Web Based Monitoring of Solar Power Plant Using Open Source IOT Platform Thingspeak and Arduino

Now a days renewable energy systems are becoming best way to generate electricity. With advancement of technologies the cost of renewable energy equipments is going down globally encouraging large scale solar photovoltaic installations. Major part of renewable energy is solar energy. Due to its decentralized nature it is very difficult to monitor solar power plants with existing centralized SCADA(Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems. We developed a prototype for implementation of new cost effective methodology based on IoT to monitor a solar photovoltaic plant for performance evaluation using open source tools and resources like Arduino and Thingspeak. Thingspeak is a SaaS (Software as a Service ) platform which provides space on Web to monitor our parameters. Thingspeak provides all services for free of cost. Which saves lot of investment on Website designing and maintenance. We focussed on low cost system with easy interface so that common people who installs roof top solar plants also monitors easily without depending on service providing companies. This will facilitate preventive maintenance, fault detection, historical analysis of the plant in addition to real time monitoring.