Excellence in R&D: E-SPACE Monitoring wins support of EU

Since its founding, Reuniwatt has been active in solar irradiance assessment and forecasting. Our objective is to make performance monitoring more reliable and provide the best quality performance assessment. As a highly innovative company, our R&D excellence has been recognized by the EU, which granted Reuniwatt support for the development of e-SPACE monitoring as part of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument.

The H2020 SME Instrument is enabling companies with a strong R&D potential to receive EU funding and support for breakthrough innovation projects. With Reuniwatt’s innovative monitoring project, based on the measures’ correlation between an autonomous ground-based solar sensor and Earth observation data, we have won the recognition by the European Innovation Council’s jury and have been chosen to develop the project as part of the H2020 programme.
Reuniwatt is providing solar farm operators, companies specialized in O&M and solar asset managers with solar forecasts. In order to calculate whether a solar installation is working at its full potential or not, and to optimize plant operation, the monitoring must be be as reliable as it can be. With e-SPACE Monitoring, we are aiming to provide an online-service, simple and easy to access for the end user, but based on the most precise up-to-date estimation methods.

Locally installed instruments for on-site measurements of the irradiance provide important information on local phenomena, but can be prone to drifts and errors due to material ageing, damages, environmental effects or wrong calibration. In order to provide a more reliable, independent solar irradiance assessment, Reuniwatt seeks to associate the advantages of satellite-to-irradiance with their proven Solar InCell™ within their EU-funded e-SPACE monitoring project.

The well-established autonomous irradiance ground sensor, Solar InCell™, is thus combined with the globally available and stable solar irradiance assessment tool SunSat™, using satellite data to calculate up-to-date maps of GHI. Geostationary satellites provide us with regular high-resolution Earth observations, that are used by Reuniwatt to calculate the cloud index map and subsequently the local irradiance level at the location of any solar power plant.
The on-site ground sensors will be used to refine estimations from satellite data, as satellite-to-irradiance performs well for large and relatively steady clouds, but local sensors can provide a better accuracy to the calculation respecting local micro-climates and a thinner temporal granularity.
Combining both methods and using our proprietary algorithms, e-SPACE Monitoring’s personalised service will be able to point out discrepancies between the solar data measured on site and the plant’s actual solar production.
e-SPACE monitoring aims at at delivering PV operators with a permanent PV performance assessment online service through a SaaS platform, where key performance indicators will be showing our customers whether a solar installation is working to its full potential or not, and help with optimizing O&M processes.

Thanks to H2020 SME Instrument, Reuniwatt has the chance to invest more into their R&D and offer the best, most innovative services on the PV monitoring market.