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As tens of gigawatts of solar photovoltaic installations have come online over the past several years, the operations and maintenance (O&M) of those solar power plants has become a critical mission. Yet, a substantial portion of solar asset owners believe that once their systems are powered up, they need little or no maintenance. The result of their “shut your eyes and hope for the best” approach to O&M is millions of dollars in lost returns.

The goal of a solar PV O&M program for any system or fleet of systems is to ensure proper maintenance, optimize the performance and maximize the owner’s lifetime return on investment. The residential, commercial and utility-scale systems that aren’t sufficiently maintained generate less energy - and less revenue - than they would if they were properly monitored and maintained. The gap between 1% and 3% annual power reduction due to maintenance neglect can be the difference between double-digit profitability and marginal gains.

As with any O&M program, the quality level of a PV system’s design and installation is often in inverse proportion to the amount of maintenance necessary once the array is operational. A well-designed and constructed array, made with reliable components, usually requires less rework and repair over its lifetime than one with installation or equipment failure issues would require.

 

Window on the world

When it comes to keeping a system’s inverters in good working order, the usual attention to performance optimization and revenue maximization goals applies whether the power conversion devices are micro-inverters, string inverters or central inverters. Although a PV system’s performance won’t suffer adversely from a defective module or two, a broken inverter can have a serious impact on an installation’s output.

The distributed nature of micro-inverters, however, presents a somewhat different O&M environment than do other inverter architectures. Because micro-inverters are module-level power electronics devices, the failure of one or two - an increasingly rare occurrence, given the improved reliability and quality of the devices - would have a minimal impact on the performance of a PV system. When a micro-inverter needs to be replaced or repaired, it’s a simpler task for the technician to perform compared with the job on more complex string and central inverters. In some cases, the technician doesn’t need to make a house call, as troubleshooting and correction of issues with a software-defined micro-inverter can be done remotely.

Much of the O&M value for providers and system owners can be derived from the rich module- and system-level data harvest provided by a smart, bidirectional micro-inverter system and cloud-based monitoring platform. Visualized and actionable sensor-level data - such as performance, weather, grid conditions, regulatory updates and other metrics - allows technicians to take a more predictive and preventive approach than they could with a less granular monitoring platform.

This kind of proactive O&M has many advantages and cost savings as opposed to a more reactive, corrective-centric plan.

 

Getting granular

Harnessing module-level data and using remote diagnoses helps an O&M team boost operational efficiency and prioritize maintenance responses. Maintenance prioritization monitoring could include filtering the status on a list of PV systems to determine which systems need maintenance and sorting according to the provider’s or system owner’s business needs.

Comprehensive monitoring can also be used to verify system performance and compare the actual and estimated performance levels of an individual installation or fleet of installations. This provides another maintenance prioritization tool, seeing as a production threshold can be established to control when a system shows a production issue and the maintenance can be ordered based on a threshold alert.

Should a truck roll to the solar array be necessary based on the analysis, technicians with access to the trove of detailed system telemetry data will already have an advanced understanding of what the problems might be and how to solve them, making for more efficient use of their on-site maintenance and repair time.

The ability to take care of problems before they arise, resolve issues remotely and predict necessary corrective maintenance before arriving at the system site can save as much as 50% in costly O&M truck rolls and even more than that in time savings.

When an O&M team doesn’t have access to high-level monitoring, data acquisition, and remote diagnosis and remediation capabilities, it must take a more hands-on, in-person approach. If there is a module-level problem, or the ground fault has tripped, or the string inverter software needs upgrading, the only solution would be to get the technicians on-site. Although the job eventually gets done, the operational efficiency of the team suffers, and the asset owner may incur a longer-than-necessary hit on his system’s production performance.

 

Premium information

The solar industry is maturing, and ownership models are changing, making comprehensive, intelligent O&M services more important now than ever. New and prospective owners want to collect solar assets, securitize them and sell them at as high a premium as possible. If a system or fleet owner wants to sell the securitized assets, he must have supporting data, including production rates and how those rates compare with modeled or expected system performance.

These assets must be maintained properly to maximize their sale price potential. If not, they will be difficult to sell or end up being discounted for sale. It will be difficult for power purchase providers that are hoping to securitize, for example, thousands of solar homes and sell them to a yieldco - unless there’s proof that the PV systems have been working at or near 100% of their production potential.

To ensure maximum value for the solar assets, whether the systems are micro-inverter-based or another inverter type, a smart, proactive O&M program is essential and represents a sound investment for the system owner or manager. In addition to a team of certified technicians and engineering support personnel, a complete offering should include guaranteed system and fleet availability, real-time monitoring and analysis of system performance, monthly performance reporting, proactive system optimization, and remote maintenance. It should also feature on-site preventive and corrective maintenance, inverter and module replacement hardware and labor, site inspection and photo documentation, and warranty claim support.

There’s no reason solar asset owners have to leave money on the table anymore. R

 

Martin Rogers is the vice president of worldwide customer service and support at Enphase Energy and the manager of the Enphase Energy Service group. He has created and managed field and support offerings for many global organizations and has served in leadership roles at Power One and Schneider Electric. Rogers can be reached by email at mrogers@enphaseenergy.com.