Smart Renewable Microgrids for Rural India: An Iot-Based Hybrid Energy Monitoring and Control System

Abstract

Rural and semi urban places in India are still faced with common power cuts, fluctuating voltages and inadequate exploitation of locally available renewable sources thus limiting socio economic development. In order to overcome these obstacles, this paper proposes Urja Pravah, an Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based hybrid microgrid monitoring and control system. The system combines solar and wind power with smart load and storage systems specific to the decentralized communities. The platform defines the real-time parameters of energy surpluses or deficits at the block level by recording generation, storage and consumption parameters through distributed sensors and embedded controllers and calculating these parameters in real-time. Based on this analysis, the non-critical loads are automatically switched on when excess energy is present and switched off when generation reduces, and the critical loads are insulated by priority-based supply. An energy-sharing scheme block level allows the export of excess energy blocks to provide the importing blocks and increase reliability and equity within the microgrid. An edge gateway gathers information and data provided by field controllers and sends it to a dashboard and mobile application, both hosted on the cloud, providing operators with live visualizations, fault or low-battery notifications, and manually overridden functions. The proposed system aims to reduce the number of outages, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and assist the national goals of affordable and sustainable energy access in rural India through the incorporation of low-cost IoT hardware, open-source analytics, and renewable resources.