Anderson Road Solar Plant and JNIOR
The JNIOR is used in a variety of industries. Here the JNIOR is used in a clean energy solution, a residential Solar installation. This solar installation went live in the evening of July 7th, 2022. This is the second solar installation for this owner. The previous installation generated power for over a decade. It is still in operation but for a new owner.
How?
The JNIOR is tasked with communicating with the four inverters to collect the amount of power that they produce. Once every 10 seconds the application on the JNIOR sequentially communicates with each inverter to request the current power, daily yield and total yield. The communication is done via MODBUS TCP. Once the data is read, it is tucked away in 2 locations as individual reading and totalized. The data is stored in the registry as a system key that is used for real-time reporting. The data is also stored in a readings.dat log file. This file is moved to the flash filesystem at the end of every day for historical analysis. Only the previous 7 days are maintained in the flash filesystem. The files are numbered by the day of the week to ensure that Sunday overwrites last Sunday, Monday overwrites last Monday and so on.
The real-time data is served from the registry using a php script that generates a JSON format. That JSON response is requested and consumed by a linux server that is responsible for collecting and storing that data in a MYSQL database for long term storage.
Why?
Fun! While the data can be used to check that the power company is paying you for the kWhs generated beyond what is consumed by the house, this page is generally watched as a sort of game to see how days throughout the year stack up against each other.