Why Portfolio Energy Management Is a Must for Solar to Ensure Energy Efficiency
Why Portfolio Energy Management Is a Must for Solar to Ensure Energy Efficiency
Portfolio energy management is an incredible tool that you can use to improve energy efficiency. It includes three basic components: data analysis and monitoring, regular reporting, and site inspections. These components keep energy efficiency at its peak.
Data Analysis and Monitoring
Today, many analytical tools are being used to pull real-time data from energy-producing systems. Data analysis is performed to identify any patterns which can lead to issues later on. This way, you can reduce the magnitude of issues plaguing your plant. For instance, diagnosing problems with certain components like inverters early on can save you from a production loss. For this purpose, smart alarm setups can be helpful. In addition, learning algorithms learn the production patterns of inverters and trigger alarms when inverters are under their usual performance. This gains a lot of time for operation and maintenance companies as they don’t need to go to a site or waste their time on the screen to understand which inverter has an issue.
This brings us to monitoring. With data analysis, it’s possible to catch any problems, as explained in our above example.
In addition, monitoring systems of your portfolio give you access to advanced analytical tools to compare your performance parameters or any other electrical parameters between your sites like PR, capacity factor irradiance values, etc.
To sum up, monitoring and managing your portfolio on a single increase efficiency in your operations and save your time/money. You don’t have to look at every inverter portal for each site. You should only have one single platform that brings all the data for you by using different methods.
Regular Reporting
Regular reporting on power plant diagnostics and performance can also help identify issues. For portfolio energy management for solar energy, this is long-term monitoring. It can identify bulk issues which don’t come up in the short term. For example, production loss may be down a couple of percentage points month by month. However, in the everyday tally, nothing may seem out of place.
These large-scale, long-term reports offer a way to catch problems that are festering in the system. Monthly reports can also identify KPIs which are neglected in the short term. You can also identify major losses in certain sectors which aren’t readily noticeable.
A good monitoring system offers different reports like monthly, daily etc. Besides, an automated reporting option is also available so your colleagues or other stakeholders can get their regular reports in the defined period of the day, week, or month.
Site Inspections
Site inspections are also very important for portfolio energy management for solar energy. Not only can you identify issues that may lead to production losses or expensive replacements but also health and safety risks that can endanger your employees. You can potentially save yourself from disasters that can cause heavy losses like fires from Faulty solar DC isolators.
Many clients with solar energy setups often find that they need to make improvements with site inspections. These can range from optimizing energy transmission to updating software, replacing hardware, and identifying use of unsafe components.
Site inspections can also allow deeper diagnostic tests to take place, which can isolate problems not readily apparent in the data. Different technologies are available to make inspections easier, like drones’ thermal inspection.
Workforce management systems provide a good solution to manage your site teams. They help you assign and manage tasks and track your equipment, vehicles, and stock levels. You can create different workflows or checklists for different purposes like testing, maintenance, etc. Workforce management, which is designed especially for solar sites, would be more beneficial, and you can find them out from your monitoring solution suppliers, but not all have this option. This can save your time and increase efficiency in your operations.
Using these three basics, you can optimize energy efficiency for your solar system, ensure your system and your employee’s safety and meet ROI targets.
