Monitoring

It’s Friday, and Friday is the day you get to see new gear! Ideal Energy has put out a great white paper on a solar+storage demand charge management project, 8minute Solar Energy talks up their advanced solar power plant software partners, and Northern Reliability Company shows off the beautiful energy storage gear they assemble.

Cape Analytics has published a report breaking down which cities in America are home to the most solar per capita. Not to spoil anything, but be prepared to see a whole lot of California.

Solar panel cleaning involves an analysis of cost versus gain, with a collection of system variables like system size, location, panel angle, local labor costs – and of course the potential gains driving annual cleaning events.

sPower was on the receiving end of a cyberattack in March that caused Cisco firewalls to crash, limiting visibility of operations at multiple wind and solar power plants totaling up to 500 MW of capacity. No negative outcomes were observed, and the path to exploit this vulnerability has been patched.

Lawrence Shaw says understanding solar module hotspots via infrared scans can help quell residential rooftop fire risks, while suggesting missing data represents missing work. Shaw also found the missing USA solar fire data.

Nineteen thousand people walked the floor at the United States’ largest *energy conference* – not just solar power conference – and it is a bit sad to end, but the education, handshakes, and hardware were great.

Walking the floor at Solar Power International means swimming in new hardware, smart company representatives, and new ideas. Here are a few.

Solar installation inspection results of 100 sites in Rhode Island found 50% of large-scale projects had issues, while 83% of small projects had them – with 30% and 26% of those systems having “critical” issues, respectively.

Enel’s vision of future inverters include individual sub component health monitoring, while Southern Power spoke of paying closer attention to onsite transformers while presenting at O&M conference PV Operations Dallas 2019.

Solar energy can greatly reduce energy bills, can be used for a wide variety of applications and costs very little to maintain. However, even though it is considered an excellent source of renewable energy, it is not immune to its own unique problems and challenges.