The profitability of photovoltaic (PV) systems for irrigating Mediterranean greenhouse crops is analyzed. A standalone direct pumping PV system is proposed. A simulation model of the system was developed in order to obtain the economically optimal design of this system and evaluate its feasibility. The model is composed of several submodels: the photovoltaic power generation capacity submodel, the direct pumping management submodel and the submodel that evaluates the irrigation water requirements for a representative greenhouse and the overall economic performance of the system.The effect of the total number of irrigation sectors per hectare on the performance of the system has been analyzed. Two management strategies have been considered: to irrigate with only one irrigation sector simultaneously or to irrigate with a variable number of irrigation sectors as a function of the incoming power provided by the PV array. The optimal operation strategy provided by the model was the first one as the second was penalized by the higher cost of the pumps. The system becomes profitable for at least 4 sectors per hectare. The profitability and energy use efficiency of this type of systems are relatively low, although these values could be improved if the excess of energy were used for other purposes, such as ventilating or cooling the greenhouse

In recent decades, considerable efforts have been devoted to process automation in agriculture. Regarding irrigation systems, this demand has found several difficulties, including the lack of communication networks and the large distances to electricity supply points. With the recent implementation of LPWAN wireless communication networks (SIGFOX, LoraWan, and NBIoT), and the expanding market of electronic controllers based on free software and hardware (i.e., Arduino, Raspberry, ESP, etc.) with low energy requirements, new perspectives have appeared for the automation of agricultural irrigation networks. This paper presents a low-cost solution for automatic cloud-based irrigation. In this paper, it is proposed the design of a node network based on microcontroller ESP32-Lora and Internet connection through SIGFOX network. The results obtained show the stability and robustness of the designed system.