Dipesh Dhital Benefits of Using Drone for Solar Panel Inspection
Drone solar inspections are significantly faster than traditional methods. Drones can inspect 1 megawatt (MW) of solar panels in about 10 minutes, whereas I-V curve tracing can take 2 to 5 hours for the same.
I-V curve tracing is a manual electric testing system that is currently the standard practice for PV systems. Due to higher cost and labor limitations, I-V tracing is typically used at the combiner and string level and more testing is required for module-level inspection. Whereas, utilizing aerial thermography, drones can cover an entire PV system while collecting data for every module.
A case study by Measure found that drone inspections increased inspection efficiency by 97% in comparison to manual inspection. This operational efficiency resulted in an average cost savings of $1254/MW.
For larger solar farms, manual inspection is even more time-consuming, and expensive and might also lead to interruptions in power generation. According to Nanonets, for a solar plant with 200,000 PV modules spread over 250 hectares, manual inspection with a team of 3 people will take more than a month. Whereas, drone inspection can cover the same 250 hectares in 2 days.
Drones can also help automate the manual and highly cumbersome task of large solar farm monitoring. Drones can be programmed with flight path planning algorithms and equipped with both RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and thermal cameras. Such a drone-based system can autonomously inspect the entire solar farm and further adding an image processing algorithm will also enable it to process RGB and thermal images for automatic fault detection.
Drone Solar Panel Inspection – Service Providers
- Precision Hawk
- The Drone Life
- Drone Deploy
- Intertek
- Percepto
- Equinox’s Drones
- The Chandler Companies
- Viper Drones
Best Drones for Solar Panel Inspection
- Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced
- DJI Matrice 210 V2
- DJI Matrice 300 RTK
- Parrot ANAFI Thermal
- Autel Robotics EVO II Pro RTK
Ground inspection does not provide the necessary imagery and entire testing of the solar panels the same way that an aerial thermal imagine does. A UAV ...
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One of the studies demonstrated that the drone inspections are 97% faster than manual inspections for solar panels. Cost savings due to efficiency gains ...
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Benefits of Using Drone for Solar Panel Inspection Drone solar inspections are significantly faster than traditional methods. Drones can inspect 1 megawatt ...
