Tips for a new Solar O&M Entrepreneur
Hello everyone, glad to be a part of this community. Thank you @Călin Sas for creating this forum. My name is Rohith, and I am excited to share that I’ve just started my own Solar O&M company based in India. I’ve onboarded my first client, who has a ~5MW solar plant at a single location. The plant is currently only undergoing regular cleaning, weeding, and occasional repairs to cables and connectors, but there is no formal Preventive Maintenance (PM), Corrective Maintenance (CM), or PV analytics being done at the moment. In the next week or two, I will be taking over the plant’s O&M responsibilities and am looking to get some advice and insights from the community. I’m in talks with SCADA providers to bring the plant's SCADA system online, and once the data starts flowing, I plan to explore more optimization opportunities. I’ve gone through some best practices guidelines, and I’ve come up with a preliminary schedule for electrical and mechanical checks, but I’m sure there are areas where I could improve and avoid common pitfalls. I would greatly appreciate any guidance or tips on: 1. A highly implemented and efficient daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual maintenance activities. 2. Best practices for implementing a PM and CM program for a plant of this size. 3. Recommendations on tools, excel templates or resources for efficient performance monitoring and data analytics once the SCADA system is live. 4. Insights into building a productive O&M process, systems and scaling for future plants. I’m eager to learn and improve my approach, and I’d love to hear from anyone with experience in managing similar plants. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!