From residential rooftops to utility scale power plants, the solar industry is growing across the nation. In the last decade alone, it has experienced an average annual growth rate of 42%, and it’s expected to grow faster than all other renewable energies from now to 2050.
To sustain all this growth, it’s crucial to implement better solar industry practices. More efficient solar practices will lower the cost of solar installations, inspections, and labor to make moving away from traditional energy sources easier.
Fortunately, drones can help. They can survey a construction site to determine where best to position solar panels for optimal performance. Drones can also monitor a solar plant installation to ensure it stays up to code. And drones can routinely inspect active solar sites to locate defects and prevent maintenance issues later down the road.
In this article, we’ll go over the top 7 ways you can use drones to take your solar project to the next level. Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
1. Routine Solar Maintenance Inspections
Traditional solar maintenance inspections are performed manually with handheld thermal cameras or I-V curve tracing. However, I-V curve tracing can take 2-5 hours per megawatt (MW) for a group of technicians to inspect.
By the time you pay for the manpower and man-hours to do this for a very large solar plant, you’ll be out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you choose to check only a sample size of the site to save on time, you run the risk of overlooking faulty panels.
This is where drones equipped with infrared cameras come in. They have the ability to fly 1 MW of solar panels in just 10 minutes, a mere fraction of the time.
During the flight, hundreds or even thousands of photos are taken and are then uploaded to specialty software that uses artificial intelligence to scan for anomalies. These defects could include string, cell, diode, and reverse polarity malfunctions among others.
Drone solar maintenance inspection reports can provide a top-down interactive map of the PV system that allows you to click on individual faults to learn where and what they are. Inspection reports can also include an as-built site drawing with the maintenance numbering scheme, so you can compare it to the final installation. Finally, solar reports also provide estimates for how much kilowatt hours (kWh) and revenue loss you’ll experience if the identified problems go unfixed. These estimates take into consideration the local cost for kWh as well as the specific model numbers and specifications of the installed panels to give you the most accurate estimation. You’ll want a diagnostic report like this so you at least have an accurate assessment of your solar plant’s health, whether or not you decide to improve it.
Whatever you do, think twice before trying to perform maintenance checks with your own drone. Proper inspections should be done by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) licensed drone pilots with a thermography certification for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS).
For example, you wouldn’t want an inexperienced technician opening a combiner or inverter box for the risk of electrocution. The same goes for drone solar inspections.
You need experienced professionals who understand drone laws and emergency procedures and know how to fly in coordination with manned aircraft.
Drone inspections bring many benefits. For one, they reduce inspection time by eliminating the need to check solar panels one by one with a handheld device. They also eliminate the need to shut down the entire solar plant. Unlike manual I-V curve inspections, drones can inspect solar panels while they are still operating. So you don’t lose out on any revenue during that time.
Ultimately, the total amount of time and money you save through drone solar inspections makes them an obvious choice for maximizing profits.
2. Rooftop Site Development Planning
If you want to install a rooftop PV system, proper site planning is a crucial part of the project. Traditional rooftop planning involves a lot of bottleneck processes, like obtaining necessary permits, finding recent photos of the roof, and gathering measurements of parapets, offsets, and obstructions. But drones accelerate this process by performing aerial surveys that are 75% faster than manual surveys.
The drone footage is then processed by engineering and computer-aided design (CAD) software to give you precise measurements of boundaries, obstructions, offsets, and so forth, so you know exactly where and how to build the PV system.
Drone rooftop reports produce a number of files, including orthomosaics, digital surface models, point clouds, orth scale factors, 3D Mesh Files, and AutoCAD files. Together, these deliverables give you an unprecedented amount of data to work with, which ultimately leads to a faster, safer, and more accurate rooftop site installation.
“The future of solar power depends on keeping production high and OPEX low. Autonomous drones facilitate both of these goals – without costly staffing increases, and with a previously unobtainable level of accuracy and efficiency.”
- Ariel Avitan, Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder of Percepto
In sum, drones inspect more roof area in less time and enable installation teams to obtain necessary permits faster. They eliminate the safety risks of manual rooftop visits by not putting workers at dangerous heights. And they prevent outdated or incorrect measurements from turning into costly mistakes.
3. Construction Progress Reporting
Once the construction of a PV system is underway, drones can be a great tool for monitoring progress at regular intervals. They can collect aerial imagery on a weekly or even daily basis to track changes over time and document milestones. This way, the construction team can stay on top of the schedule and make necessary adjustments.
At the same time, drone reporting software can deliver numbers and percentages on the current state of construction to all managers and stakeholders. Even if they are not on-site, they can get real-time progress reporting that gets everyone on the same page.
Solar progress reports can also help identify construction issues in advance. For example, drone images can be overlaid with as-built drawing plans. If there are any discrepancies, you can correct them before they turn into bottlenecks down the line. This way, you minimize delays and ensure adherence to the project schedule. Plus, PV construction involves a lot of workers and heavy equipment, so drone progress reporting can help foresee and prevent potential safety issues.
What's included in YOUR GUIDE...
Techniques for Exposing Warrantiable Items on Your PV Sites.
A Proven Roadmap for Successfully Implementing Drones in Solar.
Strategies for Identifying DC Losses and Avoiding Downtime.
In the long run, drone construction progress reporting benefits managers, clients, investors, and engineers. Teams stay on schedule, workers are safer, and asset owners and stakeholders maximize their returns on investment.
4. Aerial Topographic Survey
Before construction begins on a ground mounted solar system, it’s important to understand the condition of the proposed site. Drones can survey the topography of a site to help development and engineering teams assess whether they need to do any earthwork before building. Drones are able to measure and assess the ground to produce contour maps, diagrams with exact volume measurements, orthomosaics, digital surface models, and more.
Aerial topographic surveys have many benefits. They allow you to position your solar panels where they’ll get maximum sunlight and show potential runoff and cut and fill areas. Topographic drone surveys also give you 3D data for future assessments and simulations. This data is great for keeping a documented record of the site.
“With Drones, we save weeks on the turnaround time from initial design to deployable design.”
-Albert De Sousa, Operation Manager at iSolara
5. Commissioning & Asset Transfers
Drones can also help in commissioning and asset transfers. During this time, it’s important to verify that the new solar plant is healthy and up to standards before closeout. Drones assist with this by checking that the installation is complete, safe, and compliant with all safety requirements, including those of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
Drone commissioning inspections can also help you locate installation issues like defective modules, string outages, inverter and combiner anomalies, and more. This way, you can claim them under warranty while in the warranty window. We’ve seen many clients closely monitor their sites with drones at 3-6 month intervals after site commissioning. During this time more issues are uncovered which are still within the warranty window.
Commissioning inspections also provide documentation for future inspections, so that operations and maintenance technicians have a baseline to go by. That way, they have historical data to assess which solar panels require the most attention.
Finally, commissioning inspections assure owners that their PV system was installed properly and that it is operating at peak efficiency. They can rest assured knowing their new solar plant will start producing maximum energy.
6. Site Shading Assessment
Drones can also assess the impact of shading on a PV system. Using the site’s geographical location, nearby obstructions, and seasonal sun positioning, drones can graph potential shading effects over the course of the year. To do this, they collect images each hour, on the hour, throughout the day.
Drone shading assessments include all the imagery from a standard inspection plus detailed diagrams visualizing shade obstructions. This in-depth analysis equips you with the quantity and location of shading anomalies and an estimate of the resulting production loss so that you can create a site remediation plan.
What’s more, site shading assessments help O&M technicians refine performance forecasting and help EPC groups improve future construction sites. All in all, they produce countless benefits down the road.
7. Transmission Line Inspections
Last on our list, we have inspections of solar utility lines. We’re talking specifically about transmission lines that distribute solar energy from solar plants to outside areas. As solar energy continues to grow, more and more transmission lines will need to be constructed to transport that energy.
Manual transmission line inspections are dangerous because they require workers to get close to high voltage power lines while suspended up to 100 feet in the air or hanging beneath helicopters. With drones, inspectors can stay on the ground and locate transmission line issues remotely. Zoom cameras even allow the drone to stay at a safe distance while still delivering high-quality footage.
Another common payload option when inspecting transmission lines with drones are radiometric thermal cameras. Some infrared drone cameras even use dual sensors that allow drone pilots to toggle between regular and thermal footage to achieve more detail during the inspection.
With a thermal-enabled aerial platform, drones reduce risk to personnel, significantly lower inspection costs, and complete inspections within minutes instead of hours. They are the smartest solution for reliable powerline inspection.
Next Steps: Using Drones on your Next Solar Project
If you want to take advantage of this advanced technology, our trained pilots can help you take your solar operations to the next level with site development surveys, commissioning, and routine drone inspections for rooftop and ground-mounted PV systems. Schedule a free one-on-one meeting with one of our drone pilots today.
What's included in YOUR GUIDE...
Techniques for Exposing Warrantiable Items on Your PV Sites.
A Proven Roadmap for Successfully Implementing Drones in Solar.
Strategies for Identifying DC Losses and Avoiding Downtime.
