One of the most pressing needs of the European Union is the green energy transition. By 2030, 15% of the global energy production will come from solar sector, the total production will increase from 0.7 TW in 2020 to 8 TW in 2030. Therefore, energy companies are under pressure to build the necessary infrastructure at a very high pace. They need to keep infrastructure maintenance and operation cost as low as possible. While solar farms require periodic inspections, solar owners and operators are looking for robotic solutions to optimize inspection and maintenance processes. However, their inspections remain outdated, inefficient and expensive. This is because inspections are still done manually, which is time consuming. Conventional drones used by inspection companies can only inspect up to 5-15 MW /day. Thus, large infrastructure with an average of more than 200MW being built today cannot be efficiently inspected by drones. Due to the large size, some companies are testing airplane inspection but they are expensive, pollutant and less precise.
We offer and end to end service for aerial inspection of large infrastructure. We perform the inspection, process the data and delivery the analysis through a digital platform. We are using an in-house Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) drone which covers up to 50 times more area than conventional off the shelf solutions, while our patented payload interface unit can collect data more efficiently and precisely. We use AI to perform autonomous identification and positioning of anomalies to create a maintenance report, following standards. The increase in efficiency of flights and data handling will have a great impact on the energy generated (+1%), increasing customer profits (saving 250,000 €/GW/Inspection) while reducing CO2 emissions (~45 k tn CO2 eq/GW/Inspection). Finally, we provide the report and a virtual tween of the park through a digital platform where customers can manage their assets.
