The use of unmanned aerial vehicles in solar operations and maintenance can reduce costs and save hours of painstaking labour, but only if applied correctly. Aline Kirsten Vidal de Oliveira, Mohammadreza Aghae and Ricardo Rüther explore the optimal use of aerial inspections and emerging methods for analysing the data they gather to identify faults.
A new report from GTM Research and SoliChamba Consulting states that the global market for utility-scale PV operations and maintenance (O&M) will grow to 390GW by 2020 — almost triple the estimated 133GW expected by the end of 2015.
