Accurate soiling forecasts and optimized cleaning schedules are just the first step in effectively mitigating soiling across a fleet of assets. Balancing factors like fund budgets, cleaning ROI, vendor availability, and overall O&M budgets is equally important in making cleaning decisions – and is difficult to do without the right tool. Solar Unsoiled’s Proactive Planner combines modeling, analytics, and logistics into a solution that allows customers to prioritize sites, align with a budget, schedule cleanings, and forecast future losses.

Step 1: Prioritization

It is rare that there is enough budget to immediately implement all the optimal cleanings due across a fleet, especially early in the transition from reactive to proactive mitigation. Solar Unsoiled’s Proactive Planner takes the guesswork out of getting the most out of an available budget. The tool scores each site, balancing key factors such as payback period, projected soiling at the time of cleaning, how overdue a cleaning is, and overall site health. Sites are then ranked from highest to lowest priority score, making it easy to identify which assets require the most immediate attention.

Step 2: Budgeting

Upon loading the Planner, cleanings for each site are tentatively scheduled based on Solar Unsoiled’s site-specific optimized schedules. These schedules can be edited directly in the tool, and adding or removing cleanings automatically updates the projected cleaning budget. This budget estimates the total cost of the selected cleanings and breaks it down into quarter-by-quarter buckets. Step 2 is ensuring the projected budget aligns with the available funds. Guided by the prioritization list, users can de-select lower-priority cleanings until the plan matches their available budget.

Often, customers budget for groups of sites through funds. Solar Unsoiled’s Proactive Planner natively supports this through site tags – user-defined labels that allow sites to be grouped in flexible ways. By filtering the site table using these tags, users can easily plan and manage cleaning budgets within a specific fund.

Step 3: Scheduling

Once the budget is set, cleaning schedules can be shifted between months. For instance, nearby sites might be grouped within the same quarter, or the highest-priority sites could be scheduled earlier in the year. This feature pairs nicely with Solar Unsoiled’s Marketplace for sourcing and comparing vendor quotes. Planning ahead helps customers ensure their sites are cleaned on their preferred timeline, even during high-demand seasons with limited vendor availability.

Step 4: Forecasting

As selected cleanings change in the Planner, the site’s forecasted soiling losses for the next year also update automatically. This allows users to explore different scenarios, seeing what future soiling would look like under different cleaning schedules. Ultimately, these results can be integrated into a forecasting software of choice – improving the certainty of revenue and performance projections and decreasing overall portfolio risk.

Walkthrough of a Practical Example

The following example illustrates how the Proactive Planner tool could be used in practice. In this hypothetical scenario, a user adjusts an initial schedule (left) within the Planner to align a cleaning plan with a $300k budget for a given fleet (right).

Using the priority column, the user identifies several sites with relatively low cleaning priority. To move toward the target budget, the user removes some of these lower-priority cleanings. Specifically, the user deletes the cleanings for Eyebrow Patch and Flapjack Ranch, LLC. The user also reduces the two cleanings at Photon Field to a single cleaning in July, effectively splitting the difference between optimal months. Once the projected cleaning budget aligns with the available funds, the user shifts cleanings as needed. While using the Marketplace to source a competitive quote for Syzygy Solar, the user moves that cleaning to June until a vendor and date are finalized. Additionally, after identifying a vendor that offers a 30% cost reduction for cleaning Haybale Helio during the off-season, the user reschedules that cleaning to November. Finally, the user exports the updated table and inputs the monthly soiling projections into their yield models or digital twins (e.g., PVsyst, HelioScope, SAM) to improve the accuracy of revenue projections.

Enabling Proactive, Fleet-Wide Optimization

In summary, the Proactive Planner enables customers to turn soiling insights into actionable cleaning plans that align with both operational priorities and budget constraints. This tool provides the pathway to transitioning from reactive, site-by-site cleaning decisions to proactive, fleet-wide optimization.

Contact the Solar Unsoiled team to learn more and see if this could be a fit for your portfolio.