A business intelligence solution for monitoring efficiency of photovoltaic power plants

Abstract

Photovoltaics (PV) is the field of technology and research related to the application of solar cells, in order to convert sunlight directly into electricity. In the last decade, PV plants have become ubiquitous in several countries of the European Union (EU). This paves the way for marketing new smart systems, designed to monitor the energy production of a PV park grid and supply intelligent services for customer and production applications. In this paper, we describe a new business intelligence system developed to monitor the efficiency of the energy production of a PV park. The system includes services for data collection, summarization (based on trend cluster discovery), synthetic data generation, supervisory monitoring, report building and visualization. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.