7 Technologies to Streamline Clean Energy Development, Construction, and Management

There’s nothing stopping us from mowing the lawn with a weed whacker, hammering in nails with a wrench, or eating soup with a fork. But we generally don’t, because we know that using the right tool is a big part of getting the job done. 

When it comes to clean energy development, we’ve got an enormous task at hand. By 2030, the U.S. is looking to add 110 gigawatts of wind energy capacity atop today’s 150 GW, and it’s expected to roughly triple today’s solar capacity of about 150 GW by then. 

That’s a huge lift in a short time. To get there, independent power producers (IPPs) and teams working across the clean energy lifecycle need the right tools. While excellent ones exist today, and others – particularly those involving artificial intelligence – are in development, too many of the companies racing to build, install, and maintain clean energy infrastructure are doing so with the digital equivalents of forks in bowls of soup. Here are seven technologies that can change that.

1. The cloud

You’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: Cloud-based infrastructure enables common databases across a company’s projects and operations (that “single source of truth”), scalability, and upgradability. It should be considered table stakes as the IT backbone for those building out wind, solar, storage, EV charging stations, and other distributed energy resources involving repeatable but individually unique projects. Why? Because all of the below technologies thrive in the cloud.

2. Deployment operations systems

These cloud-based systems help clean energy developers, operators, and their contractors plan, build, manage, and maintain job sites, assets, and crews in real-time as they combine the strengths of project, asset, and work-management software. These systems sharpen planning and development, speed construction and implementation, manage ongoing maintenance, streamline vendor and labor management, and track finances. They move projects to completion at least 20% faster while cutting project managers’ reporting burden by 80%. For those and other reasons, they are rapidly becoming mainstay tools despite being relatively recent arrivals in clean energy.

That said, deployment operations systems don’t do everything on their own, so it’s important to go with a solid core platform that’s also capable of interoperability with payment, geospatial information systems (GIS) and other specialized applications.

3. Integrated geospatial data

Real estate is about location, location, location, and clean energy development is all about real estate. Integrating and overlaying GIS data with site and project data enables precision in terms of siting and material needs and helps streamline planning, engineering, and construction.

4. Mobile capabilities

The ability to remotely access applications and update centralized project and deployment-related databases in real-time lets field teams manage their work and, after project closeout, guide operations and maintenance activities. It helps jobsite personnel get questions answered, avoid mistakes, and work faster and more efficiently. It also provides managers in the office immediate visibility into work status, which lets them adjust resources and plans as needs quickly evolve. 

5. Internal collaboration tools

Email, text messaging, and Slack have their strengths; acting as primary communications media for deployments and O&M isn’t one of them. Clean energy infrastructure buildouts do best with dedicated channels that can be tied to individual projects and used as an audit trail to help clarify what decisions were made when and what actions were taken based on those decisions.

6. Artificial intelligence

The list of potential AI applications in clean energy is long: site identification, regulatory compliance, energy-production forecasting and optimization, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and the management of government incentives among them. 

Few are proven as of yet, and even fewer are widely deployed. As they embark on what will be AI journeys, companies should remember that, rather than implementing a series of point solutions, they can realize the deeper long-term value from AI through its strategic integration with core systems that enable access to troves of diverse data.

What might the fruits of strategic AI integration look like? Crews could be directed to work on certain sites rather than others based on AI-derived suggestions driven by combinations of project status and deadlines, materials availability, field-crew capabilities and experience, predicted weather, and other variables. The likelihood of such a scenario should be motivation to move to the cloud so that AI will have access to the internal and external data it needs to exploit its full potential.

7. Drone-based scanning and 3D modeling 

UAVs have revolutionized aerial site surveys, and they save time and money on multisite clean energy projects. Drone-based software companies can  analyze terrain based on UAV video create topographic maps, calculate slopes, and determine whether earth must be moved or filled in. When construction starts, they can match visual data with BIM or CAD overlays, compare maps or photos from different dates, and enable the tagging and annotation of issues that need fixing.

Given the imperative of the energy transition and the enormous projected electricity demand growth ahead, clean energy developers must deploy – and construction teams must build – as many sites as they can, and as quickly as they can, while staying profitable so they can keep building, growing, and prospering. This is, figuratively speaking, not the time to be eating soup with a fork. The right tools are out there; it’s just a matter of getting to the cloud and using them wisely.  

Emily Obenauer is director of product marketing for energy and utilities at Sitetracker. 

Sitetracker | https://www.sitetracker.com/