ONOTO for solar farms
One flight over fifty megawatts.
A 50 MWp plant in south-central Vietnam, rendered live in your browser. Scroll to fly it — from first light to the 3 a.m. patrol.
The hidden loss
5,000 strings. The control room sees one number.
SCADA reports the plant average. One dead string is 0.02% of a 50 MWp site — invisible inside it, sometimes for months.
The aircraft lives on site
It leaves the dock on schedule.
From its dock beside the O&M building it flies a fixed grid over every row, then lands to recharge.
Radiometric thermal
Every module, in infrared.
Heat gives faults away: cell hotspots, dead bypass diodes, whole strings offline. Each one is located to its row and table.
What one fault costs
One dead string: $1,100 a year.
Illustrative: 10 kWp × 1,600 kWh/kWp ≈ 16 MWh a year, at $70/MWh.
The whole array, every quarter
Fifty of them: $55,000.
Every fault is ranked by lost megawatt-hours, so the O&M team repairs by value, not by walking rows.
Same aircraft, same dock
When the sun goes down, the job changes.
Night watch
Copper walks off remote plants at 3 a.m.
One raid can cut DC trunks, take hundreds of metres of cable and leave part of the plant offline for days.
An illustrative incident
- Person at the fence line, sector D. The alert reaches the guard’s phone with the clip attached.
- The guard challenges over the speaker and drives out.
- Two intruders leave empty-handed.
Yield by day. Security by night.
One package, $60,000 a year.
Hardware, setup and twelve months of flights. On recovered yield alone it pays back inside the first year.