Solar Power's Golden Opportunity: Connected Tech

摘要

The solar industry has the opportunity to integrate intelligent technology, including some that was originally developed for conventional energy resources, into its solar systems. Most parts of a solar farm are already computerized and collecting massive amounts of data. However, the utilization of that data to build predictive capabilities remains largely untapped. That doesn't have to be the case. Nearly every part of every solar farm in the world is currently collecting massive amounts of data, and in nearly all cases, nothing significant is being done with it. "The gas world is way more sophisticated than the solar world today, but even they aren't in the analytic space," Azeez Mohammed, president and CEO of GE Power Conversion, said during a September 13 keynote presentation at the Solar Power International conference in Las Vegas (Figure 1). "In the solar side, we are still at phase zero."