Open Access

ARTICLE

A Low-Cost, Real-Time Rooftop IoT-Based Photovoltaic (PV) System for Energy Management and Home Automation

Muhammad Uzair^*, Salah Al-Kafrawi, Karam Al-Janadi, Ibrahim Al-Bulushi

Electrical Engineering Department, Islamic University of Medina, Medina, 42315, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Muhammad Uzair. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Energy Systems Management and Climate Change)

Energy Engineering 2022, 119(1), 83-101. https://doi.org/10.32604/EE.2022.016411

Received 04 March 2021; Accepted 26 August 2021; Issue published 22 November 2021

Abstract

This work discusses the importance of monitoring and energy management of green energy resources in order to minimize the negative impacts of electricity generation by regular power plants. The paper introduces a highly efficient, low-cost rooftop photovoltaics (PV) solar panel system which can provide monitoring, controlling and automation. The proposed system is based on Internet of Things (IoT) and can be used to control different utilities in any premises automatically or set by the user-defined priority list, as compared to the existing IoT-based PV systems which can only perform monitoring and maintenance of the PV panels or only certain parameters, i.e., temperature, dust, etc. This is a new step in improving the efficiency of IoT-based PV system where the facility loads are automated by the IoT network. The proposed system can also provide a constant feedback about different parameters, i.e., voltage, dust, sun irradiance and humidity, etc., via low-cost open-source platforms for telemonitoring and controlling purposes. The simulation results show that the proposed system provides a high efficiency to energize the utilities and utilize the available energy as compared to the manual control.

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Keywords

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