OpenEMS a good fit?

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Hi all

This could get a bit lengthy…

I’m part of an energy cooperative with a growing number of distributed solar systems.
My goal is to have a self-hosted monitoring solution where the inverters only access to the internet should be the monitoring VPN with minimal hardware (at least at first).

When doing my initial research, I didn’t find a solution that met my requirements (must’ve overlooked OpenEMS). So I wrote two small logging scripts of my own, one for SunSpec Modbus TCP compliant devices and one that adapts non-SunSpec Modbus to the SunSpec data models. Both write data into one database, the database tables basically represent different SunSpec models.
Here is a basic sketch:

OpenEMSForum
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After getting this into a “close to working” state, I stumbled upon OpenEMS. I’m generally inclined to build on other Open Source projects instead of starting another one of my own.

Though, I’m not sure if OpenEMS is at this point a good fit for us (and if I want to go back into java).

It’d be great if I could get answers to a few questions to make it easier for me to decide:

  1. At this time and also for power plants that don’t need anything apart from monitoring, I’d like to forego additional hardware on location and keep it simple with just the LTE-Router. As far as I can tell, this is not really an intended use for OpenEMS? As a workaround, I could run one or more (?) Edge Dockers on my VPS, right?
  2. If I understand the documentation correctly, I need to manually define Modbus Tasks if they are non-SunSpec devices? For SunSpec there is already a general implementation? Are there already some configs for common non-SunSpec inverters from Sungrow, Goodwe …?
  3. In the future we’re interested in controlling batteries, evcs, … Would there be a way to use the OpenEMS control algorithms with data from a non-OpenEMS Database? Then I could start off with a basic and easy to overlook solution for basic monitoring to quickly get up and running. And then take my time later on to understand OpenEMS which seems like a big project (and get back into java).
  4. Also, if there are any other projects that are not OpenEMS and maybe fit my requirements, feel free to share.

Thank you!!