Controllogger: A remote monitoring system for decentralized renewable energy sources

The development of a remote monitoring and control system for decentralized renewable energy plants is described in the present paper. The system has a microcontroller-based unit for local storing and data transmission to internet by a GSM modem and a database server to store the data. The proposed architecture is easily extended for controlling a decentralized renewable energy plant by a remote operator. Correlations and performance tests are used to compare the data collected by the system prototype with data collected by a commercial data acquisition system. The results indicate that the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is 0.103 m/s for the wind speed measurement and the correlation factor is greater than 0.9996. Overall, the low errors rates indicate that the data have been stored in a similar form to what would be expected with the use of a commercial data logger.