Solar Monitoring – See everything in RealTime?

Why is it so important to see your portfolio in RealTime?

I used to garden during the early pandemic.

Every spare minute, I’d be out to check if the seedlings needed water, or maybe new buds bloomed. It was worse when the veggies were almost ready. Think tomatoes can ripen in an hour? Well, I wanted to check to be sure. 

Like I invested my heart into my garden, your team is invested in every single plant in your portfolio. Unlike me, you can’t afford to send site teams to check on all the modules at any time, without seriously escalating your operating costs.

However, by the time your teams check, a problem might have been running for a while. Yield might have been leaking out; damage may have occurred. Your team must know instantly about underperformance or weak links. Plants are financed and every penny is modelled to recoup itself.  In our fast-growing industry this is inevitable. Everything must be tip-top, always.

The importance of monitoring your system is a no-brainer. With SCADA data and Excel, your team can do this up to a point.  As plant size and more importantly, the size of your portfolios grow, RealTime, condition based monitoring is needed to ensure maintenance. This means continuous performance monitoring and trend analysis, plus proactive site maintenance using predictive O&M guidance, to ensure no leaky failures go undetected. All this makes it possible to optimize your system to reap the best RoA all the time.

How does RealTime Solar Monitoring work?

RealTime monitoring platforms work with the SCADA IoT devices or Inverters you already have in place. They pull the data through streamlined, seamless data transfer, do advanced analysis and provide implementation-ready recommendations lists for your team to know exactly what to focus on.

 In simple terms your plant’s data is whizzed off to the monitoring platform and converted to usable, actionable information for the site team. Bingo!

Ok – tell me more.

RealTime monitoring boosts production by ensuring all panels are perfectly healthy.  Studies show top range monitoring systems increase production between 2–5%; better returns for you. With continuous, intelligent monitoring, you can save time by homing in on underperformers to reduce downtime, save O&M costs, pre-empt problems and lengthen equipment life with swift repair. It allows you make decisions based on up-to-the-minute, and complete data. True data transparency to drive measurable performance improvements. What’s not to like?

What’s Complete Data?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing solar. Equipped to handle big data, these technologies keep you right on point with present and future trends. Vital in a rapidly developing industry like yours.

As to the data – it’s certainly big. With plant parts in the hundreds of thousands. Add weather, energy production, the points of data get into Elon Musk’s fortune in pennies types of numbers.

What AI and ML do is sift through all those points of data to find patterns and signals which reveal your system’s true potential performance and how to help you get to it, served to your team in easily digestible, actionable form.

Which Monitoring System?

If you want the peace of mind which comes from knowing your plant assets will continue operating at peak performance throughout their lifetime, having a bankable monitoring expert for actionable insights and guidance is of critical importance.

Of course, we’d love you to choose Quadrical Ai as your trusted monitoring partner. But it’s not just self-interest. We’ve spent the last three years building Digital Twins https://www.linkedin.com/posts/quadrical_digitaltwins-aiforbusiness-solarenergy-activity-6839536338610511872-c35_ to help improve yield and reduce O&M for solar companies, polishing the technology to evolve into the most sophisticated one in the industry. They’re our secret sauce, because they can distinguish between the natural variances and problematic performances within your system.

We’ve wrestled with countless glitches, bugs, and barriers to produce a plug and play platform that has proved to increase yield by 2% – 4% while making it hassle-free for our customers to monitor entire portfolios on our RealTime platform.

Whichever monitoring option you choose, we wish you the greatest success. Like you, our goal is to build a sustainable future through smart, clean solutions – by balancing profit and efficiency with green goals. We are ready to help you for the future.

Author: Kitty Chachra, CRO at Quadrical Ai
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Originally published on February 13, 2022