Renewable Energy Solutions 

Systems and services provided by Campbell Scientific help optimize investment returns through maximized energy yield, controllable operating costs, and optimal site placement. 

Choose the right location | Site Assessment Data 

Building a photovoltaic (PV) farm represents a significant investment; it can cost somewhere in the region of $1 million per gigawatt (GW) of installed capacity to create a utility-scale farm. It is essential that the developer has an accurate picture of weather conditions across the site, understands the potential yields, and knows how the prevailing conditions or seasonality will impact power generation and return on investment. 

Campbell Scientific’s turnkey data-acquisition systems comply with all relevant industry standards and provide field-proven reliability with options available to suit all locations and data-collection requirements. Properly collected site assessment data delivered by Campbell Scientific provides the insight required for investors and other decision makers to make fully informed yield and siting decisions based on best-in-class data collection and analysis. 

Control operation and maintenance costs | Data-Driven O&M Decisions 

Large-scale farms can often be sited in hard-to-reach locations and/or be so large that the maintenance costs are significantly higher than expected. In addition to the standard preventive maintenance and repair activity, PV panels need to be regularly cleaned, especially in arid regions where PV solar plants can lose 30% efficiency per month due to dust and other contaminants. 

Campbell Scientific’s PV soiling assessment systems are suitable for all solar installations, including large rooftop industrial solar installations and utility-scale PV farms. A soiling assessment system allows plant owners to maximize power output and return on investment by enabling strategic decision-making. 

Data-driven cleaning schedules can help optimize maintenance activity to ensure maintenance is only carried out when needed. Through effective and accurate soiling assessment measures, a plant owner can optimize maintenance schedules around actual cleaning need, especially in arid regions. 

Campbell Scientific’s PV soiling assessment systems measure the impact of dust and contaminants across the whole PV panel to get a true soiling index. Many other systems take spot measurements and assume homogeneity across the entire panel, which can mislead and cause inefficient decision-making. 

Verify and assure site performance | Data-Driven Actionable Insight 

Understanding how a PV plant is performing is critical to all stakeholders across the value chain. Accurate and cost-effective data collection from across a site provides a reliable baseline for performance calculations, establishing a solid platform for future performance comparisons, troubleshooting, or future farm expansion. 

Campbell Scientific’s weather stations are the backbone of critical weather monitoring systems globally and have been providing high-quality measurement data for more than 40 years. In addition to measuring the standard weather parameters, a Campbell Scientific weather station can also include sensors to measure the albedo ratio for bifacial solar panels and back-of-panel temperature monitoring. 

In combination with the mainline professional weather station, a series of smaller, distributed measurement stations (sunstations) such as the MeteoPV are used to fill in the data gaps. The MeteoPV is a purpose-built PV resource-data platform used in system analysis and performance assessment to provide key data to increase the measurement density required to facilitate effective decision-making. 

Weather Monitoring Ensures Solar System Operation 

Campbell Scientific’s Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) provide accurate, continuous, and automated measurements with low power requirements and operate well in all weather conditions.