The power of the sun is a remarkable source of clean, renewable energy. Solar energy minimizes energy consumption, which benefits our planet. While most of us have seen solar panels on homes and buildings, many might not be aware that there are primarily two types of technology that use sunlight to get energy. Solar thermal technology captures the heat of the sun for cooling and heating your home, among other purposes.
Photovoltaic (PV) technology, on the other hand, directly converts sunlight into electricity through panels made of semiconductor cells. They are designed to power up electrical devices and produce electricity for power grids.
Maintaining this type of power plant is a huge job and that’s where CGI comes in.
The solution
Drones with thermal and RGB (Red Green Blue) cameras can inspect the photovoltaic plants, generating hundreds of images that, after being processed, can be used to detect, with 90% accuracy, defects in the panels and evaluate the plant's performance, as well as geopositioning its location.
Using cloud architecture in Oracle and deep learning (Convolutional Neural Networks) with NVIDIA GPUS running in OCI, it is possible to analyze a huge data set of images about photovoltaic defects in a short amount of time. Moreover, a dashboard reports information about defects in panels, performance, and geo-positioning with the objective to achieve that renewable energy be more efficient through artificial intelligence.
The result
The adoption of this solution helps our clients to increase their plant performance: our technology ensures regulatory compliance, the images adhere to industry standards, and efficiently process large volumes of images, reducing the manual processing time from weeks to mere minutes so, they can raise the frequency of inspections, reduce cost, get greater reliability and speed in the photo analysis. Inspection history evolution helps the clients to detect improvements and performance of photovoltaic panels
In addition, this solution has been distinguished by Oracle with three awards at the Oracle CloudWorld 2023 event. Firstly, in the Innovation category of the 2023 Oracle Partner Award Cloud/Tech for Southern Europe and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), and then in 2023 Oracle Worldwide Partner Award for Innovation.
