In Conversation With Murali Krishna Reddy, Sales Director, OTT HydroMet

1. Please brief our readers on OTT Solar and its offerings in the field of Clean Energy? 

OTT Solar has been a pioneer in providing Weather Monitoring Solutions (WMS) for over a century. Through our brands Kipp & Zonen, Lufft, and Sutron, our focus is to bring conscious practices into the consumption of solar energy.

With extensive technological research, performance monitoring adhering to strict quality control, we understand the criticality of measuring solar radiation with precision and accuracy. For this purpose, 30GW+ Kipp & Zonen Pyranometers are used in India to monitor and measure solar irradiance.

Our innovative solutions for measuring generation loss due to soiling are a benchmark in the solar energy sector. The performance database allows accurate forecasting of future energy yield and even financial returns.

2. Highlight your strength and expertise in the field of Renewable Energy and Solar Radiations.

OTT is a global innovator when it comes to solar and meteorological instrumentation. Our class-leading instruments for measuring solar radiation and atmospheric properties are in a range of small-scale, rooftop-mounted, and large-scale solar power plants. We are also the only organization that designs, manufactures, and offers complete Weather Monitoring System solutions.

Close to 3000 Kipp & Zonen Pyranometers are installed and operated in across almost all the solar power plants in India. More than 1000 dataloggers function in solar and meteorological sites in extreme temperatures ranging from -50°C to +60°C. We are the only organization with a local service center and onsite service support ensuring very high uptime to our customers.

3. What are the technology innovations done by your company in the field of PV weather monitoring systems?

Kipp & Zonen pyranometers have set a standard in measuring irradiance in solar plants and solar research centers. Our recent innovations include the easy-to-use soiling measurement device, Dust IQ, now used across many plants. The soil on the panel glass is one of the many problems in the rapidly expanding solar energy market, with the attendant loss of efficiency and reduction in performance ratios. DustIQ helps plants to determine the time and location for cleaning and enables them to increase power generation by cleaning panels at the right time. Our low-cost, high-accuracy radiation instruments for Rooftop plants are preferred strongly by the developers. We continuously strive to create innovative solutions for the solar sector.

4. What are your business development and expansion plans for the Indian market in the near future?

All key products in WMS are imported. We identified repair and onsite services as customer requirements and, we set up a full-fledged service bench in India over the last six months. Plans of expanding this cover to most of our products in the next 12 months are also in the pipeline. Onsite service is a big ask from the plants and we are looking to ensure customers get high uptime from our products. Customer education is the other key aspect we are focused on.

It is an impactful add-on to customers as they can do more than usual by collecting and using more data from WMS. We are also expanding our customer-facing team in service and sales to ensure we provide the best possible support in customer growth.

5. Anything else you would like to add?

As per MNRE reports, India has achieved the 5th position globally in solar power deployment by surpassing Italy. Solar power capacity has increased by more than 11 times in the last five years. We are optimistic about our growth in the country, are strongly invested in people and capability building to support this capacity addition. India is our key focus and among the top 3 priority markets globally for OTT in the solar segment.