We have been looking at the business of cleaning and maintaining solar PV systems.

According to Go Solar California (the organization that runs the California Solar Initiative) there are over 51,000 systems either installed or currently reserved in the big three shareholder owned utilities’ territories (PG&E, SCE and SDG&E).

In looking at systems that have been in place for as little as three years it’s amazing to see how dirty the panels have become. We have also seen panels shaded by weeds growing up from in between the panels!  This especially seems to be an issue with some of the early SunPower (Powerlight) lay flat systems.  The complete lack of access to the interior portions of these systems is a major problem for conducting ongoing maintenance.

We inspected another site where the system was producing less than 2/3rds of projected production and the managers on site had no idea.  The monitoring company that had been paid to monitor the system not only failed to notify the owner, they didn’t even realize they were being paid to monitor the system and had never enabled the data link to the meter!

These examples are for multi-million dollar commercial systems.  It’s likely that there are similar problems in the residential sector.  System installer’s salespeople often told the prospective buyers that the system would be maintenance free and require no servicing.   In many instances this has not been the case.  Panels get dirty, inverters malfunction, connections fail, etc.  Meanwhile the production suffers, and once production is lost you can’t get it back.

At a minimum, it seems like there is a real need for reliable remote monitoring - like an alarm company for your solar PV system.  Owners can receive daily email reports, or texts with a summary of the previous day’s production, or simply a “your system is functioning normally” message.  Prolonged below expected production would then trigger a service call to find out what’s wrong with the system before more production is lost.