On April 24, the Solar Energy Institute, which is celebratinLast January, QPV participated in the installation of an advanced monitoring system in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The objective of the project is the remote monitoring of photovoltaic systems for rural electrification in isolated areas. The dense vegetation of the Amazon and the dispersion of photovoltaic systems have been a great challenge when designing the monitoring system, which at the same time makes it a very innovative project that seeks to monitor small systems on a large scale isolated areas at low cost.
The isolated systems of the project are at distances between them that reach lengths of up to 2 km in the Amazon, crossing large masses of trees. The information from these systems is concentrated in a community center forming a wireless local network. This network has been implemented using LoRa mesh technology creating a robust mesh network that ensures communication stability. From the community center there is an external connection through a satellite link with a BGAN Hughes 9502 device and using the Inmarsat satellite network. Thanks to this connection, the data collected by the different systems are sent to central servers where they are already processed and prepared for visualization.
The Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources of Ecuador (MERNNR), through a collaboration agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (BID), has coordinated this project with the general objective of improving the quality of life of the populations of the Ecuadorian Amazon Region (RAE). The systems are managed locally by the Empresa Eléctrica Regional Centro Sur which guarantees the stability of the supply and maintenance of these systems. In the development of the equipment used and its implementation we have worked with different companies: the LoRa mesh network has been developed by RBZ, the measurement devices of the facilities by TTA and the installation of the central servers, the satellite links and their supervision of the field assembly by QPV.
