Design of a Smart Energy Monitoring System for Industrial Facilities in Aba, Abia State

This project designs a smart energy monitoring system for industrial facilities in Aba, Abia State, South East Nigeria, targeting small and medium-scale manufacturers who lack visibility into their energy consumption patterns and therefore cannot identify efficiency improvement opportunities. Aba hosts a dense concentration of textile, footwear, and food processing industries that are highly dependent on self-generated electricity due to chronic grid supply deficiency. The designed system deploys current transformers and voltage sensors at each major load panel to measure real-time power, energy, and power factor for individual production lines. An ESP32 microcontroller aggregates the sensor data and transmits measurements via Wi-Fi to a cloud dashboard hosted on the ThingSpeak platform. The dashboard provides graphical consumption profiles, daily and monthly energy summaries, and peak demand indicators accessible from any internet-connected device. Threshold-based alerts notify facility managers when demand approaches contractual limits or when abnormal consumption patterns are detected. Data logging at one-minute intervals enables post-hoc analysis for operational scheduling optimisation. A prototype was deployed at a garment manufacturing plant in Aba for six weeks. Analysis of the collected data identified a 17 percent energy saving opportunity through rescheduling compressed air compressor operation to off-peak hours. Power factor was found to average 0.76, revealing significant reactive power charges that could be eliminated through capacitor bank installation. The project demonstrates the practical value of affordable energy monitoring for Nigerian SME manufacturers. Keywords: energy monitoring, industrial efficiency, IoT, power factor, Aba.