Success Story: Norfolk, MA Landowner Gets 250-kW Ground Mounted Solar Installation with Commercial Solar Guy

Commercial Solar Guy helps Massachusetts landowners finance and build ground mounted solar systems on their land to take advantage of attractive, yet soon-to-expire state tax and financial incentive programs.

Massachusetts continues to be a leading state in driving clean energy in the nation, most recently through their innovative state-level SMART incentives program.  One landowner in Norfolk, MA wanted to create a passive, yet reliable side income stream for their unused one acre of land by installing a solar farm with zero cash outlay.

Equally important was the profound concern about climate change; they wanted to do their part to balance out the environmental impact of traditional energy sources such as coal, oil and gas.

Despite their long interest in moving forward with solar, the financials were just not working out. For instance, two questions posed to John:

1. Was the rate they were getting for their land, attractive?

2. Will the lease payments grow appropriately over the period of the contract?

John Weaver and his team at CSG in New Bedford, MA began by solving the problem rather than leading with the solution.  By applying CSG's creative, yet efficient proprietary analytical process to the Norfolk site, John put together a carefully designed ground mounted solar installation that would be the most cost-effective solution.

Ultimately, the CSG team installed a 250-kW ground mount system on the acre of land which made full use of the available incentives and shoulder pricing in a cost-effective manner.

The 20 year contract cost the landowner zero, and brings a guaranteed income of $10,000/year for 20 years, growing automatically by 3% each year.  John and the CSG team were even able to pay the landowner's attorney's fees to have the contract reviewed!

You can find out how much you can receive in monthly payments for your specific land and its annual growth today.

Getting the Critical Data You Need for Robust Photovoltaic (PV) Operations and Maintenance (O&M): Key Questions to Ask

Photovoltaic (PV) Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Data

As solar assets start to incorporate more complex components such as storage batteries, owner operators and (Independent Power Producers (IPP's) face an increasingly challenging job managing photovoltaics (PV) operations & maintenance (O&M). For an owner/operator of a large-acreage solar farm, a robust, well-integrated data and analytics "early warning" system is key to ensuring reliable production at lowest cost. Any delays in detecting issues under the surface can rapidly result in losses in production, outages or worse.

For instance, the tragic cause of last year's November wildfires in California were PG&E’s gaps in O&M.

In order to avoid unexpected production losses, you need to answer the following key questions:

1. How do you know that a problem has happened and it's severity?

2. How do you get alerted to that information quickly without false positives?

3. In which equipment or location did it happen?

4. What's the cause and the best remedy?

To answer these questions, modern solar installations use a range of vendor software to manage O&M. However, each vendor software system keeps a separate copy of your data in their own proprietary data format and every O&M department may have their specific procedures, priorities and approach. This can create a number of challenging issues for PV O&M managers:

1. Failure or warning reports that are most useful to you, may not be available in a single vendor system but need to be "cobbled together" from multiple systems.

2. Critical preventative information that crosses system boundaries can easily "fall through the cracks", leading to reduced production and expensive remediation.

3. Each of these systems usually contains only a subset of your data which may be hard to join up with the data you're entering into other systems.

4. These partial data sets being maintained across multiple systems quickly result in vendor lock-in because moving the data to a newer system becomes too hard.

For these reasons, it’s important for you to have a copy of your own data to avoid lock in.

Keeping your own database presents a number of challenges because it contains lots of data with varying size, shape, speed, weight and cleanliness. In a PV O&M scenario, that data can arrive in large volumes and in real time from IoT or other sophisticated sensors distributed across a large area, or from drone-captured imaging data.

In particular, drone-captured or other camera-captured imaging data needs to be joined up and correlated carefully with other data in your other management and monitoring systems to be useful rather than overwhelming for large installations.

A good O&M data solution allows you to connect all your different, proprietary vendor API’s together while allowing you to join up, manage & maintain all of that data in clean and easily accessible / usable form for later purposes like predictive analytics and AI/ML.

Organizing data and optimizing O&M data systems is a key part of our work at Quantyzed. We help our partners have full control over their solar assets/installations from the design stage in the beginning to ongoing operations and maintenance. To learn more about how we can help you organize your data streams and put together a meaningful dashboard of data for your PV O&M system, contact us for a free consultation.

Lowering the Cost of Long-Term Operation and Maintenance (O&M) of Photovoltaic (PV) Panels

For many solar power developers and professionals, a huge focus is placed on the early activities of getting a solar installation up and running. There’s a specific sequence in the state-mandated approval process including site specifications, designs, permit approvals, zoning considerations and so on. However, in that race to get those installations up and running so they can begin monetizing ASAP, key aspects related to the quality and maintainability of that solar asset can be overlooked. These missed items can heavily impact the operations and maintenance (O&M) cost of the solar PV plant over the span of its 20+ year lifetime.

There is limited public data available on the long-term reliability or failure rates of solar equipment or installations. This leads to a situation where most smaller solar developers simply don’t have the time or resources to research the most effective O&M cost minimization techniques or the most reliable, cost-effective designs or equipment. The development and bidding process for solar projects is also extremely price competitive which can make it even harder to plan for high reliability to lower the long-term cost of O&M. Since the costs of solar equipment continue to fall, it becomes difficult to justify further investment into improving the reliability of a solar installation once it’s in operation.

For example, in a typical solar asset it’s expected that around 5-10% of PV panels are either under performing or malfunctioning at any given time. To illustrate this, in Germany this percentage would impact nearly 1.5 - 3.5 GW of Germany’s solar energy capacity. That represents a greater failed capacity amount than all the new installations in 2015 in that country! Clearly, this reliability issue can have a significant impact on how much energy is actually being sent to the grid. It also has a negative impact on the overall long term value of the solar asset itself while possibly violating the terms of whichever PPA’s (Power Purchase Agreements) were negotiated with the installation’s customers.

This topic was a focus at the PV magazine quality round table as part of Intersolar Europe. Solar professionals from around the world listed various reasons that systems fail in operation: module delamination, hotspots ( a particularly big problem that installers request improvements for), severe weather conditions and module defects.

Although PV Operations & Maintenance can be a complex area with a multitude of considerations, industry professionals advise smaller developers to be aware of the following key points for their solar installations:

1. Careful design of system, focusing on quality and operational reliability

2. Procurement of equipment with a view to lowering TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) over the long-term instead of lowest immediate cost

3. Strict Quality Control at Installation

4. Real-time ongoing monitoring

5. Intelligent reactive maintenance.

Developers are using a wide range of data and new, sophisticated analytics software to ensure their project parameters are optimized and the RoI for the solar assets are maximized. Early detection and pro-active action is crucial to get ahead of operational failures, and many new technologies and platforms are emerging to assist in these objectives. To learn more, join us in Dallas for the New Energy Update PV Operations and Maintenance conference. Our team members Sameer Sirdeshpande and John Weaver will be there to discuss how using data and having a clear handle on financing of a solar project can optimize your assets’ long term Operations and Maintenance. We hope to see you there! Click on the image below to learn more about the conference.