Open Source Software-Based Industrial Internet of Things for Aiding Visibility to Distributed Generation

Distributed generation (DG) and digitization drive the recent global energy transition. Digitization helps bring more visibility to the grid and makes better understanding and management possible. Unfortunately, DGs are often located far from the utility control center, and it is difficult to extend the SCADA networks to the edge level. Moreover, the customer-owned DGs support vendor-specific monitoring apps, and their access is limited to utility. To address this issue, this article proposes an open-source software-based edge data collection and visualization framework. The approach is entirely vendor-agnostic and best fits with distributed energy resources (DERs) located remotely, even with intermittent network connectivity. The framework is demonstrated by considering two DER nodes that are using the Modbus protocol. The data is successfully aggregated from the edge and visualized at the cloud level. The application of open-source tools has great potential in addressing the issues of such a large heterogeneous power system network.