Why is it important?
Energy from fossil fuels like coal produce a huge amount of carbon footprint. That is adversely affecting the climate of this world and is also in limited amounts. A renewable source of energy is needed with less carbon footprint. Thus, we are using solar energy as an alternative to fossil fuel. This does not have much carbon footprint. But there are problems associated with solar energy. Solar panels, our main source to harness solar energy, are not very efficient and it requires a large amount of investment in the land area.
What are we trying to do?
At IIIT we are developing a method to increase the performance of solar panels by measuring the power produced and using a camera to track the movement of sun and adjust the panels automatically to give the maximum output. We also measure the difference in CO2 that happened because of using solar panels.
Features
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Monitor and measure the following energy related parameters for the solar installations using smart energy meters
- Voltage & Current in each phase
- Power factor
- Power consumption (VA), Signed active power (KW), Signed reactive power (kVAr)
- Energy consumption in KW & KVA
- Maximum demand(peak load) in KWh
- Growatt Inverters are used to interface with the solar installation. It provides the following parameters to the App
- PV capacity
- Generation
- Revenue
- CO2 (reduced)
- Alphea 6CW cameras are used for taking sky images.
- Fault identification and diagnostics based on the predicted energy(using sky images and weather inputs) and actual power generated.
Research
- Fault identification and diagnostics based on the predicted energy(using sky images and weather inputs) and actual power generated.
- Dataset can be used for predicting cloud movement.