Brazil’s centralized and distributed generation solar power plants produced less than expected last year, according to a study by Brazilian consulting firm Greener.
Brazil’s solar industry is grappling with new concerns as weak operational performance threatens to exacerbate existing challenges with pricing, connectivity availability and contract closings.
Among the most common faults in distributed generation, the consultant found that 44% were related to the malfunction of the string inverters and 30.6% to the lack of communication between plants.
“There is a lack of training for professionals,” Huawei O&M Manager Rodrigo Trigona said. “There are a lot of problems in construction work and you often have to redo it. It creates a bad legacy for the implementation phase in a situation where deadlines are tight.”
He added that entrepreneurs underestimate the complexity of solar power plant systems, as they combine different areas of knowledge such as electricity, solar power, grid architecture and civil engineering.
“We do remote monitoring of the start-up and often the plant doesn’t even seem to have started. We see a chain loop, a reverse flow, an intermittent communication. If the data is not sent reliably, it is impossible to know whether the plant is really producing what was expected,” explained Neto.
