Aggregation: An Unstoppable Trend in Solar Power Plant Monitoring
PV monitoring software and hardware are slowly becoming decoupled in most markets around the world, creating opportunities for a new breed of monitoring firms.
Historically, PV monitoring vendors developed fully integrated solutions, including both on-site hardware to acquire the data and remote software to collect, process and present it. While this one-stop-shop approach to data acquisition and presentation remains dominant, it is increasingly getting challenged by a new model: hardware-independent data aggregation.
Why aggregation?
In nascent markets, plant operators and owners tend to standardize on one monitoring solution (hardware and software) that fits their needs. When markets mature, however, things tend to get messy. Some vendors disappear, get acquired, or become less competitive. Projects get sold.
O&M providers manage heterogeneous portfolios of PV systems and find themselves using multiple monitoring software solutions, sometimes more than 10. Data gets scattered. Plant supervision and reporting become complex and inconsistent. Costs increase and efficiency decreases.
Monitoring aggregation solutions are designed to integrate with a variety of other monitoring platforms, bring all the data under one roof, and offer a consistent interface for supervision and reporting.
Source: greentechmedia
