Efficiency in Innovation: Strategies Deployed by Skyfri in Floating Solar Asset Management – Arpit Saxena VP- Sales And Business Development Skyfri Energy Pvt Ltd

1. How is Skyfri contributing to the emerging era of solar floating solar projects?
   1. Floating solar photovoltaic installations opens new opportunities for scaling up solar generating capacity, especially in countries with high population density and competing uses for available land. Skyfri Energy private limited being one of the top-notch O&M services providers having expertise in Floating solar Operation maintenance services.
   2. Skyfri Have been managing 32 MWp assets out of 92 MWp NTPC’s Kayamkulam, Kerala since 2022. We are eager to add more challenging floating solar project in our portfolio in India. 
   3. We have set a target to manage assets of 500 MWp Floating project till 2025.We are aiming to collaborate with Floater manufacturers to get expertise and help Indian IPP for better O&M services.  

2. What are the Challenges managing any floating solar PV project from O&M perspective?
   1. Since FSPV plants are installed on the water’s surface rather than on land, ma­nag­ing operations and maintenance (O&M) in such circumstances can be challenging. Through our experience, we came across the following key ch­allenges in FSPV systems. The Few challenges are as follows: –
      1. Accessibility to entire plant for preventive and corrective maintenance – Due to its fundamental design approach, Solar plants installed on water bodies like reservoirs, lakes, industrial water storage or irrigation ponds. They kept floating throughout its life though floaters. For annual PM and corrective maintenance, only boat is the option for commutation. Minimizing turnaround time (TAT) for corrective maintenance is one of the key challenges for any floating solar plant. 
      2. Finding manpower with additional swimming skills – To manage such plants efficiently and in compliance with OHSE, O&M vendor must find recruit technical personnel and helpers, who can swim efficiently. 
      3. Bird droppings – Bird droppings are among the most aggressive and corrosive types of soiling. Not only do they increase cleaning efforts, but they can etch and scratch the glass, if not cleaned properly. For solar plant operators, the­re are several repercussions if bird dro­ppings remain on a module for an ex­te­nded period, including the possibility of reduced yields.
      4. Lichen Growth – Solar arrays are exposed to both sunlight and water, which facilitate the growth of lichen – a greenish and mossy mass on the solar panels. Nutrients such as nitrogen and am­monia speed up growth, especially as bird droppings are rich in nitrogen. The lifetime of a panel as well as its output and performance are known to be reduced because of such staining, which is also kn­own to result in persistent module shadowing.
      5. Occupational safety and health (OSH) hazards-One of the major concerns during the O&M of FSPV plants is the safety and health of workers since the entire plant is located on a waterbody. Ensuring that the members of the cleaning team are certified swimmers is one of the essential prerequisites for conducting cleaning activity. There is a need to develop global standards for safety during O&M.
      6. Challenges with Mooring and Anchors – The Mooring and anchoring is used to keep the float in position against the external forces and water level variations. Most of the time due to any environmental effects, routine checks up for anchoring and mooring required. Sometimes the anchoring level reaches up to 100 Meter or more than that. Uncertainty in the calculation of environmental forces due to wind shear effects and shallow water blockage effects may be there. Potential difficulty in knowing the actual tension in the mooring rope lines, in other words, a lack of instrumentation.

3. Can you share specific strategies or practices you have implemented to enhance the overall efficiency of solar assets in the Skyfri-managed floating solar PV project?

• India is still in the early phases of developing floating solar photovoltaics (FSPV) as a technology. There have only been a few projects installed so far, totaling 1.272 GW in capacity. However, there are over 3.8 GW worth of projects at various stages of development.
  • During managing the assets, each variation must be recorded to prevent future breakdowns and the same have been shared and discussed with end client with an adequate plan of action.
  • We are more careful and take more precautionary measures for any leakage current to arise so that we can avoid any hazardous conditions in water body. 
  • Since floaters are under more R&D phase considering geographic water challenges, breakdown of floaters are more frequent. Sometimes it leads to fire incident. Our engineers on ground make sure to check each solar floater’s health more frequently. 
  • With the minimum required manpower, we have implemented more digitised process for all preventive activities.

4. What are the recommendations based on your experience to use data analysis to make informed decisions about maintenance, upgrades, or replacements of solar components?

Data helps not just humans make better decisions, but also machines. One of the exciting ways that Skyfri uses data is in their digital software, which identifies performance issues that a human might miss across a large portfolio. 

“There are two basic methodologies or approaches to monitoring an issue. One is to rely on notifications from individual components. So, you have a bunch of components on-site, think of a big commercial site with a bunch of string inverters. Those string inverters are intelligent components and have the idea of operational health. They can send a signal back through the monitoring platform to say, ‘I’m broken in some way.’ So, one methodology is to gather all those component notifications, organize them, prioritize them, filter out the noise, because there is a lot of noise in that signal set, and react to it. This is a qualitative approach.

The second methodology, which is what we ware describing earlier, is to build up an independent concept of how the asset should be behaving in the form of generation of kilowatt hours – a quantitative approach. Given everything is working well on site, the physical components, the orientation, the design, the actual weather matching the predicted “how much energy should that system have produced”? 

Based on the above, our continuous monitoring, Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Corrective maintenance (CM) strategies are helps to maximise generation from Plants. 

As far as Solar floaters are concerned, we are looking for diagnoses tools which can monitors the Floaters and mooring lines, anchor point and ferro cement platform physical condition and to assess/maintain right stability of the Pontoon.