Welcome to Pro-Tips!
Whether you are new to the renewables industry or a seasoned veteran, ‘change’ is a constant challenge and opportunity for the industry.
Since the start of the millennium, rapid and growing investments in several key technologies has transformed the viability of solar, storage, microgrids, and electric vehicles into one of the largest economic transformations in our lifetimes. This rapid emergence of new technology has created a gap between the demand for renewables deployments and the ecosystem of skilled labor and institutions with the experience to support those activities.
Lessons than many new entrants into the industry experience:
An experienced electrical contractor may not have the necessary knowledge to support electrical codes and best practices for projects with DC voltage, MV interconnections, and connected equipment networking and instrumentation. All of these scopes of work are outside the traditional NEC 600V and below electrical experience licensed electricians are taught and apprentice for.
The relationship between project budgets, estimated yields, project site characteristics, and equipment capability are often in conflict. The nature of project deal cycles are long, and therefore subject to the application of many initial assumptions that are only refined over time. As the implementation stage of financing and construction approach, the final design, equipment selection, and team of practitioners are a compromise of local regulations and approvals, commercial availability of resources, and the reality of unknown ‘unknowns’.
Renewable deployments are only successful when the sum of all the individual parts work together as a complete system. Unlike many electrical installations that function as self-contained appliances, renewable installation are an integrated system of modules, inverters, metering, protection, and monitoring that all must work in concert with each other to function efficiently.
For contractors who have been successful deploying renewables at smaller residential and commercial & industrial (C&I) scales, the transition to utility scale and multiple-megawatt-scale systems is a greater challenge than simple logistics and project management practices. The utility interconnection process introduces unfamiliar requirements, equipment, testing, and scrutiny by a new AHJ (the utility) that is quite different than local regulations and standards. The number of third party engineering, consultant, and technical support resources required to support these requirements increases in both quantity and cost.
These factors are some of the primary reasons so many renewable projects struggle to achieve timelines and profitability during the execution stage, and often result in mistakes and uninformed decisions being made that handicap the long term commercial efficiency of these assets over the term of their operating life.
Common examples of these underestimated long term challenges:
Non-operational and incorrect metering at the time of commercial operation.
Inadequate access to inverters and trackers for remote fault troubleshooting and restoration.
High ground coverage ratios (GCR) result in row-to-row shading, limiting production in key production hours.
Underestimating the impacts for topology and near shading (like trees) for intra-row shading.
Appropriate vegetative management planning to reduce seasonal shading and under-array damage.
High costs associated with overhead MV equipment inspection and services.
Lack of isolation points for safe and economical equipment servicing and inspections.
Higher costs of civil maintenance due to interior road requirements based on equipment access requirements.
Having experienced many of these issues first hand, Aderis’ proven product offerings are designed to provide turnkey functionality that de-risks installation, commissioning, and operations.
As developers, owners, and operators – our staff wanted better solutions, so we built them.