Most commercial-scale solar electric sites today have overall monitoring that detects major outages like inverter failures or major storm damage. They also usually include inverter diagnostics, but have very little information about the solar array itself. An audit commissioned by Sandia National Labs, a solar arm of the DOE, found that half of the systems surveyed were unacceptable and "will not live up to the potential that can be expected from a properly designed and installed PV system.” This underperformance is partly due to a lack of adequate array diagnostics that would have highlighted performance issues in the sites.

While today's solar electric performance is improving, a survey of the fifteen largest PV solar power sites reporting 'solar performance ratio' to the IEA reveals significant performance variability in spite of the fact that they range in size from 114 KW to 3 MW DC peak and therefore should be well maintained. NREL has a web-based program named PVWATTS, for estimating solar energy production from photovoltaic (PV) systems and it uses a performance ratio assumption of 0.77.  The best three sites reporting to the IEA actually averaged just over 0.80, 4.3% above the NREL assumption. The overall average of the 15 sites was 0.66 however, 14.5% below the NREL assumption. The three lowest performing sites averaged only 0.48, a full 38% below the NREL average. It's clear that these sites could produce significantly more solar electricity than they are currently reporting. If monitoring, diagnostics and maintenance could be accomplished cost-effectively, these sites would also provide a much larger Return on Investment for their owners.

The most advanced solar electric monitoring today takes measurements at a granularity of ‘strings of solar panels’. While this type of monitoring can detect many faults, it can’t provide diagnosis of the problem, or problem location, at any level of detail. As a result of this, maintenance is expensive because it requires the deployment of skilled technicians to the solar electric site. Once on site, their only recourse is to dismantle the system and search for the cause of the failure.

Our patent-pending technology monitors individual solar panel connectivity and performance, allowing it to effectively diagnose virtually any site fault, pinpointing its location. Our service-business concept, coupled with low-cost communications provided by the internet, make sophisticated array diagnostics a cost-effective investment.