A Turkish company developing an artificial intelligence-based performance monitoring platform for solar power plants has begun to reach international markets.
The software company Loggma Digital Energy Solutions from the western city of Izmir has already achieved to make exports to five countries so far.
It has developed an algorithm to detect performance problems of power plants, their inverters and panels.
The Solarify platform, which has been developed through 100% in-house research and development (R&D) studies, analyzes data records for a minimum of 40 days, or ideally three months, to detect performance problems, according to the company’s co-founder, Mustafa Ozan Tuncan.
With sustainability playing a crucial role in the renewable energy sector, Tuncan explained digital solutions will take a central role in helping a power plant’s performance stability throughout its life cycle.
This cutting-edge technology gives solar farms an extra efficiency advantage through the monitoring system that records and controls the plant's system efficiency to maximize production. In addition, a remote monitoring system provides 24/7 data flow with instant reporting and performance analysis.
Beyond a remote monitoring system, Solarify also simplifies operations management in solar power plants that are typically distributed while being compatible with all types of inverters, meters, sensors and analyzer brands and models.
“It is impossible to install an inverter and a sensor on each and every panel as this would be costly. Therefore, it gets difficult to track the performance of solar panels and that is why we developed Solarify,” Tuncan told Anadolu Agency (AA).
Thanks to Solarify, Tuncan explained that a solar plant with one megawatt-peak (MWp) capacity can produce more or less 57 megawatt-hours (MWh) of additional electricity on average per year.
The platform is currently being exported to five countries, including Ukraine, Greece, Senegal, Portugal and Nepal.
However, the company aims to expand its reach further from the current 10% share in the Turkish market.
It has already enlarged its customer profile with the addition of an asset management system to the Solarify platform, attracting companies like Siemens, Hanwha Q-Cells and Japan Energy Capital.
“Our priority is to expand our portfolio in Europe, followed by the Far East, Korea and Japan. We also want to have a presence in the U.S.,” Tuncan said.
He also said Turkey is one-step-ahead in the supply of digitalization products in the renewable energy sector relative to global development.
However, he said there is slower growth on the demand side given the lack of customer knowledge on these developments coupled with market misguidance.
“As power plants get older and problems arise, we observe a growing customer interest in digital solutions to increase a plant's efficiency and longevity. We now receive five times more orders than we did two years ago,” he noted.
The company also recently designed a new platform, Enerify, for use in all renewable energy plants to aid energy management by analyzing consumption and production on a single platform.
