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Developing an open access monitoring device for off grid renewables

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-01-27, 14:32 authored by Richard BlanchardRichard Blanchard, Matt Little
Electricity access is a key driver for developing a modern society. The use of locally generated renewable energy can overcome limitations of expensive grid infrastructure. However, there are still barriers to access particularly for the rural poor in the global south. When individuals or communities invest in electricity provision it is important to know how well the system is performing. Commercial monitoring systems have been developed for large scale renewable energy systems. The cost of these can outweigh the cost of a small decentralised renewable energy system. This paper describes the development of a low cost data logger that is going to be used to monitor the system performance of small photovoltaic nano-grids in Kenya and Bangladesh. The device performs within the expected range for the current, voltage, temperature and irradiance sensors. Data from the data logger device is sent via GPRS to a website where it can be accessed as real time graphical displays and data files.

Funding

This work is part funded by UK Engineering and Physical Research Council Projects EP/J000361/1 and EP/L002612/1. The remote monitoring device has been developed under Creative Commons By-Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 (CC BYSA 4.0) License 4.0.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Research Unit

  • Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST)

Published in

International Conference on Developments in Renewable Energy Technology

Citation

BLANCHARD, R. and LITTLE, M., 2016. Developing an open access monitoring device for off grid renewables. Presented at: 4th International Conference on Development in Renewable Energy Technology 2016 (ICDRET), Dhaka, Bangladesh, 7-9 January 2016, 6pp.

Publisher

© IEEE

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2016

Notes

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Language

  • en

Location

Dhaka, Bangladesh

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