Design of Web-based Monitoring System for Solar Photovoltaic Power Plants

This paper presents a design of a monitoring system for solar photovoltaic power plants. A solar photovoltaic power plant uses solar energy for its power generation. The amount of power produced by the solar photovoltaic power plant mainly depends on the amount of solar irradiance targeted on its photovoltaic panels. Other environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed also have minor effects because of their direct or indirect relationships to the photovoltaic cell performance. Although monitoring for a solar photovoltaic power plant has to consider all of these environmental parameters, most plants do not have weather sensors because of economic feasibility issues. To handle this problem, a web-based design of the monitoring system is presented in this paper. Open API of the national weather service is connected to the web-based monitoring system to provide environmental data for each monitoring plants. Web-based monitoring also enables to manage every decentralized plants by the one system with the help of its web-based data collection API.