Operation & Maintenance
Solar project maintenance can help maximize uptime and extend the life of the plant. The delivery of solar power without any disruption maintains the stream of economic value generated by each kilowatt hour of production, and proper service is a critical component to ensuring optimal performance while minimizing the risks of downtime. Without proper operation and maintenance, system components could be void of all warranties
O&M issues should be discussed pre-construction. The site manager oversees maintenance and the ordering of spare parts and equipment, and communicates with land owners, the local electric utility and state and local government officials. There are plenty of third-party companies who can perform O&M services to help prevent problems going unnoticed and prevent future issues. Typically, a site manager and project technicians work at the project site. A good operations and maintenance firm will have a dedicated team of field-service engineers and technicians who will actively oversee the quality and performance of a solar project with effective maintenance. Typically, this will involve signing maintenance contracts — but make sure you tailor the agreement to meet your specific goals and needs.
The following services should be included in any serious maintenance contract:
Site visits:
The maintenance company should come on site to inspect your installation and analyze whether it is producing the amount of power it has promised. Solar our maintenance firm should perform. On average, regular solar array cleaning will increase annual solar energy production by 5 to 10% in climates with a dry season.
Electrical system checks:
Maintenance companies should be able to check the electrical systems to make sure they are performing properly — and make corrections if they are not.
Solar Inverter preventative maintenance:
They should be able to do the same checks and corrections for your solar inverters. Inverter is the heart of the system for solar PV and are predominantly by electronic device they need to be taken very high care due to the extreme hot, humid and dusty. AmpUltraVolt Engineers has unmatched experience in operating and maintaining large utility scale projects and solar rooftops for the last five (5) years. We also offer monitoring of hardware and services, based on the solar-log data logger platform from Germany.
Civil and structural sub-station:
One of the tasks of the O&M personnel will be make sure that the growth of shrubs & other vegetation is fully in control. If not they will grow very tall and cause shadowing effect on the panels. Snakes and other poisonous reptiles might take shrubs their home and can cause safety hazards to the workers. The other problems relate to the mounting structure, in some cases, bending of the structure can happen due to the improper design. If left unaddressed, the bending can damage the modules. Similarly during rainy season it has been observed that the top soil gets washed away due to improper drainage system. A proactive O&M team can address this by visual inspection and take preventive action before rain.
Communication:
The most of the solar plants are located in remote places with unreliable communication infrastructure. Most of the remote monitoring system needs an internet connection and in absence of a reliable connection, there could be problem of lack of data logging for long period of time. This makes it very difficult to diagnose and rectify problem in a timely manner.
Other components:
Battery, cables, Connections, Junction Boxes, Earthing, Inverters, PCU, Mounting structures.
Type of Plant:
Grid Tie, Off-Grid, Hybrid.
Plant Maintenance:
- Scheduling for Preventive Maintenance
- Corrective Maintenance
- Predictive Maintenance
- Spare/Inventory Maintenance.
Site Management:
- Green cover/Vegetation Management
- Infrastructure Management
- Site Security/Site Surveillance
- Water Management
- Waste Management.
Our services portfolio:
Preventive Maintenance Packages:
- Regular cleaning of solar panels
- Frequent maintenance of thermal-based components
- Yearly service of HT side equipment
- Diagnostic testing for low power production
- Circuit testing
- IV curve tracing
- Thermal imaging
- Earth value measurement
- Retro commissioning
- Data acquisition system check
- Warranty management
- Uptime Management
- Automatic string level visual alarms
- Real time data collection
- Monitoring energy production (daily basis)
- Effective data interpretation
- Mismatch characterization and Insitu-Banding
- Solar Resource Management and Prediction
- PV system monitoring systems
- Trending and Analytics for continuous improvement
- Critical and non-critical reactive repairs
- Spare parts and inventory management
State-of-the-art Network Operations Centre:
To monitor the operations & manage maintenance of solar rooftops, Tata Power Solar has set up a network operations center, giving instant business insights as a value added service to our customers. Tata Power Solar also monitors and maintains rooftop solar projects for its corporate customers.