Micro-grid Monitoring and Supervision: Web-based SCADA Approach

Owing to the widespread use of the micro-grid concept to serve many real life applications, the main concern of this paper is to monitor, evaluate and manage the operational performance of an existent, already installed micro-grid that consists of On & Off grid PV systems in addition to the main grid supply. With the aid of customized web based SCADA system fully designed by authors, the performance evaluation of the proposed micro-grid is carried out in terms of energy consumption, power quality indices and energy cost based on Egypt’s energy current tariff. The designed system helps in both micro-grid status monitoring as well as load sharing between the main grid supply and the off grid PV energy system. The data of the on grid PV energy system are accessed and collected online directly from the inverter web server instead of downloading them offline from the PV inverter. In this case, data are analyzed with a reasonable refresh rate, which saves time and effort. Remote access platform is developed securely through a multi-level security authentication and strong data encryption using the OpenVPN protocol under the Dynamic Domain Name System service. Smart wired and wireless technology—used as integrated sensing devices to the developed SCADA system—enables easy system installation and running cost saving. Finally, to validate the collected data from the newly SCADA designed monitoring system, a performance characterization for the on grid PV system following international standards of yields calculations is carried out for 3 months in 2019.