Case study of Inspection for solar asset

The owner’s 6 MW solar PV system was recently inspected as part of an annual preventative maintenance inspection using Raptor Maps turnkey services. A pilot was deployed within one week of the inspection request. The Raptor Standard level inspection took three hours of on-site piloting and provided the O&M team with sub-modular anomaly details through thermal and visual spectrum imagery. Raptor Standard level inspections can show anomalies from the inverter level down to the cell level. The inspection uncovered 490 system anomalies, categorized into 16 anomaly types, and amounting to 2,853 affected modules.

Some anomalies to note were instances of tree line shading, which affected over 2,200 modules, and combiner issues, affecting 324 modules. In addition, there were 3 strings and 68 individual diode faults discovered.

The owner’s O&M subcontractor used the deliverables to identify the most impactful and easily remediated anomalies within the site. The deliverables enabled them to set up a plan to resolve all non-shading related anomalies within two weeks of the site inspection. The team started with the malfunctioning combiners to resume the 1.78% of lost production. The O&M team was already aware of the shading issues impacting the site, however, the shading impact had never been quantified. The O&M team used this new data to create a plan to resolve the onsite issues causing the shading and performance loss.