A smart monitoring infrastructure design for distributed renewable energy systems

The automatic meter reading is essentially requited in renewable grids as in conventional grids. It is intended to propose a reliable measurement system that is validated in a photovoltaic power system to meet the requirement of a renewable grid. In the presented study, the photovoltaic plants are controlled by using a widely known maximum power point tracking algorithm that is named as "Perturb and Observe". The distribution line at the output of inverter is modelled according to realistic parameters of 25 km line. Besides carrying the generated line voltage, the grid is used as a transmission medium for the generated power measurements of photovoltaic plants and power consumptions of load plants separately. The modem constituting the power line communication manages the dual-channel transfer and transmits the consumed energy ratios of the load plants. One of the modems is located at the output of voltage source inverter and the other one of the load plants. The power consumption values of each load plants are individually measured and successfully transmitted to monitoring section in the modelled system. The obtained data that is only used for monitoring in this application can also be evaluated for automatic meter reading applications. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.