A LoRaWAN based Open Source IOT Solution for Monitoring Rural Electrification Policy

The Government of India has implemented Solar PV based microgrid Decentralized Distributed Generation (DDG) projects in different parts of the country. The monitoring of the performance of DDG projects is a manual process with reliance on the data provided by the system integrators who oversee the DDG projects. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IOT), the monitoring & evaluation can be improved dramatically by making it objective, and also to monitor the performance of the policy progress on a near real-time basis. The characteristics of an LPWAN technology viz., LoRa that makes it an appropriate communication technology for remote monitoring of DDG projects are: Long-range, Low power, Small data requirements, and flexibility to operate in unlicensed spectrum. An open-source Internet of Things (IOT) solution is proposed here to monitor and evaluate the rural electrification projects. The methodology involves the development of a low-cost prototype and an open-source based solution to monitor the performance of a DC-based stand-alone solar photovoltaic system, which was set up in the IIT Madras campus. The integration across the LoRaWAn architecture was demonstrated, and a visualization dashboard was created in the Ubidots IOT platform to monitor basic parameters such as voltage and current. The goal is to monitor the solar DC system in terms of the objectives set in DDG policy.