Floating solar inspection

Aerial thermographic inspection for floating photovoltaic plants on reservoirs, lakes and former mining ponds in Malaysia, where inspecting from a boat is slow, costly and hard on the floats.

The floating solar problem

Floating plants combine everything that makes inspection difficult: no road access, modules mounted on floats that should not be walked on more than necessary, a humid environment that is hard on connectors and cabling, and movement of the array with wind and water level. Ground crews can only sample a small fraction of the plant, and each visit carries its own risk.

From the air, the whole array is covered in one campaign under generating conditions. Every module is identified on the float layout, so a finding leads your team straight to the right walkway and the right panel.

What we typically find on floating plants

• Connector and cable heating from moisture ingress and movement
• Strings offline after float or cable-tray movement
• Bird soiling patterns concentrated on certain sections of the array
• Bypass-diode failures and hotspots as on any plant, but harder to locate without module identification
• Floats sitting low or tilted, visible as modules out of plane with their neighbours

What is included

• Thermal survey of the full plant or an agreed section, under operating load
• Every inspected module identified on your plant layout
• Anomaly classification in line with IEC TS 62446-3 practice, with severity rating
• Estimated yield loss per anomaly and per plant, to rank repairs
• Repair list and site map for your O&M team
• Results in the PVSCAN client portal plus a written report
• Findings walkthrough with your engineers, and optional re-inspection after repairs

Planning around water and weather

We plan survey windows around the reservoir operator's requirements, water-level conditions and the local weather pattern so that results are consistent across the array and repeatable in future years.