Energy monitoring at the CAT - part 4

With the pulse output kwh meters on all the renewable generators and un-interruptible loads connected up to the display server. The next step on the monitoring data acquisition side is to get detailed data from the 20kW PV roof array.

This is quite a big project with a lot of different measurements being made including energy measurements on the DC outputs of the panels and AC energy measurements on the outputs of 6 inverters and to research the effect of panel temperature on performance the temperature at multiple points under the array and the wind speed over the array.

Thankfully Glyn Hudson a good friend of mine, who has just graduated from doing electronic engineering at Warwick university is working with me on this and Suneil is also just about to join us this coming week, so we will have a good team on it!

Last week we spent quite a bit of time doing some further development on arduino based pulse counting, using low level port manipulation to read from multiple digital inputs at the same time and also much faster. We are just writing up about that at the moment.

We are also hoping to develop the public display software further. We want to make it easy to use, simple to setup and flexible enough to be used for home scale energy visualization to CAT scale energy visualisation. A downloadable energy monitoring content management system, like wordpress or drupal say but for energy... more to come on this soon

Thanks for reading the update!