- BELECTRIC is one of the top 5 providers of operational management and maintenance services in the solar market worldwide
- BELECTRIC’s predictive maintenance approach is improving productivity
Kolitzheim (Germany) - BELECTRIC continues to expand its Operations & Maintenance (O&M) business and now operates solar plants with more than 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity worldwide. This makes BELECTRIC one of the top 5 O&M service providers in this market globally according to a ranking by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“This year, we were able to connect large solar plants with several hundred megawatts of installed capacity to the grid for our customers in India, Israel, Australia, Canada and Europe and we are pleased that they are also entrusting us with the operation and maintenance of their plants,” explains Ingo Alphéus, CEO of BELECTRIC Solar & Battery GmbH. “In Italy and the USA, we were also successful in winning new O&M contracts for plants already in operation. This means we are on course to achieve a major milestone of operating and maintaining 3 GW of solar power plants around the world, and are one of the leading companies internationally in the field of technical management of PV systems.”
BELECTRIC's core business includes the planning and construction of solar power plants. When operating these plants, the company strives for the lowest energy costs with the best possible ecological balance. As a natural extension of this business, BELECTRIC focuses on reducing operating costs across the entire service spectrum of maintenance, repair and operational management of solar power plants.
“We offer our customers operational management and maintenance services from a single source, not only for
state-of-the-art plants but also for older power plants. With approximately 20 years of experience in power plant construction and around 530 solar plants under constant monitoring, our service teams with around 220 employees have the necessary expertise and technical know-how not only to ensure plant performance, but to continuously improve it,” explains Barry Bennett, Head of International O&M at BELECTRIC.
BELECTRIC is following a predictive maintenance approach to increase productivity
BELECTRIC has its own control centre in Germany for monitoring the plants, which is equipped with a modern
real-time SCADA system. The system enables the global monitoring of all solar power plants and related service activities. Special evaluation procedures give BELECTRIC as plant operator as well as the owner the possibility to compare old and current power plant data and to make statements on performance and, if necessary, to take appropriate maintenance and improvement measures. Thanks to directly coupled data from maintenance works and component service, BELECTRIC can deliver a predictive O&M Analysis. Selected assembly groups are monitored in order to notify on-site service team and to initiate countermeasures even before a possible loss of revenue.
“Predictive maintenance has been considered to be one of the driving forces for improving productivity”, explains Barry Bennett. “This maintenance approach relies on the actual condition of equipment, as well as the expected life statistics, to predict when maintenance will be required. Some of the main components that are necessary for implementing predictive maintenance are data collection and processing.”
With data analytic tools BELECTRIC is transferring the monitoring parameter data into predictive maintenance data and onto a computerized maintenance management system so that the equipment condition data is sent to the right department to trigger maintenance planning, work order execution, and reporting.
