IoT Monitoring systems applied to photovoltaic generation: The relevance for increasing decentralized plants

The increasing of photovoltaic plant installations at different scales promotes the development of monitoring systems that facilitate the communication, control and automation of the generating units, allowing to guarantee the predicted energy generation performance. Monitoring systems are composed of different interfaces that involve sensing and capturing data; conversion, treatment, pre-storage and transmission of data; and publishing and final storage through graphic interface. This article focuses on describing the growth of decentralized plants, as well as the increasing demand for monitoring and data acquisition system, commenting the limitations of current commercial models and presenting alternative developed monitoring systems with different platforms.