Photovoltaics Performance Evaluation Using IoT Technology

The excessive utilization of non-renewable energy sources to fulfill the energy demands of the world, particularly in the electricity generation sector, has brought upon dire effects to the Earth’s ecosystems. To reduce the dependence on non-renewable energy sources, the Malaysian government has pushed for the utilization of solar photovoltaics (PV) to produce electricity for the nation. This initiative is present in both utility scale, via the Large-Scale Solar (LSS) scheme, and domestic scale via the Net Metering (NEM) scheme. Contained in this paper is the elaboration on the utilization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to evaluate the performance of PV on the domestic scale. A prototype is designed to collect data, which will then feed the data into an algorithm which will provide an evaluation of the health of a PV system. Two experiments were conducted to determine the if the integration of the mathematical model, algorithm, software, and hardware would produce a prototype can provide accurate results. The experiments conducted provided conclusive results that the data collected by the prototype is accurate as it is able to detect PV performance issues, and the results were verified via manual measurements.