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Internet of Things (IoT) in Photovoltaic Systems

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DOI: 10.1109/NPEC.2018.8476807

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 2018 National Power Engineering Conference (NPEC)

Internet of Things (IoT) in Photovoltaic Systems

Nallapaneni Manoj Kumar 1, Karthik Atluri 2, Sriteja Palaparthi 3
1
Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Pahang, 26600 Pekan, Pahang, Malaysia.
2
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Karunya University, Coimbatore-641 114, Tamil Nadu, India.
3
Bulwaark Integrated Systems Pvt. Ltd., Ameer pet, Hyderabad-500016, India
Email: nallapanenichow@gmail.com, yaswanth9494@gmail.com, sritejapalaparthi@gmail.com

Abstract— Solar energy is one of the greatest attractions
among the renewable energy re-sources used for electrification.
Harnessing solar energy needs photovoltaic (PV) system that
converts light energy from sun into direct electricity.
Photovoltaic systems can be installed at any place where
sufficient energy potentials are avail-able. The major challenge in
the PV systems is to study its performance as it is varying with
respect to various parameters and system components
functioning. Hence real time monitoring system is needed to
assess its performance. This study briefs about the use of internet
of things (IoT) in performance monitoring and real time control
of PV systems. Focus is made on the IoT need and its architecture
for PV systems with relevant discussions. Use of IoT enhances
the understanding over the real time operating parameters. This
helps in accessing the control over the PV systems installed at
remote areas, effective and fast fault diagnosis, maintenance,
recording generation and performance data for analysis.
Keywords—Solar energy, Photovoltaic systems, Internet of
Things (IoT), performance moni-toring, real time monitoring
display, vehicles, actuators, sensors etc.) with the help of
devices like micro controllers, digital communication tools,
transceivers, and information and network protocols [4, 5].
This technology will help in collecting much information in
detailed about the objects for providing variety of new
developmental scopes. IoT has wide range of applications that
includes: healthcare, industrial and home automation, home
energy management, renewable energy systems, medical aids,
traffic maintenance, automotive industries, smart grids, micro
grids, intelligent drive systems, and many more [5, 6].
Among the wide area applications of IoT, a focus is made
on the solar photovoltaics. This is due to the popular use of
solar photovoltaics in the present-day energy sector as well in
distributed level generation. This popularity of solar PV
systems would be a great scope for implementing IoT systems
in conjunction with it. This would indirectly give a great
business for the IoT service providers as well as the IoT
customers.

I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, solar photovoltaic systems serve as one of
the major contributors of clean electricity in most of the
nations. Electricity generation potential from a photovoltaic
system is the most important one that is to be concentrated [1].
These potentials could vary from technology to technology,
location to location depending various parameters. Based on
the electricity potentials, the cost per unit electricity, pay backs,
return on investments would depend [2]. Hence, sufficient
measures are to be taken on every installation of photovoltaic
system, so that they have higher energy potentials. Even
though efforts are made during the installation or before the
installation, there are chances of failures, maintenance
problems during the operation of the PV systems. These sought
problems might be more in the case of PV systems installed in
remote locations or far away locations. Hence a suitable
approach is to be adopted to overcome these problems. The
best way to overcome this is the frequent monitoring which is
quite impossible for a human. The major problem that human
could encounter is the concentration, care full attention,
accuracy towards problem identification and solution to be
proposed [3].
The best method for catering such problem is to adopt for
remote monitoring of the systems using the most emerging
technique called the “Internet of Things” shortly referred to be Fig. 1. Schematic view of photovoltaic system operation
IoT. In IoT, all the information technology and communication
technology devices become an integral part of the internet. IoT II. PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS
enables quick and easy interactions with most of the objects Photovoltaic (PV) system is a combination of photovoltaic
that we see in our daily life (cameras, home appliances, module, electric power converters, and storage devices.

978-1-5386-3803-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

 2018 National Power Engineering Conference (NPEC)
Fig. 2. IoT architecture for remote monitoring of photovoltaic system
It is simply an energy harvester used for converting
sunlight into electricity [7]. This process of energy generation
using PV system is quite different from the traditional method
of power generation using fossil fuels. But the transmission and
distribution of energy involves the similar methods. A group of
PV modules are connected to form PV arrays, such PV array
arranged in series and parallel configurations are termed to be
PV generators [8-10]. These PV generators are installed in such
a way that they are exposed to sun light directly. These PV
genera-tors generate DC electricity which is then converted
into AC electricity using power converters. Then based on the
requirements the energy can be self-consumed by a particular
load or can be supplied to electrical grid using transmission
network [11]. Although energy is generated and transmitted but
in some cases the possibility storage option using battery is
essential. Based on the type of components and operation, PV
systems are classified into two types i.e. off grid, and on grid
PV systems. Fig. 1 shows the schematic view of the
photovoltaic system operation.
III. IOT AND ITS NEED FOR PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEM
Internet of Things is shortly referred as IoT. IoT is a
technology developed from the concurrence of grouping
“internet, micro-electromechanical systems, wireless
technologies, and micro services” [3-6]. In simpler it can be
said that, IoT is coordination of analogous things with solitary
identifiers, objects, mechanical machines, computing devices,
and digital machines. This coordination helps in conveying the
data across the network by eliminating the gap between
information technology, and the operational technologies
without the need of computer to human interaction, and human
to human interaction.
IoT can solve the most complex issues that a present-day
science and engineering systems would face. Considering the
photovoltaic system used for power generation, these involves
various components whose operational behaviour varies. To be
more precise, solar intensity is time varying and weather
depended hence constant power generation is not possible
throughout the system operation [12]. This indirectly effects
the functioning of other system components like power
converter voltage levels, battery state of charge, energy
demands by loads etc. Sometimes, the dust accumulation, and
other environmental conditions may also result in poor
performance of the photovoltaic system. However, these
problems in longer terms results in the failure of the system.
Monitoring such failures is quite difficult for humans, as they
need to visit the plant site frequently and maintain the record of
operational data. It is quite tedious job when the plant is
located in faraway places. So for addressing these failures
human takes lot of time and sometimes may not be addressed
 2018 National Power Engineering Conference (NPEC)
due to lack of sufficient information about the system failure or
poor performance [3]. Hence, a continuous monitoring system
is to be equipped along with the PV system, such that it would
monitor the system parameters and store them in cloud
platform. The stored data will help in understanding its
performance and reasons for poor performance. This allows to
make troubleshooting and maintenance operation when the
performance is poor due to some faults. In this way the need
for IoT is essential in performance monitoring and optimizing
the system parameters with a remote-control option.
IV. IOT ARCHITECTURE FOR PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS
The IoT architecture for photovoltaic systems consist of
three different layers:
First layer is the PV system design environment, second
layer is the gateway linkage, and third layer is the remote
monitoring and control layer. Fig. 2 clearly shows the IoT
architecture for photovoltaic systems.
First layer includes the PV system design environment,
where all the components were connected as per the required
configurations to full fill the user requirements. In this case PV
system components are interlinked with the Arduino server
which is the second layer of the IoT architecture.
This second layer is termed as gateway linkage which
serves as interconnection between the hardware designs of the
PV system to the web server through a router with internet
firewall option. Arduino server is the major component that
helps in integrating the web server through Ethernet or wireless
router module. Here the Arduino server has the microcontroller
that monitor, control, and manages the functions of PV system
hardware components.
The information from the server will be given to the third
layer, which is the remote monitoring and control layer. Here
the server will deliver the gathered information regarding the
PV system in to storage devices from which periodical reports
could be generated.
Users can also retrieve this data in the form reports or in the
form visual graphs using the android interface with the cloud
data through Wi-Fi network
V. RELATED WORKS AND DISCUSSIONS
Internet of things in photovoltaic systems enabled few new
features to the current solar market trend. This feature includes
the continuous monitoring, effective operational efficiencies,
fast and immediate response to the faults, emerging business
analytics based on the historic generation data, possible
increments in revenue etc. To understand this clearly, few
discussions were made focusing on the works related to the
monitoring and remote control of PV systems using IoT.
For achieving energy efficiency in the domestic houses i.e.
home energy management, (Jongbae Kim et al. 2015) proposed
IoT based photovoltaic (PV) system for constructing the
interoperable, scalable, and reusable home energy management
systems over the highly changing house energy patterns. This
finally helped in the cost reductions of the system [13].
IoT based Smart solar photovoltaic system is studied by
(Soham Adhya et al. 2016) for accessing the remote monitoring
and control. In this system, IoT is used to achieve energy
efficiency in PV systems and to have remote transmission of
data from plant to supervision server. The implemented system
uses “web console-based interface” and the wireless devices
which consume small quantities of power and helps in reducing
the time of manual supervision [14].
IoT technology for power conditioning unit monitoring in
solar power plants is proposed by (Shrihariprasath. B et al.
2016). This proposed method shows the satisfactory results in
monitoring the solar power conditioning unit parameters,
visualization and report generation of energy outputs, storage
of monitored parameters in cloud for historic analysis [15].
Smart solar PV system proposed by the (Balbheem
Nadpurohit et al. 2017), using IoT had shown great monitored
performance and less maintenance possibilities. Here an
intelligent hybrid system with primary energy sources, unified
power supply unit, and the battery storage facility is adopted.
For this intelligent system, IoT technique enables to operate
and charge the battery during the energy source presence and
also helps in shifting to the storage option as the supply unit
during the absence of energy source [16].
An isolated platform using IoT for controlling and monitory
operation of PV systems proposed by (Jesus Guaman et al.
2017) shown the best possibilities in collecting various
parameters of the system such as humidity at the site location,
temperature of the system components and ambient
temperature at the site, current, and voltage levels of the PV
system. This monitored data is stored, analyzed, and visualized
in cloud platform [17].
In all the above discussed works, IoT enables the better
monitoring and controlling options compared to the human
control or human inspection over the PV systems. Hence the
use of IoT in solar photovoltaics is to be promoted for better
understanding of the system over the time and for possible
business promotion analytics. Table 1 shows the details
regarding IoT use in solar photovoltaic systems for various
applications.
TABLE 1. IoT applications in Solar PV systems
Application in PV systems Author details Ref
Solar manager application in Jesus Guaman et al. [17]
visualizing the monitored data
Lifetime detection of solar panels R. Vignesh et al. [18]
Intelligent hybrid solar PV system Balbheem Nadpurohit [16]
et al.
Solar PV power conditioning unit B. Shrihariprasath et al. [15]
Remote monitoring and control of PV S. Adhya et al. [14]
systems
Solar PV based home energy Jongbae Kim et al. [13]
management system
Solar energy analytics B. Vikas Reddy et al. [19]
VI. CONCLUSION
In this work, a brief study on the use of IoT i.e. internet of
things in photovoltaic systems is discussed. More outline is
 2018 National Power Engineering Conference (NPEC)
given by elaborating the requirement of remote monitoring
using IoT and its implementation. IoT architecture integrated
with photovoltaic system components i.e. off grid and on grid
is also explained elaborately.
From this extensive study few conclusions were made:
• IoT reduces the tedious job of visiting the plant site
frequently and recording the performance data and
monitor for faults.
• Use of IoT will reduces the human to human
interaction and human to computer interaction while
monitoring the PV system.
• IoT enables the identification of faults in PV systems
and reasons for low performance in effective manner
without putting much efforts.
• IoT enables the continuous record of performance
data and failure data, so that it can be used for
analytics for forecasting and predicting the future
power generation possibilities, income generation etc.
• It also prevents the frequent maintenance of the
photovoltaic systems.
• IoT will play a major role in accessing the control
over the photovoltaic system installed at remote
locations or far away from the control center.
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