IoT: A key technology for green electricity
Solar power, wind energy, micro cogeneration power plants: energy from renewable sources has become indispensable, but it makes power generation and distribution far more complex. How the Internet of Things is helping make energy management sustainable.
It feels like Ground Hog Day yet again – in 2020 it happened on August 22. That was the point when the demand for raw materials exceeded the Earth’s supply and capacity to reproduce these natural resources. All reserves that are consumed from that date on cannot be regenerated in the current year. In other words, humanity is living above its means, consuming around 50 percent more energy than the Earth provides naturally.
To conserve these precious resources and reduce climate-damaging CO emissions, the energy we need must come from renewable sources such as wind, sun and water. This is the only way to reduce both greenhouse gases and our fossil fuel use. Fortunately, a start has now been made: In 2019, renewable energies – predominantly from wind and sun – will already cover almost 43 percent of Germany’s energy requirements and the trend is rising.
This also means, however, that the traditional energy management model – a few power plants supplying a lot of consumers – is outdated. After all, the phasing out of large nuclear and coal-fired power plants doesn’t just have consequences for Germany’s CO balance. Shifting electricity production to wind, solar and smaller cogeneration plants reverses the previous pattern of energy generation and distribution from a highly centralized to an increasingly decentralized organizational structure. Instead of just a few large power plants sending electricity to the grid, there are now many smaller energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. This has made the management of it all – including the optimal distribution of the electricity – far more complex as a result. It’s up to the energy sector to wrangle this challenging transformation. As the country’s energy is becoming more sustainable, it’s also becoming harder to organize, since the energy generated from wind and sun cannot be planned in advance as easily as coal and nuclear power can. What’s more, there are thousands of wind turbines and solar panels making electricity and feeding it into the grid. This has made the management of the power network extremely difficult. In particular, there’s a lack of real-time information about the amount of electricity being generated.
This is where the Internet of Things comes into play: IoT can supply exactly this data from every power generator and send it to a central location. Once there, it can be evaluated before ideally enabling the power grid to be controlled automatically. The result is an IoT ecosystem. In order to operate wind farms more efficiently and reliably, a project team is currently developing an IoT-supported system that bundles and processes all relevant parameters and readings at a wind farm.
