Operations and Maintenance

That depends on the installation, the location, and the environment. For most industrial solar farms, we perform annual preventive maintenance, supplemented by periodic inspections and continuous remote monitoring. For installations in environments with high levels of dust, industrial activity, or birds, more frequent maintenance may be recommended. A good O&M plan is always customized.

Monitoring involves the continuous tracking of your installation’s performance: production per inverter, per string, and per panel; comparison with expected output based on solar irradiance; detection of deviations; and automatic alerts in the event of malfunctions. At Solora, this is done 24/7 from our own control room in Ghent, via a proprietary platform that we developed and manage ourselves.

The most common causes are dirty panels, a malfunctioning inverter, shading from vegetation or new structures, module degradation, or a string that has partially failed. In many cases, these are cumulative losses that have been gradually occurring for months. A good monitoring system detects them early on. If you have any doubts about this, have your installation inspected.

Solar panels do indeed operate largely autonomously, but that’s not the same as performing well. Contamination, wear and tear, minor defects, and degradation have a cumulative effect on annual production. Over time, a system without regular monitoring will consistently underperform relative to its potential, without any obvious warning signs. Maintenance isn’t a luxury—it’s what protects your investment in the long run.

Preventive maintenance is everything we do to prevent problems: periodic inspections, thermographic checks, inverter checks, and safety checks. Corrective maintenance is the intervention that takes place after something has gone wrong: replacing a defective inverter, swapping out a damaged panel, or fixing a grounding fault. A good O&M plan combines both, with prevention keeping the likelihood of corrective interventions as low as possible.

Maintenance focuses on the technical condition of your installation. Asset management focuses on the financial and operational management of your solar park as an investment: performance reporting for investors or financiers, contract management, warranty tracking, and long-term planning. At Solora, both can be combined under a single point of contact.

Repowering is the partial replacement or upgrade of components in an existing solar farm without rebuilding the entire system. Examples include new inverters, optimizers, or the integration of a battery system. It’s a good option if your installation is more than 8 to 10 years old, if the inverters are nearing the end of their lifespan, or if technology has advanced to the point where an upgrade demonstrably yields more than the investment costs.

No. The relative impact of an undetected defect or an underperforming string is just as significant—and sometimes even greater—in a smaller farm. The barrier to entry for professional monitoring has dropped significantly in recent years. Above a certain capacity, monitoring is not only worthwhile but necessary to protect your investment.

When an alarm is triggered through our monitoring system, we intervene remotely whenever possible. If a physical intervention is required, we schedule it as quickly as possible through our own service teams in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. We operate without the involvement of external contractors, which significantly reduces response times. The exact response times are specified in your O&M contract.

The cost of an O&M contract depends on the system’s capacity, location, desired scope, and required reporting. We always develop a customized plan following a thorough analysis of your situation. Maintenance has a direct impact on annual production: a good maintenance plan pays for itself through higher yields and lower unexpected repair costs.

Not always. Many installations include basic monitoring, but that’s different from professional 24/7 monitoring with alarm management, intervention protocols, and periodic reporting. It’s worth checking what level of monitoring you currently have and whether it’s sufficient for the size of your installation.

Yes. Solora also manages systems built by other parties. We always start with a thorough technical audit to assess the system’s condition, after which we draw up an appropriate O&M plan.