An IoT open source platform for photovoltaic plants supervision

•Open Source solution based on IoT technology for photovoltaic plants monitoring.•Analysis on photovoltaic indsutry challenges and IoT opportunities.•Application of IoT monitoring architecture and integration in IoT Platform.•Adataptable solution for different scenarios in industrial environemnts.•Use case: 3 MW photovoltaic plant with 24 inverters and 156 string boxes.•Validation in a real environment and compared with previous solution.•Usage of tools Eclipse Kura and Eclipse Kapua.•Validated possible devices and the independence from the hardware of the solution.•Creation of unique system based on Open Source, IoT technology and industrial devices. In the present work, the authors propose an IoT solution for photovoltaic plants monitoring based entirely on Open Source software. The described solution is implemented and deployed in a real plant of approximately 3 MW with a total number of 24 inverters and 156 string boxes. All details about software and hardware architecture are provided, proving that it is possible to develop a flexible, versatile and competitive monitoring system just using available Open Source tools. In addition, the authors make a detailed comparison between the proposed IoT solution and conventional SCADA-based monitoring systems, describing all benefits and drawbacks of conventional SCADAs and modern IoT systems and proposing solutions in order to overcome the identified weak points of the newest IoT-based monitoring systems.