An IoT based smart solar photovoltaic remote monitoring and control unit

Using the Internet Of Things Technology for supervising solar photovoltaic power generation can greatly enhance the performance, monitoring and maintenance of the plant. With advancement of technologies the cost of renewable energy equipments is going down globally encouraging large scale solar photovoltaic installations. This massive scale of solar photovoltaic deployment requires sophisticated systems for automation of the plant monitoring remotely using web based interfaces as majority of them are installed in inaccessible locations and thus unable to be monitored from a dedicated location. The discussion in this paper is based on implementation of new cost effective methodology based on IoT to remotely monitor a solar photovoltaic plant for performance evaluation. This will facilitate preventive maintenance, fault detection, historical analysis of the plant in addition to real time monitoring.