Measure, a leading provider of drone services to enterprise customers, today launched new services for the solar energy industry with the introduction of a robust suite of drone inspection solutions for solar plant maintenance.
The new turnkey solutions enable solar facility owners, asset managers and O&M contractors to realize the cost and operational benefits of aerial inspections – including decreased inspection costs and higher plant productivity – without investing in drones, flight planning, pilots, GIS data specialists or data analysis infrastructure.
Solar panel inspections are the cornerstone of the solution suite, quickly and cost-effectively identifying defective or damaged panels that are limiting energy output and associated business revenues. Measure’s temperature-specific thermal orthomosaics store temperature in every pixel for faster and more accurate pinpointing of faulty panel infrastructure.
Measure’s new solar solutions also include drone-based site overview and maintenance, site shading and terrain analysis, thermal inverter scans, tracker misalignment detection and vegetation management.
Benefits include:
- Improved efficiency and safety through reduced inspection time and elimination of field work. On a site generating 21 MW, for example, Measure can complete an inspection in 7 hours instead of weeks, freeing employees and contractors for higher-value activities while also lowering inspection costs. The lower cost also makes it possible to perform more frequent inspections that can detect problems in a timely manner.
- Specially designed ‘snapshot’ reports that dramatically reduce the time required for asset managers to extract actionable information, whether from orthomosaic, terrain or surface models or other formats like point-of-interest images. Measure’s online portal provides secure data hosting capabilities and customized tools for reporting and analytics.
- Maximum revenue capture for larger plants that may not be inspected in a single visit, potentially leaving unidentified issues and/or faults that compromise solar plant capacity and associated revenues. Measure’s launch customer was able to avoid a potential revenue loss through an inspection that discovered over 200 malfunctioning panels on a new solar farm.
