Development of a measuring and analysis environment for energy production and consumption in a Belgian farm
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- This thesis presents the development of a measurement and analysis environment for monitoring energy production and consumption in a Belgian dairy farm. The work was carried out as the first year of a 4-year research project between UCLouvain and the Ferme de la Warde, an organic dairy farm located in Wallonia. The main objective was to build a reliable, non-invasive and transferable monitoring platform before considering more advanced energy optimization strategies. The project focused on the selection, deployment and integration of sensors adapted to an agricultural environment. The solution had to avoid permanent modifications to the existing electrical infrastructure and remain easy to reproduce on other farms. This requirement influenced several technical choices, including the use of long-range and low-power communication instead of relying only on local Wi-Fi coverage. The system combines data from electrical meters, LoRaWAN current sensors, temperature probes, a photovoltaic inverter and solar forecasting tools. These data are centralized in Home Assistant and presented through dashboards designed to make the farm’s energy behaviour easier to observe and understand. The resulting platform provides both global and more granular information about the farm’s consump tion and photovoltaic production. It makes it possible to compare real solar production with prediction models, monitor sensitive equipment such as cold rooms, and identify abnormal situations in the electrical installation. This thesis does not implement automatic load control or a complete optimization algorithm. Instead, it establishes the technical basis required for future work on load shifting, storage management and local control strategies. The system already gives useful information to the farmers, while also creating a foundation that can be adapted to other farms with similar energy monitoring needs.