New functions in the SOLID monitoring software

SOLID provides solutions for renewable heating, cooling and power generation. In recent years, SOLID has developed automated plant monitoring software with a special visual display.

Customers can order turnkey systems including planning, construction, commissioning and handover for their own operation or purchase the heat, cooling or electricity generated by the system via a long-term energy supply contract without having to invest in the system themselves. With both business models, SOLID also takes over the monitoring of the systems with the help of the self-developed monitoring system for maximum efficiency and security of supply over the entire term.

Stephan Jantscher, CEO of SOLID Solar Energy Systems: “Permanently efficient operation is essential for every system operator. With SOLID Monitoring, we offer our customers great added value in the form of savings and system availability.”

For any application, it is important that a high energy yield is maintained over the long service life of the system. SOLID has therefore also specialized in monitoring and optimizing systems in order to maximize the yield and return on investment.

Lukas Emberger, Data Scientist at SOLID Solar Energy Systems: “A particular challenge when monitoring renewable energy systems is their dependence on several framework conditions – such as changing solar radiation, outside temperature and demand, all of which affect the operation of the system. Especially for large systems with high solar coverage, it is important to consider time-dependent processes such as the heating of collectors and storage tanks. According to our research, however, there was no existing software that took this into account and met our requirements.”

Therefore, based on years of experience in monitoring, decades of project expertise and in cooperation with the research group for visualization and data analysis at the University of Vienna and BEST Bioenergy and Sustainable Technologies, a software for system monitoring was developed that enables simultaneous visual analysis of several sensor data (Learn more).

What makes SOLID Monitoring special?
The software has been in use at SOLID since 2020 and is constantly being optimized and further developed. Heat yields can be checked, alarms created, events documented and sensor data monitored live via a web interface. A particular highlight is the system’s data visualization, which is adapted to the special challenges of renewable energy systems with volatile operation and combines the analysis of measurement data, events and alarms and enables simultaneous analysis – a special feature that other monitoring systems do not have.

The monitoring tool has since proven itself in daily system operation thanks to its robust architecture and comprehensive functions. SOLID also offers these monitoring services to other plant operators.

What else is planned?
Extensions to AI fault detection and yield prediction are already in the works and are being actively researched (Learn more).