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Optimized Solar Cleaning Schedules: The Transition to Proactive Soiling Mitigation
Implementing a Fleet-Wide Change to Assessing, Planning, and Budgeting for Soiling Losses
Cleaning panels at the right time increases site profit.
In the evolving landscape of solar energy, maintaining performance of solar assets is a significant challenge. With a slew of underperformance issues always present, an often overlooked culprit is soiling. Soiling, caused by the accumulation of dirt, dust, and other particulate matter on solar panels, significantly hinders their energy generation efficiency. Whether this issue is obvious (Southern California) or more obscure (Southern East Coast), it is present all the less, and highly localized to each site.
The Reactive Approach: A Cycle of Inefficiency Historically, the industry's method for addressing soiling has been reactive and cumbersome. It begins with identifying an underperforming site, followed by a series of checks and analyses to confirm soiling as the root cause. This process not only involves a significant amount of time and resources but also results in lost revenue due to delayed action. Once soiling is confirmed, the process of cleaning involves coordination with third-party providers, which is another layer of complexity and cost. This is on top of having to free up unexpected O&M costs, as soiling may not have been properly budgeted for during development.
Solar Unsoiled’s comprehensive and interactive fleet dashboard. See all soiling information at a glance, or filter and prioritize by site.
The Proactive Approach: Efficiency and Optimization Maximized profit is the goal – finding that tradeoff between the AC impact of DC soiling and the costs of cleaning. To achieve optimized cleaning schedules, predictive models tuned with analytical methods are needed. Knowing current and future soiling, as well as when each site will need to be cleaned, allows for a switch to proactive mitigation. The strategy of scheduling cleanings months ahead of time and adjusting O&M budgets years out, all with the knowledge of forecasted performance gains and payback periods of each cleaning, is a shift in the way soiling has been treated. This paradigm shift does require a two-phase approach.
Phase 1: Prioritization of Current Budget Knowing optimized cleaning schedules across a fleet does not necessarily mean that these schedules can be immediately applied, as there is a set budget available for cleaning right now. Phase 1 is about prioritizing where to deploy this budget to get the best returns. Targeting which sites have the highest financial losses or shortest payback periods on cleanings is a good way to ensure that the current budget is being used most effectively. With this strategy, one Solar Unsoiled customer with approximately 150 sites was able to clean 30 of them with the budget they had available over a one year period (April 2022 to April 2023). The result was an average performance gain of 7.1%, an average cleaning payback period of 7.2 months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit.
Phase 2: Proactive Mitigation and Budgeting After catching up with the sites that have the most pressing soiling issues, the value of the proactive approach can be fully realized. Soiling quantification at each site allows improved confidence in other site losses. The removal of soiling sensor maintenance and IV Curve Tracing for soiling analysis saves technician and engineering time. Scheduling with a cleaning contractor ahead of time reduces logistical friction and ensures sites get cleaned during times of high demand. Following the successful implementation of Phase 1, the same Solar Unsoiled customer was able to budget and schedule cleanings across the fleet for the next two years. These cleanings are clustered by region in order to reduce mobilization costs of cleaning crews. Most importantly, these cleanings will be happening at the right time.
In response to the need for a more efficient approach to soiling management in solar farms, there are solutions tailored to enable this proactive strategy. For those interested in exploring how a proactive approach can be implemented in their solar energy operations and the specific tools available to facilitate this, further information and guidance can be provided upon request. This new approach to solar farm maintenance marks a significant step towards a more efficient and sustainable future in solar energy management.