IoT Platform for Solar Power
PowerHub platform allows customers, project owners, and system operators to monitor and support the operations and maintenance of solar system easily at a glance what their solar system is generating.
- Centralised management of multiple solar sites
- Monitor and collect realtime data regardless of the type of inverters and power meters
- Easily grant the access for projects and different levels of management (customers, project owners, system operators).
- Access the system everywhere with Web application, Mobile application (iOS, Android)
Challenge
Solar systems can be built from different PV plant devices. Each provider has its own management system, making it difficult for clients to manage if they have multiple solar projects from different providers. We were looking to build a centralised management of multiple solar sites in order to monitor and collect realtime data regardless of the type of inverters and power meters. The system has to communicate with each device using its own protocol and then manipulate the data into the same data structure. It also has to minimize the processed time with the huge volume of data and provides realtime reports of solar system generation.
Solution
To communicate well with different PV plant devices, we developed a data logger which can monitor and collect realtime data from different inverters (SMA, Sungrow,…) and power meter (Elster,…) through modbus RS485 or TCP/IP protocol. The collected data is processed into a standard format and stored on a cloud by IoT core services with MQTT protocol. The Web portal and mobile application were built providing the in-depth analytics and visualize data of solar system generation.
Benefits
PowerHub platform provides the centralised management of multiple solar sites. With one data logger, it can connect with different inverters and power meters. As a result, it reduces the cost for building the solar system. PowerHub also provides the secure data with access control on multiple platforms.
