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A solar array can look perfectly healthy and functional — even while it produces little or no electricity. It may take weeks for the only obvious fault clue to arrive: The building is purchasing far more electricity from the grid than expected. That risk is especially acute for an orphaned solar system, a system that remains in place but no longer has dependable monitoring or support.
Fortunately, you can use Yardi Meter Insights to receive an independent view of solar production and get alerts when production stops. Solar pays off through lower electricity bills. When a system stops producing, you buy that power from the grid instead, and your ROI shrinks. Meter Insights helps you spot the outage sooner so you can fix it and protect your return.
Why an orphaned solar system is damaging
An orphaned solar system is not necessarily old, damaged or abandoned. It can be disconnected from the people or technology previously responsible for monitoring it because of property closure, lack of hardware support or other issues.
The problem is that you have an energy-producing asset but no reliable way to confirm it’s producing.
Silent solar outages can be costly
Solar equipment doesn’t need to fail dramatically to lose value. A small mechanical malfunction is all it takes, and production can decline gradually enough to blend into normal changes in weather and season, masking the problem as the building keeps buying more electricity from the grid. You might not see the financial impact until you review the next energy bill.
The stakes are just as high for properties subject to a building performance standard that measures greenhouse gas emissions. An unnoticed solar outage can increase grid electricity purchases and the emissions attributed to the building, reducing or eliminating its cushion below the applicable limit. You could face penalties, required corrective action, retrofit costs and difficulty demonstrating progress toward public sustainability goals.
Restoring visibility with Meter Insights
The first priority for remedying an orphaned solar system is to create a trustworthy source of production data. To do that, our Yardi Energy team can install electric submeters at the solar inverter or generation output and bring that interval data into Meter Insights for a view of total solar production, individual inverter production or both.
“Meter Insights helps make solar performance visible again. Instead of waiting for an unexpected utility bill to reveal that something went wrong, teams can see production trends, receive an early warning and act while the cost of the problem is still small,” said Christy Cannon, a senior solutions consultant for Yardi Energy.
Meter Insights turns data into an operational monitoring workflow that includes:
- Production outage alerts: A flatlined meter data alert identifies production meters whose values have stopped changing.
- Communications alerts: A stale meter data alert identifies when a meter has stopped transmitting, helping teams separate a likely data-communications problem from a possible production outage.
- Trend visualization: Interval graphs show the daily shape of solar production and how it changes over time. Users can see whether production returns each morning, compare patterns across days and seasons and identify inverters that behave differently from the rest of the system.
- A shared operating record: Alerts, reports, exports and investigation notes give property, facility, sustainability and asset management teams a common place to review what happened and the action taken.
“Meter Insights does not replace maintenance providers who diagnose and repair equipment. It closes the visibility gap. The alert tells the responsible team where to look and helps them begin the service process sooner,” Cannon said.
From solar data to better ROI
Earlier detection can protect asset value and ROI by:
- Reducing the time between production loss and corrective action.
- Limiting avoidable purchases of replacement electricity from the grid.
- Identifying partial-system issues that may be harder to spot on a monthly utility bill.
- Creating production history that supports contractor, warranty and performance conversations.
With direct production metering, clear alert ownership and a defined response process, building owners can regain control even when the original monitoring relationship is gone.
Yardi can help evaluate and create an alert strategy for solar systems that need an independent source of production visibility. Learn more.
