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Cyber Physical System for Solar Energy Monitoring

Published In: Conference: 2019 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)

Abstract:

Renewable energy sources (RES) are potential sources of carbon neutral, sustainable and unlimited energy to satiate growing world energy needs. Among these, solar energy has evolved as the most cost-effective and mature technology for energy generation. Solar energy being intermittent in nature with numerous parameters affecting its operations such as sunlight intensity, soiling on solar panels and panel defects can result in unexpected and undesirable power output oscillation. Thus a low cost, real time solar panel monitoring system is needed for performance evaluation and preventive measures. This work presents a low-cost real time cyber-physical system for remote monitoring of solar energy plants. The proposed system uses Arduino-nano integrated with current, voltage, light intensity, dust, humidity and temperature sensors for performance evaluation and effect of different sensed parameters on power generation. Using GSM module, the sensed parameters are transmitted to free and open source cloud platform for processing, storage, analysis and preventive measures to enhance power generation capability.