Development of integrated hardware set up for solar photovoltaic system monitoring

Performance monitoring systems are used in solar photovoltaic (PV) applications for collecting data regarding the installed system performance, for evaluation purposes. In this paper, development of microcontroller based integrated system for photovoltaic system monitoring is described. The proposed system consists of main unit to measure electrical parameters (e.g. voltage and current of PV, Battery, Load etc), outdoor (meteorological) unit to measure meteorological parameters (e.g. irradiance, panel temperature, wind speed etc), data-flash for data storage and data logging software to transfer the data to computer for analysis. The meteorological unit transmits all the measured parameter to main unit using RS485 bus. All the parameters are measured as per the IEC 61724 methods and accuracy requirements. The monitoring system has been installed to monitor 1kW standalone system. From the field results, it is concluded that the given system provides an excellent low cost tool for monitoring and analysis of standalone PV system.