Sensor data analysis applications

A PhotoVoltaic (PV) plant is a power station which converts sunlight energy into electric energy. In the last decade, PV plants have become ubiquitous in several countries of the European Union, due to a valuable policy of economic incentives (e.g., feed-in tariffs). Today, this ubiquity of PV plants has paved the way to the marketing of new smart systems, designed to monitor the energy production of a PV plant grid and supply intelligent services for customer and production applications. In this chapter, we start moving in this direction by fulfilling the urgent request of PV customers and PV companies to enjoy knowledge-based managing and monitoring services, integrated within a PV plant network. In particular, we illustrate a business intelligence solution developed to monitor the efficiency of the energy production of PV plants and a data mining solution for the fault diagnosis in PV plants.