A Low-cost Solar Farm Monitoring System Based on Cloud Database

Renewable energies have become important sources of electricity generation in modern times, with solar energy being one of the best types of such energy since solar radiation can be converted directly into electricity. To harness the solar energy in the best way, specialists in this field resort to solar farms where a large number of solar panels are installed in an open area and the electricity produced is being transferred into towns. The design of a reliable monitoring system for such a large number of solar panels becomes the essential part of such design to reach the needed efficiency. This paper introduces a low-cost practical implementation of a monitoring system for an existing solar system installed on the building of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) in Baghdad based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technique. The “ThingSpeak” cloud database is utilized to store and retrieve the monitored data and the PHP and HTML programming languages are used to design a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to display these data.