Rinchi
TechInAfrica – Internet of Things (IoT) can change people’s lives and makes everything more efficient and easier. Using this technology, AMMP and Grafana are teaming up to provide electricity to African communities in rural areas.
According to Hendrik Broering, COO and Co-Founder of AMMP speaking at GrafanaCon L.A, there’s this village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of approximately 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017. A developer, Rafiki Power, built a solar mini-grid and provided it to households and businesses in the village.
The impact of the solution was quite big, as stated by Broering: “You increase the standard of living and give people in the village opportunities that they didn’t have before. People were now able to run laundry services in those villages. They were able to store cold drinks and food, but also things like vaccinations. The could extend their businesses by having electrical appliances for a hairdresser shop, for example.”
Broering said that there’s the need to monitor technical data on the consumer side as well as on the production side. As of this matter, AMMP monitors more than 100 of the solar mini-grids across various African countries using the operational data in order to help developers of the mini-grids to improve activities in the entire of the value chain for the developers.
Data helps to make the projects bankable and for benchmarking systems and technologies against each other, improving system design and engineering. However, the most important thing is the technical maintenance and the operations of those systems are usually quite complex. Thus, AMMP, generally installs a local gateway at the systems and send the data in the cloud or via a direct API connection to the equipment vendors. All the data is then stored in an Influx database while AMMP applies analytics and alerting on it using Capacitor and Loud ML. All of it then will be visualized on Grafana.
Broering highlights that the visualization is important as the villages are in the remote areas and they try to make it as perfect as possible so that there is no error that requires them to visit the areas to fix it.
Source: grafana.com
