Category: Visualisation

Realtime Solar PV charting

Solar PV inverters often have their own web-based monitoring solutions. However some of these do not make it easy to view current generation or consumption due to refresh delays. Out of the box monitoring is usually good for looking at long-term time periods however lacks the granularity to see consumption of appliances over the short term.

The challenge

Realtime monitoring of Solar generation and net export helps to maximise self-consumption. For example coordinating appliances to make best use of solar PV.

Existing inverter monitoring does not show granular data over recent history – for example, to be able to tell when a dishwasher has finished its heating cycle and whether another high-consumption appliance should be turned on:

Solution

This sample android application allows realtime monitoring whilst charting consumption, generation and net export:

Solar Watch screenshot

The chart shows recent data over time and is configurable for SMA and Enphase inverters. In both cases the local interface of each inverter is used to pull raw data:

  • SMA: https://<inverter_ip_address>/dyn/getDashValues.json
    • NB – Smart Inverter Screen must be enabled
  • Enphase: http://<envoy_ip_address>/production.json

Code

https://github.com/niftimus/SolarWatch

Features

  • Interactive UI:

  • Configurable settings:

Limitations / areas for future improvement

  • Improve security handling of SSL – the current code imports a self-signed SMA inverter certificate and disables hostname verification to allow the SMA local data to be retrieved
  • Refine code and publish to an app store
  • Remove hard-coding for extraction of metrics
  • Better error handling
  • Add a data export function

Conclusion

This sample app is really handy to monitor appliances in realtime and allows making informed decisions about when to start appliances.

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Time of Use vs Flat Rate Electricity – which is cheaper?

Electricity retailers sometimes give the choice of paying a flat rate for electricity, or so called Time of Use (ToU) rate. Time of use pricing usually has peak, off-peak and shoulder prices. This can also vary by time of year and also weekend or weekday.

For the consumer, Time of Use pricing may be beneficial if consumption can be shifted to off-peak hours, but this is potentially offset by more expensive rates during peak times.

Assuming a retailer gives the ability to choose – which one is cheaper?

Solution

This web calculator gives the ability to simulate costs based on historical meter data usage and configurable pricing and peak/off-peak definition:

https://niftimus.github.io/EnergyAnalyser/

Energy Analyser – Screenshot

Note: Beta only. Default prices may be different depending on the retailer or electricity plan, but the sliders allow adjustment to configure unit prices to match any real plan for comparison.

Features

  • Calculate costs, potential savings and get a recommendation:
  • Fully client-side, JavaScript and HTML – no server upload required
  • Ability to drag-and-drop upload a Victorian Energy Compare formatted CSV:
  • Focus on a particular date range within the uploaded meter data:
  • Ability to configure time of use definitions (i.e. peak, off-peak and shoulder times):

Potential future improvements

The following future improvements could make the solution more useful:

  • Cope with different data formats (different States’ data)
  • Ability to compare two (or n) different plans
  • Automatic comparison of available plans from multiple retailers (pulling prices automatically)
  • Inclusion of solar feed-in tariff as a comparison point
  • Provide recommendations for changing energy usage behaviour
  • Simulate the impact of having a home battery

Visualising Solar Generation Data in a Custom Histogram using D3.js

Using the “brush” feature of the D3 Javascript library again proves handy for creating an interactive, animated histogram.  This type of visualisation helps to analyse and explore the distribution of time-series data.

For this demo, home solar PV generation data has been obtained from United Energy’s Energy Easy portal in CSV format.  For the sake of convenience in dealing with the raw data which usually comes in half-hourly intervals, this data has been loaded in to a Pentaho data warehouse instance (more details in a later post, perhaps!) and converted to day-by-day figures.

D3 - Interactive Histogram - Preparing Solar PV generation data with Saiku
Preparing Solar PV generation data with Saiku

Analysis can help explore whether solar panels are getting less efficient over time, or even determine what a “good” day of production is like in summer vs winter (by looking at the relevant frequency of each in the histogram).

Features:

  • Drag and scroll date region which affects histogram above:
    D3 - Interactive Histogram - Selectable Date Range
  • Changeable histogram buckets:
    D3 - Interactive Histogram - Adjustable Buckets
  • Snap-shotting of one selected date range for visual comparison with another (e.g. summer vs winter comparison):
    D3 - Interactive Histogram - Summer vs Winter Comparison

Key techniques – how it’s achieved:

  1. Data is embedded into the HTML page:

    <pre id=”csvdata”>
    Day,Quantity
    2013-01-01,9.288
    2013-01-02,10.494
    2013-01-03,7.376
    …
    2014-12-29,3.832
    2014-12-30,7.752
    2014-12-31,7.212
    </pre>

    It’s hidden visually using the CSS display:none directive…

    #csvdata {
    display: none;
    }

    …and then read into a Javascript variable for display and computation via D3.

    var raw = d3.select(“#csvdata”).text();
    var dataset_copy = d3.csv.parse(raw);

  2. Maximum value is found in the selected region of the dataset:

    max = d3.max(dataset, function (d) {    return +d.Quantity;});

    …histogram is created based on maximum value:

    // Generate a histogram using uniformly-spaced bins.
    datasetHist = d3.layout.histogram()
    .frequency(false)

    .range([0, max])
    .bins(buckets)
    (dataset.map(function (d) {

    return d.Quantity;
    }));

  3. An HTML form input slider is used for selection of number of buckets:

        240px; text-align: right; font-size: 10px;font-family: sans-serif;”>Number of buckets: 10

    </label>
    nBuckets”>

    Value of slider is passed into Javascript (to variable “buckets”) via this code:

    d3.select(“#nBuckets”).on(“input”, function () {
    buckets = +this.value;
    d3.select(“#nBuckets-value”).text(+this.value);
    clearSnapshot();
    render();
    });

Demo / code:

Try out the demo and check out the code here:
http://jsfiddle.net/hzmj24d1/