We’re pleased to be announcing an addition to our SolarAnywhere® product family today – SolarAnywhere® SystemCheck. We’ve been hearing from our customers who own fleets of residential and small-commercial scale PV systems, or who provide PV monitoring services, that obtaining consistent benchmark data for systems that are spread out over large geographic areas can be cost-prohibitive. This is especially true for smaller systems, as it typically requires the installation and maintenance of on-site hardware, or frequent in-person maintenance checks to verify performance.

Benchmarking is important to ensuring that a PV system continues to produce at its maximum over time by making it possible to compare actual to expected system performance. If predicted performance is trending higher than actual, then the system owner can take action and correct problems such as soiling or shading.

This is particularly important to residential leasing companies, and installer and financing networks who may own thousands of systems dispersed across a wide geographic range, and who want to be sure that the PPA guarantees they’ve made provide the returns they expect. Monitoring companies also benefit by being able to offer affordable benchmarking options to their customers.

Using SystemCheck to Identify PV Performance Problems

SystemCheck makes it possible to take benchmarking to the masses by providing a consistent, affordable source of predicted power output data without relying on on-site measurement hardware. It combines SolarAnywhere® irradiance data with robust PV simulation technologies to provide system- and location-specific predicted power output on an hourly basis. The benchmark data is available via an application programming interface (API) for easy integration into in-house software, and it’s designed to make it easy to get benchmark data for a single system, or thousands of systems.

We’re also excited that DECK Monitoring, an early SystemCheck adopter, announced today that SystemCheck is available from within the online DECK Admin Panel, where it provides a performance baseline for easy charting of actual generation against modeled performance.

In the words of DECK’s co-founder Cosmos Corbin, “SolarAnywhere SystemCheck offers some clear advantages over a traditional weather station for performance baseline monitoring. SystemCheck is highly consistent and less expensive since it does not involve the expenses of installing or maintaining physical hardware. Given the high price point for traditional weather stations, the satellite option is a significant cost savings opportunity for our customers.”