Monitoring solar energy consumption by computer / server

Owners of solar power plants may be faced with the need to manage the energy consumption of end devices, as reducing consumption can extend battery life in the evening and in cloudy weather, and also avoid data loss in the event of a hard shutdown.

Most modern computers allow you to adjust the processor frequency, which on the one hand leads to a decrease in performance on the other hand to increase battery life. In Windows, the frequency reduction is carried out manually through the control program interface, in Linux through the taskbar widget and through the console (cpupower - CentOS, cpufreq-set - Ubuntu).

In Linux, executing commands through the console allows them to be executed automatically when certain events occur.

The usps-consumptionagent utility from the free set of UmVirt Solar Power Station allows you to execute commands that control processor performance depending on the operational data of the solar power station.

Typical configuration for 12 volt mode:

• If the voltage on the panels is above 16 volts, setting the performance mode
• If the voltage on the panels is below 16 volts or it is not known, set the power saving mode
• If the battery voltage is less than 11.6, the shutdown command

The shutdown command can be:

1. smooth shutdown (poweroff),
2. sleep mode (systemctl suspend),
3. hibernation (systemctl hibernate),
4. sequence of commands.

Example command sequence:

./suspend.py &&  systemctl suspend

Running this command will save the current virtual machines to disk and put the computer into sleep mode. This command can be claimed by programmers and miners in case of compilation of "large" programs such as Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice and others, when the working time (uptime) can get used to daytime.

As a demonstration, a small video without sound .