Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

How Digitalization Is Ushering in a New Solar Era

Renewable Energy World: As the solar industry continues on its quest to achieve lower and lower costs, the next step is to use digitalization to achieve further cost reductions from the bottom up — reducing unplanned downtime, improving asset reliability and availability, and guaranteeing long-term plant performance.

One technique that is helping cost-conscious solar developers is known as “digital twins.” This involves creating a virtual plant asset replica based on normal operating profile data that can then be used to simulate how a plant should perform under optimum working conditions. By comparing real-time asset performance with its perfectly healthy virtual equivalent, asset performance management (APM) can help fine-tune asset parameters to enable peak productivity.

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