can reduce alarm flooding at the remote center while preserving access to detailed site alarms. Ovation Green adds common filtering by site, device type, and alarm severity, helping operators move from fleet-level awareness to the specific asset that needs attention.
Plan the ROCC as an Integrated Operations Model
The strongest theme was integration. A remote center becomes more useful when operations, fleet management, engineering, monitoring and diagnostics, maintenance, and training can collaborate around the same information. Standardization does not mean every site must be identical. It means the fleet has agreed operating conventions, a scalable network design, and a common way to present conditions and alarms. Those decisions can help operators work across a mixed fleet with fewer unnecessary context changes and a clearer path from detection to action.
Learn More
Explore Ovation Green Software and Automation Solutions for approaches to optimizing renewable energy asset operations across wind, solar, and energy storage fleets.
