Long-Range Transmission of Photovoltaic Climate Information through the LoRa Radio

Photovoltaic (PV) representing clean renewable energy is increasingly attracting attention by the Republic of Korea government's announcement of the renewable energy 3020 implementation plan. Monitoring of the PV climate information is essential to achieve sustainably high performance ratio of the PV plant through the efficient maintenance and to support stable grid connection of the PV plant through the prediction of the solar power generation. In this paper, in order to investigate the usefulness of the LoRa communication for monitoring the climate information of the PV power plant, a test about communication range is performed with a LoRa transceiver which is composed of the Arduino board and the RaspberryPi module in the terms of hardware, and which is implemented with a commercial protocol of the communication converter in the terms of software. It is shown from test results that the communication range for the transmission of the PV climate information reaches 1.3 km in the vicinity of Daddeok Research Complex in Daejon.