Locus Energy, a solar monitoring and data analytics platform provider for the PV market, has announced Swinerton Renewable Energy, a turnkey engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and operations and management (O&M) provider for the utility-scale and distributed PV markets, will standardize its solar fleet on Locus Energy's SolarNOC monitoring platform and PVIQ analytics suite as part of its SOLV enterprise solution for optimizing and managing plants.
Locus Energy announced yesterday (Thursday) its SolarNOC platform will assist the SOLV solution to provide best-in-class monitoring, analytics and O&M for Swinerton's utility-scale and commercial fleet customers.
Swinerton's PV portfolio totals over 400 MW with 600 MW under construction. Last year, Swinerton was ranked the nation's top commercial solar contractor by Solar Power World.
"Swinerton Renewable Energy is known for its depth of understanding of the utility solar sector and its ability to respond to market demands by staying ahead of the curve in terms of technological innovation," said Adrian P. De Luca, Locus Energy's vice president of sales and marketing.
"In light of Swinerton's position at the forefront of the industry, we consider it a testament to the value of our monitoring and data analytics products that they have been chosen by Swinerton as the standard for its entire fleet."
By using Locus Energy's web-based SolarNOC software as part of the SOLV solution, Swinerton's fleet operators will be able to more efficiently organize and assess performance data over a diverse set of solar PV assets spread across a wide geographical area, as well as streamline O&M workflows.
In addition, Locus Energy has expanded its data acquisition and presentation capabilities, enabling Swinerton to integrate data from its industry-leading SCADA system.
Swinerton will also integrate Locus Energy's PVIQ analytics suite, a set of advanced data analytics services that allows PV system managers to analyze system and fleet level performance and quickly identify causes of underperformance.
"Locus is uniquely positioned to provide the most advanced monitoring and analytics solutions across all segments of the PV market, at scale," said Angelo Purpuras, manager of technical services at Swinerton.
"The use of SolarNOC to manage our fleet provides our technicians with unprecedented data visibility, and the PVIQ analytics will help us to continue providing premium O&M services to our customers."
Locus Energy's PVIQ analytics suite delivers PV performance insight derived from the vast amounts of data produced by its approximately 50,000 solar monitoring systems in North America.
PVIQ consists of three elements: Virtual Irradiance (VI); the Waterfall performance report; and a spreadsheet program plug-in.
VI uses satellite and weather data to provide highly accurate ground-level irradiance data in 15-minute increments with coverage across the contiguous U.S.
The Waterfall performance report assesses the drivers behind underperformance, including factors such as inverter malfunction, shading and soiling.
The plug-in allows operators to access the Locus database directly from an Excel spreadsheet, which dramatically reduces the time required to prepare periodic performance reports.
Swinerton Renewable Energy is the solar division of Swinerton Inc., recently named California's top building contractor, with more than $1.8 billion in annual revenues.
