Evaluation of Long-Term Performance of a Solar Home System (SHS) Monitoring System on Harsh Environments

Abstract

Dataloggers installed in rural regions of developing countries need to be autonomous, robust, and have good recording capacity as they may be exposed to harsh environmental conditions. An extremely hot, dry, and dusty climate can imply additional wear and tear toequipment. A test procedurewas designed and run in a confined space to control climate conditions to test the datalogger. An outdoor campaign lasting more than three years was performed at the Instituto Madrileño de Estudios Avanzados (IMDEA) Water Institute, in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, Spain) and at the Escuela Politécnica Superior (EPS) Linares (Jaén, Spain) to test the low-cost datalogger under real conditions. The results demonstrated that it was robust and endured extreme weather conditions. In order to avoid the loss of data, a new version with a redundant system based on an SD card was implemented and tested under real conditions. good recording capacity because SHSs are commonly installed in locations where there is neither an electrical grid nor traditional wired telecommunication networks, and they are often difficult to access by everyday transport. As for modern communications, due to the quality of wired networks in developing countries, Internet services frequently and successively drop. Dataloggers need to be robust as they may be exposed to harsh environmental conditions. Schelling et al. [17] reported that one of the fundamental roadblocks to sustainable and scalable solar electrification is high maintenance costs induced by several factors: High equipment failure rates, poor maintenance/rough usage practices, high fixed maintenance costs due to travel, low user densities in sparsely populated areas, and the severe lack of accountability in the system. For equipment failures, these authors detected that an extremely hot, dry, and dusty climate can affect PV systems with additional wear and tear on equipment. This is an issue of special concern because the climate zones with the highest temperatures (in regions between latitudes N 35 • and S 35 • ) are found in many developing countries in central Africa, the Americas, and South Asia, and extreme climate conditions can affect the correct functioning of the dataloggers installed in rural areas of these countries.In 2014, Fuentes et al. [18] proposed a low-cost monitoring system designed around open source and free hardware platforms (Arduino TM ) to monitor PV systems. It was designed especially to be installed in isolated regions or rural areas in developing countries. The datalogger measured up to eight electrical/meteorological parameters and three analog temperatures with a resolution of 18-bits. The datalogger was empirically tested under real environmental conditions and accomplished the accuracy requirements of the IEC standards for PV systems. Later in 2018, an improved prototype of this low-cost monitoring system was developed by López-Vargas et al. [19]. Its main enhancements were: Minimized power consumption, more meteorological parameters measured, improved electrical measurem...

A Practical Approach for Predicting Power in a Small-Scale Off-Grid Photovoltaic System using Machine Learning Algorithms

“…Authors in [12,13] elaborated the design of an economic datalogger capable of measuring electrical and meteorological data, which also meets the IEC requirements for SAPV systems to operate in remote areas. The data from the logger is collected via a SD card since telecommunications is a concern.…”