The challenge
A 220 MW solar farm was underperforming its yield model by roughly 4%, but manual thermal survey of half a million modules was not practically schedulable — and every hour of inspection meant lost generation.
What we did
Two long-endurance VTOL platforms flew the full site over four days carrying radiometric thermal payloads, with RTK ground control for positional accuracy. Vantage processed the imagery into a georeferenced defect map, and an anomaly model classified hotspots into string faults, diode failures and single-cell defects. Every finding landed on the maintenance team's map with a module-level identifier.
“We had the anomaly in our generation data for a year. We just could not find it on the ground.”