Solar Sentry specializes in solar array diagnostics for commercial-scale solar electric sites. Most solar photovoltaic sites today collect overall energy production data and diagnostics information from the inverter(s) that connect the solar array to the power grid. While this information can help operations personnel discover and deal with major outages, significant problems in the array of solar panels often go undiagnosed, negatively impacting the production of electricity and the owners’ financial return on their investment.

Our unique patent-pending technology embeds smart wireless sensors in solar panels, allowing us to continuously evaluate individual performance and connectivity to the system. Using inexpensive wireless communications and a secure internet data channel, our diagnostic products and services collect data from each site every few minutes. This lets our analytic software pinpoint the exact location of any connection failures or underperforming solar panels and communicate actionable information to our customers, enabling them to make appropriate repairs quickly, safely and cost-effectively.

Unlike inverters that have no knowledge of the internal operation of the array of solar panels, we collect detailed granular information allowing us to pinpoint the nature and location of virtually any problem in the solar array, including:

     • all array connection failures

• intermittent connection failures

     • defective solar panels

• partially defective solar panels

     • out-of-spec solar panels

• soiled solar panels

     • panel shading

• defective bypass diodes

     • blown fuses

• array to inverter wiring

Economic Benefit
We believe most commercial-scale photovoltaic power sites are underperforming by 5% or more due to undiagnosed problems in their solar arrays. A 5% gain in output power from the use of our diagnostic products and services is expected to return an after-tax IRR in excess of 20%.


 


Courtesy of DOE/NREL, Credit - SMUD

A typical commercial-scale solar photovoltaic site has 1,000 or more solar panels (modules). With today’s monitoring solutions, significant problems in the solar array go undetected. If and when they are suspected, the absence of actionable diagnostic information forces the owner to either ignore the problem or deploy skilled technicians to the site to manually search for the problem. This process is costly, hazardous and time-consuming.

 

Awarded NYSERDA contract for clean energy business growth and development

 
     

 

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