As pressure to decrease photovoltaic solar power plant operating expenses, solar asset owners are looking for the best ways to find savings while avoiding risks to equipment performance and longevity. One area where consistency is critical, even as maintenance strategies and technologies change, is remote monitoring and performance engineering. While some minimum physical maintenance should always be on the schedule - such as action items required to uphold equipment warranties - other physical maintenance items can often be driven by what the data tells us.

Is Data Telling the Truth?

There are a number of different remote monitoring software tools available in the marketplace, but two key common denominators when it comes to the value added by monitoring are data quality and automated alarm thresholds. Since small variances in the accuracy of environmental and operational data can lead to large margins of error on performance metrics, having well-calibrated environmental sensors and granular, reliable monitoring devices are investments with tremendous payoff in ensuring that the data is trustworthy.

Once confidence in the quality of the data coming through is achieved, it’s time to decide when automatic alarms should be triggered. The most cost-effective solar monitoring takes place when operators can be pointed in the right direction by alarms without having to manually comb through every data point looking for issues. A balance must be struck between not getting alarms when true causes for concern arise, and getting so many alarms that the operator is desensitized to real problems, we don’t want operators to suffer from a “cry wolf” syndrome.