In a recent webinar Gabe Abbott, director of business development at Locus Energy, discussed key considerations for choosing a monitoring provider. Here’s a recap of his presentation. You can watch the full webinar here.
Abbott stresses the importance of choosing a quality monitoring provider on the software and hardware side.
Software
Stakeholder access
“We recognize that for many projects, there may be multiple stakeholders interested in ensuring that project is performing as it should,” he said. A given project may call for multiple users that need to use the platform. They may have the same use case or they may have different requirements depending on what their interests are. “The O&M group may be more interested in managing issues and responding to alerts,” he said. “The financier might be more interested in understanding the performance of the fleet and understanding performance risks, as well as what the financial projections look like for the next year. Flexible stakeholder access is an important thing for a monitoring provider to be able to offer customers.”
Support of business process
Abbott said choosing a monitoring provider that can support business processesis key. “Customers in the solar space are growing rapidly, and they have a laser focus on driving down cost,” he said. This includes installation, automating billing and performance benchmarking. “Monitoring providers, even if they don’t provide all of those services and capabilities, natively are in a good position to support those business processes either via integration or automated feed to those interfaces.”
Performance management
“Alerts and diagnostics and reporting are all standard must-haves for most available monitoring platforms,” Abbott continued. “By offering deeper performance analytics monitoring companies can create significant value and an incentive for adopting a monitoring platform, while also improving the ROI.”
“What we’ve seen in this space is there are some differences between residential, C&I and utility-scale fleet operators, with the residential operators tending to want more streamlined solutions that scale for whole fleet analysis,” Abbott said. “Fleet operators with residential operators are less interested in spending a lot of time looking at a graph for a particular system, and are more interested at looking in their entire fleet of systems and driving some insights for the broader fleet out of that.” For the larger systems, Abbott explained you’ll more often see requirements around more powerful tools and site level analysis. Things like charting capabilities and advanced alerts on the variety of devices you may have on those large systems.
Hardware
Device Type
Abbott explained that for residential sites, you’ll typically have a meter that’s revenue grade, especially in the third party ownership market. Those meters will provide the AC energy and sometimes additional power quality variables for understanding the grid more. For commercial projects, Abbott continued, you generally have similar metering requirements, but may also need to capture inverter level data. Inverter level data can be very useful for residential systems as well, but it’s certainly more common on commercial installations as a requirement.
Large projects, in particular, use a broader range of third-party devices including weather stations, string monitoring and controllers. Those are all things Abbott often sees on commercial and larger systems. “I think the hardware stack that you use on those projects is going to be driven by project-specific requirements,” he said. “Large projects tend to have different requirements depending on the size of the project and balance of systems equipment selected. A demonstrated ability to integrate with a range of devices is an important consideration in terms of capabilities.”
Connectivity
Connectivity can be bucketed into either Ethernet (broadband) or cellular communication over carriers such as Verizon or AT&T or Sprint. “I think we’ve definitely seen a shift toward cellular connectivity,” Abbott said. In the early days most monitoring systems were Ethernet. “We see a lot more cellular in the market now particularly on residential installations where you may not want to have to plug into the customer’s home network and rely on that over the long term, especially in a long-term lease or PPA contract scenario.”
Cellular-based models have less frequent uploads to minimize the data cost. Providers typically need to streamline the data collection and delivery methods to fit under a low monthly data cap. “We’ve observed that cellular tends to be a lower cost to install since you don’t have to wire into a broadband system onsite. They also cost less to maintain because you don’t have to worry about somebody unplugging the device or changing network parameters on a site, disconnecting the system and having to deal the impacts of that,” Abbott said. “Ethernet has more granularity, and if you’re sending a larger dataset, Ethernet may be a preferable. There is no right answer, and it’s important to identify the connectivity solution that best matches to use case of the provider and customer.”
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