One of our clients installs PV plants and offers solar O&M service. They monitor their growing fleet of small commercial solar plants with the Solar-Log® energy management. They recently conducted an internal company evaluation to confirm that they were on the right course for their investors and the solar business. These are the areas they were evaluating;
- Overall health of the fleet
- Ways to predict and avoid long-term losses
- Ways to improve in-house efficiency
They commissioned the help of the team at Solar Data Systems (SDSI) to help analyze these areas.
Overall Health of the Fleet
The average plant size in this fleet is 100kWp. Our client and their investor were looking for concrete information regarding how well the solar PV plants were performing. Solar Data Systems provided a fleet-wide, current and historical performance analysis on 28 solar plants. These plants are connected to professional Solar-Log® monitoring and additional plants are being added as their fleet grows.
A dedicated solar monitoring expert on our team provided a multi-point check for each plant using Solar-Log® monitoring. They used the advanced analytics from the monitoring system and identified solar plants that had been underperforming either intermittently or consistently. Once the SDSI team identified malfunctioning plants, they calculated the overall kWh losses caused by the performance issues. Next, they separated these losses by the likely factors that caused them. Some issues can be avoided through a service call, but other factors like weather cannot be influenced. From this analysis, the O&M service provider had clear information and a course of action to increase the health of the fleet.
Financial Impact
The straight-forward ROI portion of the report was of particular interest to the investor. The SDSI team applied the local electricity cost to the kWh lost. The financial impact of plant downtime was clearly visible to the client. In the month of August 2020, the fleet of 28 plants had a loss equivalent to more than $655. An amount which would have been much higher, if they did not have a professional monitoring solution in place.
Get an Analysis of Your Fleet
Performance Analysis and ROI Analysis reports are services offered by Solar Data Systems.
Performance Analysis Report: Receive a self-explanatory report of performance issues observed, total estimated kWh loss and the recommendations from our team of experts with clear next steps to eliminate production issues.
ROI Site Analysis Report: Our team can provide an extensive analysis of performance issues observed, total estimated kWh loss, and the financial impact of production losses due to solar plant malfunctions. This comprehensive report includes the data and charts used in the analysis plus plain text observations, conclusions and recommendations.
If you are not a current Solar-Log® user, ask how we can perform this analysis using your monitoring system.
Avoid Long-term Power Loss
Almost immediately upon evaluation, it was clear that our client had already taken steps to avoid long-term power losses across their fleet by selecting a reliable monitoring solution.
Solar-Log® has an installed fleet of more than 332,000 sites worldwide. Our experience with professional monitoring can easily confirm that a commercial site of 100kW will have performance issues sooner or later. Quick issue detection is the result of using professional and inverter-agnostic monitoring from the start. Quick detection means fewer (or even no) actions need to be taken. This avoids long-term power loss and minimizes high after-sales and service costs. The Solar-Log® sends notifications if plants are underproducing or not communicating with the platform. Reports can be sent out automatically or run on-demand, as needed. Our client immediately knows exactly what is happening on the solar site, good news and bad.
Solar O&M Service Tool
Solar Plant Monitoring is a great tool for O&M service providers, but it is a valuable tool for other stakeholders as well. Monitoring solar sites provides reliable protection against long-term power losses, ensuring a solid rate of return from the solar plant. Professional solar plant monitoring can also provide credible financial guarantees for investors.
The simple action of running this analysis was also eye-opening for our client. As part of the effort to avoid long-term power loss and save additional time and money, they requested that we regularly send the Performance and ROI Analysis. Thus, ensuring that even gradual or small drops in production do not go unchecked.
Improve in-house Efficiency
Solar Data Systems provides automatic solar incentive reporting for this particular client. During the evaluation period we addressed other ways we could help our client to reduce the man-hours needed for monitoring. As a result, they can use the time saved to focus on more profitable and beneficial tasks (like installing more solar!).
Ease O&M Pain Points
SDSI offers professional services to ease the pain points that come with solar plant issues. Reduce back-end costs and headaches on site, and increase efficiency of the O&M process. Our monitoring professionals can pro-actively monitor plant performance. Dedicated experts receive, analyze and remedy configuration & performance errors, as quickly as possible, so our clients don’t have to.
Together, we created a simplified hardware solution to fit all of this particular client’s installs. Our team provides pre-assembly, therefor reducing the installation time on site. Our client saves labor costs with shorter install time and saves training costs by using the same solution for every plant. Plus, our technical support team often answers the phone after just one ring. When you have a fleet of 28 plants and counting, troubleshooting time adds up quickly. Our team is available when needed. We can also walk a new team member through their first installation, at no additional cost to the client.
Reliable solar performance monitoring plus cellular connectivity.
The Solar Data Systems team was able to work closely with this client to create a customized product and service package to meet their company goals. Hundreds of professional solar companies work with Solar Data Systems and the Solar-Log® software. Together, we can ensure the highest return on the solar investment.
Are you interested in finding out how Solar Data Systems can ease the burden of monitoring solar plants?
Contact us to get started.
