Requirements for an IoT Middleware for Utility-Scale Distributed Solar Farms

Abstract

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the way people think about computational intelligence in real-life applications. It brought to life concepts such as smart cities, which could not have been realized using classic computing technologies. While domains like health, manufacturing, and agriculture have gained greatly from the introduction of internet-connected, low-cost smart monitoring and control devices, the energy sector remains the most significant application of IoT technologies. The most recent works on smart energy systems focus on the integration of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. While renewable energy has been a key topic of research for decades, its adoption at large scale has been hindered by reliability and intermittency issues. Internet of Things can provide solutions to overcome such issues and enable grid integration by providing means for remote and real-time monitoring and performance analysis of solar facilities. This paper presents smart solar energy systems as an IoT application and derives primary system requirements of IoT middleware required for building efficient, scalable, and reliable grid-integrated large-scale and distributed smart solar farms.