Simulation and Modelling of Electricity Usage Control and Monitoring System using ThingSpeak

Abstract

Renewable energy technology is growing fast especially photovoltaic (PV) system to move the conventional electricity generation and distribution towards smart grid. However, similar to monthly electricity bill, the PV energy producers can only monitor their energy PV generation once a month. Any malfuntion in PV system components may reduce the performance of the system without notice. Thus, developing a real-time monitoring system of PV production is very crucial for early detection. In addition, electricity consumption is also important to be monitored more frequently to increase energy savings awareness among consumers. Hardware based Internet-of-Thing (IoT) monitoring and control system is widely used. However, the implementation of the actual smart grid system is high in cost. Thus, simulation and modelling of the system is important to see the capability of the actual system before being employed. Since the smart grid and its components are usually modeled using MATLAB/Simulink, the communication between MATLAB/Simulink, IoT platform such as ThingSpeak and mobile application is crucial to be explored to gain a better understanding of the features of the smart grid. To achieve the objectives, there are five main steps which are simulation of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system to generate data to be monitored and controlled using HOMER software, then, development of monitoring on ThingSpeak and mobile application using MIT App Inventor 2.  Next, the control system is developed on mobile application and the communication on how data are transferred between all the softwares are set up. The results show that all the seletected parameters can be monitored in real-time successfully. The developed mobile application can be used to control the MATLAB/Simulink in two modes. During automatic mode, ThingSpeak controls the MATLAB/Simulink by giving a zero signal (OFF) if load demand is less than the power generated by PV and a one signal (ON) if the load demand is greater than PV power. During manual mode, consumer can send ON or OFF signal to MATLAB/Simulink via the mobile application unconditionally. It is hoped that the proposed system will bring many benefits in modeling a complete smart grid system in MATLAB/Simulink.