The Solar Inspection Pro and Essential data products identify and locate maintenance issues and their potential causes on solar sites. Using a thermal and visual (RGB) view of each anomaly, you can determine exactly where and what the problems are on your site and what is causing them.
What is the difference between the Pro and Essential version?
The Pro version is an orthomosaic-based solution. This data product includes a full thermal and visual (RGB) orthomosaic of your site, allowing you to visualize every solar panel. Some advantages over the Essential version include the following:
No sun glare - all glare is automatically filtered out during processing
Audit the detection quality - you have a visual of every single panel, even the ones that Sitemark didn't detect as being problematic.
Assess the evolution of the health of each solar panel in time using our swipe compare feature
The Essential version is a photo-based solution. This data product provides you only a thermal and visual (RGB) photo of each anomaly, without any orthomosaics. One requirement is to provide a panel level as-built of your full solar site. For more information on this as-built requirement, please check out this article.
Both versions include the same details of the data analytics regarding the anomalies. You can find more information about what kind of analytics are included in this article.
An example of a pro inspection:
An example of an essential inspection:
What data do I need to provide?
For the Pro version, check out this article for the data input requirements.
For the Essential version, check out this article for the data input requirements.
What do I get?
This data product outputs the following layers:
Thermal orthomosaic - only in Solar Inspection Pro
Visual orthomosaic - only in Solar Inspection Pro
Geo-located solar anomalies - in Solar Inspection Pro and Essential
Visual and thermal photos for each anomaly - in Solar Inspection Pro and Essential
| Pro | Essential |
Thermal orthomosaic of the entire site | ✓ | ✕ |
Visual orthomosaic of the entire site | ✓ | ✕ |
Geo-located solar anomalies | ✓ | ✓ |
Visual and thermal photos for each anomaly | ✓ | ✓ |
Add-Ons
The following add-ons are available for the solar inspection data products:
Fast Track: faster flight planning, execution, and processing
Irradiance product add-on: assurance that the data is acquired at 600W/m², verified using a handheld device
Solar Anomaly Numbering: structured numbering for every anomaly to make it easier to locate them in the field; check out this article for more information
Variations
The solar inspection data products are also available in a 3cm GSD version. This makes the acquisition officially IEC compliant, which some manufacturers require for warranty claims.
Limitations
The Solar Inspection Pro is not compatible with water-floating solar sites. The reason is related to the fact that the water surface looks very similar. It is very hard to find unique-looking pixels (key points) on water surfaces, as water is very uniform. The image processing software will not be able to process the data. Like water bodies, deserts and forest canopies are also hard to process because each pixel will look similar in the aerial image. Even if key points are found, it is hard to match them between images, as these points are not static (water moves). Since the images that mainly contain water surfaces are not calibrated, they do not contribute to the processing and can not be used to give color to the orthomosaic. Finally, it might give some holes (lack of information) in the orthomosaic on water surface areas.
Please use the Solar Inspection Essential data product instead. The Solar Inspection Essential does not need the dataset to be processed and will deliver the needed inspection results.