IoT Enabled Real-Time Energy Monitoring for Photovoltaic Systems

The increasing demand for solar energy, high energy prices, and operational costs are all of which lead to several compelling reasons for the need for energy monitoring. In this paper, an Internet of Things based remote real-time energy monitoring system is developed to monitor the solar power generation. Various current and voltage sensors are integrated with a multipurpose microcontroller for aggregating the data. An IoT analytics platform is adapted to visualize the aggregated data and evaluate the energy generated for a given distributed generation system. This helps in continuous remote monitoring and results in improved efficiency of the power plants. The remote monitoring also helps in identifying various anomalies that may affect the operation of solar panels. The results depict the efficiency and error associated with the developed monitoring system, which proved to be better when compared with conventional energy monitoring systems.