For solar projects to function successfully beyond their guaranteed lifespan, they must be constructed correctly and maintained faithfully. Solar contractors who handle construction as well as operations and maintenance (O&M) stay with a solar project for the long term to ensure the array meets all milestones.
Greenskies clean focus, a Connecticut-based commercial and large-scale developer recently completed a solar energy project that was seven years in the making. The company’s in-house O&M department maintains an 18.86 MW array in Waterford, Connecticut, which has some unique maintenance requirements.
Credit: Greenskies Clean Focus
“If you don’t have an active preventative maintenance program that looks at everything, you’re going to have equipment failures, and they’re going to be much more serious than if you caught them red-handed,” said Steve Martineau , Greenskies’ director of O&M.
Built on approximately 94 hectares of hilly land, the project was connected in April 2023. Greenskies monitors the array monthly to keep it operating at its peak.
“It allows us to be proactive instead of reactive,” says Chip Florio, director of project delivery at Greenskies, about the regular maintenance tasks. “Being reactive to these issues means we go out of our way to send people out, and everything becomes a fire drill. By being proactive versus reactive, we can deal with it better.”
Preventing downtime at the Waterford solar project
A solar project of this size is on the larger side for Connecticut and the greater New England region. The array is divided into five subsystems with different topographic and shading considerations. The first begins at the highest point of the site and the remaining four subsystems follow the topography downhill and then up a hill. The site was previously heavily logged and sSome trees that were not suitable for logging had to be removed by Greenskies.
Parts of the land are fraught with rocks, so Greenskies chose to use a ground screw foundation from APA Solar Racking to work in the less than ideal ground conditions. The array also used APA racks and a mix of HT-SAAE and Canadian Solar panels with Yaskawa Solectria string inverters.
Greenskies’ O&M teams focus on project monitoring and protective and corrective maintenance of solar panels. Martineau said each shift notifies the next department along the maintenance line to keep the arrays online and operating in top condition. At the Waterford project and at every other installation under Greenskies’ jurisdiction, O&M teams monitor inverter performance and open each unit for inspection at least once a year.
“Everything stems from financial institutions. So there are certain expectations that your financing partners have of us in an O&M facility,” he said. “It is a collection of preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance.”
Heat sensing is critical in electronic components such as inverters and switchgear as it can indicate future electrical problems on an array. O&M crews also monitor high-value components such as transformers, as one failure will cause significant production losses and take a long time to replace.
“Generally speaking, your biggest pain points come from the items that have the longest lead time if they fail, so pay the greatest attention to those,” Martineau said.
Prior to connection, water broke through one of the array’s combiner boxes. Fortunately, installers managed to swap the part in time for interconnection.
Credit: Greenskies Clean Focus
Greenskies had 15 rainwater basins excavated near the project to prevent erosion and water runoff. There are two rivers near the project, increasing the risk of stormwater entering local waterways.
To ensure the basins are functioning properly, they were inspected once a week during construction and are now inspected once a month. This monthly inspection routine will continue for two growing seasons after project completion in 2023.
“Between weekly, monthly and post-construction inspections, stormwater and erosion control measures are often monitored by multiple parties to ensure all necessary compliance,” Florio said. “It is certainly an important topic.”
In addition to concerns about rainwater, there are two basins on the property that are fenced off to prevent local amphibians from laying eggs in them. These ponds dry out in early summer, so biologists will visit the project each March to move any amphibious eggs to safer ponds. A safety plan had also been put in place to work around an endangered species of snake native to the area.
“These are outside of our normal electrical O&M on the systems, but they are just as important,” Martineau said.
As an end-to-end solar developer and EPC contractor, Greenskies owns the projects it builds for the long term. Dedicating a portion of the company to O&M of arrays like the one in Waterford ensures that inevitable hardware failures are addressed before they occur or before they cause more significant damage to the system.
“O&M with Greenskies is a progressive thought and not an afterthought,” Martineau said. “O&M gets a lot of input into our installation practices, which is a great place to be if you’re a company like us because we’re not big, but we get a lot done.”