LoRa WAN for Wind Turbine Monitoring: Prototype and Practical Deployment

The energy grids became a cardiovascular system of the today's civilization. In the recent years the new political initiatives aiming at reducing the pollution by increasing the share of energy generated by renewables have gained momentum, which introduces novel challenges and use cases. In the paper we investigate the utility and report our experiences of deploying a prototype wind-turbine monitoring solution based on the recently developed low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology named LoRaWAN. We engineer, instrument and deploy the complete end-to-end solution, starting from the power generation monitoring sensor node and up to the IoT platform with a web-based graphical user interface. The details of the design and deployment choices, and the results and lessons learned coming from analysis of operation of the deployed system over the nine-month period are reported. These results show that LPWANs in general and LoRaWAN technology in particular is suitable for monitoring the energy infrastructure.