Evaluation of IoT for Automisation of Solar Map Production: Case of Mauritius and Outer Islands

Technology advances are never last but the latest. Technology is constantly evolving and adapting to our daily lives. To enhance this adoption of technology, processes are becoming more and more automated in various fields, such as manufacturing and environmental monitoring. The aim of this work is to enable sustainable photovoltaics (PV) electricity generation in Mauritius, Rodrigues and Agalega Islands through the deployment of an automated online platform for provision of GIS solar maps. Solar stations have been deployed across the different islands in order to measure global horizontal irradiance (GHI), cell temperature and ambient temperature every one minute using hardware based stations and one IoT equivalent module. The solarmap.uom.ac.mu website was developed to publish solar related data to the public at large. The statistics obtained are useful for the recommendations for prospective PV projects. The data collected and the solar maps can be reliably used while choosing a site for PV plants, for PV system design and for financial analysis of PV projects. In this work, we further looked into automating the capture, processing and the solar map generation using the solar data captured. Additionally, we design, implement and test an equivalent IoT module for the capture of solar data providing the same format as hardware. Despite a lower cost, the IoT module produced the same amount of capture as hardware based modules.