1. CONTACT
Energy & Efficiency Case Study
Environmental services company avoids
65k in losses thanks to Photovoltaic
We care about the environ-
ment but we are also a busi-
ness. Inspiring helped us a lot
in increasing our revenues.
Gianluca Fabrizi,
Director of Operations
Customer Profile
Inspiring Software has worked with a lot of compa-
nies in the services field. One of them is an interna-
tional group of companies that deal with every
aspect of environmentally-friendly power genera-
tion and provide services and solutions for the crea-
tion of green businesses. The group started in 1989
as a manufacturer of stainless steel tanks and plants
for the chemical, oenological, and food industry.
Thanks to multidisciplinary staff it is now involved in
activities such as: environmental study, planning
and evaluation; urban sanitation services; landfill
gas energy recovery facilities and photovoltaic
plants; and construction and management of waste
recovery and disposal plants.
Inspiring Software did a successful project with the
photovoltaic operations of this group (design and
implementation of photovoltaic plants). They
manage 4 plants with capacity ranging from 1MWp
to 4MWp, for a total amount of 9MWp. They own one
4MWp plant and manage the other three on behalf
of their customers.
Customer Needs
Since the group is in charge of the management of
power plants, they have to assure plant availability,
maintain performance over the time and take care of
maintenance (from the preventive one to the reac-
tive one). The problem was in optimizing plant
control and coordinating maintenance activities with-
out compromising generated profits and without
increasing maintenance costs. With the standard
monitoring systems provided by panel manufactur-
ers, the customer could not manage multiple plants.
They were wasting a lot of time navigating separate
systems for different customers. The customer
wanted to simultaneously (1) check production and
efficiency (2) check the status of every single plant
element (from a single panel to a transformer
substation), and (3) verify that the system is always
on-line and connected. Furthermore, the customer
wanted to control both site meters (supplier’s ones)
and GSE’s ones in order to consider profits deriving
from the sold energy and the generation incentives.
SOLAR
1 GSE grants incentives for generated energy from renewable sources.
Via Enrico Fermi, 5A
Salò, BS 25087, Italy
Tel. +39 0365 520098
www.inspiringsoftware.com
intsupport@inspiringsoftware.com
Inspiring
software
®
Inspiring Software International

2. CONTACT
RESULTS
• A system for real-time control of a PV
plant with integrated maintenance manage-
ment and production optimization;
• 30,000 € in higher revenues due to
avoided losses;
• 20,000 € in higher revenues due to
improved maintenance management;
• 15,000 € in higher revenues due to more
production.
Inspiring Software’s project goal was to integrate
the group’s PV management processes using our
Photovoltaic module.
The Inspiring Software Solution
Inspiring Software proposed Photovoltaic because it
simultaneously checks plant efficiency and plant
availability, meaning that it optimizes the power
generation process and also the selling of the
produced energy. The idea for the project was to
provide a centralized PV management workstation,
from which the company would be able to control
many plants for different customers.
Inspiring Software installed at the group’s head-
quarters the Photovoltaic module which connects to
the PV elements and to the existing meters and
control systems and acquires data directly from
weather stations, inverters and panels. The
software already supported communication proto-
cols for the plant elements (for example inverter
Power-One) so the installation was easy and fast.
Thanks to the monitoring functionality of Photovol-
taic our customer is now able to verify the status
and performance of every single plant element.
They can browse an intuitive synoptic representa-
tion of the plant and a KPIs dashboard. They can
also generate complete reports that demonstrate
the effectiveness of their services and the status of
the PV plants. Our customer scheduled those
reports to be automatically sent to the final client on
regular intervals or upon condition. From a mainte-
nance point of view Photovoltaic allows our
customer to receive alerts related to problems at
any level of the plant. Therefore, if a big problem
appeared, only the main cause is displayed. This
helped in solving the problem of receiving tons of alerts
for single elements which had to be digested and inves-
tigated by the maintenance team.
After operating Photovoltaic at their 4MW plant, our
customer reported some results. For a 4MW plant the
economic loss in production is estimated at €6,500 per
day. In July Photovoltaic detected a malfunction at the
plant which caused it to shut down. The plant manager
was able to see from his dashboard that the fault was in
a transformer substation. This information made it
possible to arrange the problem to be fixed in 8 hours.
The plant manager evaluated that normally it would
have taken 5 days to identify and fix one such problem.
Instead, this time it took them only 8 hours, preventing
€30,000 worth of losses. Since the software also
provides a forecasted production for the following days,
the customer could now easily decide when to perform
scheduled maintenance, doing it when the forecasted
production is lower. This resulted in higher yearly
revenues by €20,000. The customer also set up alarms
on panel efficiency. They implemented a formula that
evaluated the economical break-even point on when to
perform a panel cleaning. They now receive an alert
every time the value is near the optimum one, and are
able to schedule maintenance in two weeks’ time. This
resulted in a €15,000 gain coming from higher revenue
due to increased production and avoided unnecessary
maintenance costs.
Currently the environmental group is installing Photo-
voltaic on all their new plants and is managing all their
PV operations in Italy and Tunisia from the same work-
station.
Via Enrico Fermi, 5A
Salò, BS 25087, Italy
Tel. +39 0365 520098
www.inspiringsoftware.com
intsupport@inspiringsoftware.com
Inspiring
software
®
Inspiring Software International