Remote Work O&M Technician Support Monitoring of Utility-Scale Solar Farms

Neuville Grid Data is developing new complex hardware and 'big data' systems that will enable individual workers in the UK solar farm operations and maintenance (O&M) industry to monitor the operational health of their solar sites remotely and in real time. Not only does this enable individual workers to undertake a large amount of their duties remotely at home, it also provides them with early-warning condition monitoring of solar farm equipment that is currently not available with existing monitoring and communications equipment within the sector. The condition monitoring early-warning element of Neuville's system is of benefit to society at large as it will enable solar farm operators to minimise downtime that results from unplanned equipment failures, thereby ensuring that a greater proportion of the UK's installed solar assets are available for communities' power consumption needs.

Whilst the hardware aspect of Neuville's innovative grid monitoring system is already in development thanks to private funding, support via public funds through this InnovateUK grant would enable Neuville to accelerate the data processing and information dispatch aspects needed to automate the processing of the vast amounts of electrical grid data generated from each site every second.

This 'big data' processing is key to enabling O&M tech to resolve many issues and answer questions remotely without need to visit the solar farm. Thereby avoiding Covid-19 exposure and maintaining social distancing by avoiding lengthy journeys to sites across the UK in shared vehicles and working in confined spaces with other persons.

Beyond the societal health benefits, this project's results will also: lower utility-scale solar farms operating costs; enhance solar energy generation; encourage more renewable energy; reduce O&M travel associated carbon emissions; reduce road traffic; improve job satisfaction; and raise skills.

Electrical power is an essential service. There are over 1,200 utility-scale solar farms (larger than 1 megawatt) across the UK totaling more than 8 gigawatts (GW). During April 2020, solar energy's contribution to the total UK electricity supply repeatedly reached 20% or more at times.

Keeping this supply of solar energy operating and fully productive requires the highly skilled labour of an estimated 1,400 British solar O&M technicians performing one of the fastest growing jobs in Britain.

Neuville is perfecting and commercialising this disruptive technology in the UK. The UK is a relatively small solar market, but the export opportunity is huge. The project's resulting tools and systems can be easily exported.

Extension for impact funding will enable us to trial and 'stress test' our operational dashboard and custom alerts (developed as part of this IUK project) on multiple sites, enabling refinement of the dashboard to a 'commercial-ready' product. The extension will also enable the development of a portfolio-level dashboard and alert system for use by O&M personnel to remotely monitor multiple sites in real-time on a single dashboard.