The task of the manufacturing software team at Fortech was to develop a monitoring portal – web application, mobile iOS & Android apps – that provides, with rich graphics, real-time data on the performance of large-scale solar plants and allows users to remote control the PV inverters.

Data insights on the performance of solar inverters are available in clear and understandable charts, periodical reports, and errors are displayed as notifications.

Solar inverters convert DC power provided by solar panels to AC power that can be fed into the power grid. Through a network of sensors, the PV inverters can log their performance parameters and send them through the internet to a central database.

With data being transmitted continuously (the progress of the connected devices can be sent every 1, 5, or 10 minutes), the maintenance crew can swiftly react to any changes or errors, reducing operational and maintenance costs and downtime of solar panels to a minimum. The platform allows them to remote control the solar inverters. They have the possibility to restart, upgrade the firmware or configure multiple internal parameters.

One innovative part of the software is the algorithm that analyses the performance of every device (solar panel), and by factoring in the performance of other, close by devices can automatically make the difference between false alarms (output dropping because of passing clouds) and real errors (output drops because of faulty modules or inverters).

Critical features for real-time maintenance of the solar system:

• Charts: They show minute-resolution data of tens of parameters in line graph format as day, month, year, and total. Users can visualize data in a table format, too.
• Periodical reports: Users can choose to receive daily, monthly and yearly reports about the performance of their connected solar plants.
• Error notifications: Warnings and errors can be viewed in grids that can be sorted and filtered. When severe errors occur, users receive an e-mail.

Industrial IoT systems facilitate predictive maintenance by monitoring asset conditions, such as solar panels. In this case, long downtimes in energy production can be prevented by allowing the user to visualize real-time data insights even on mobile devices. Even more so, the API will enable users to download the data of their devices.