There is almost 15GW of installed solar capacity in the USA, of which 1,330 MW of photovoltaics (PV) came online in the first quarter of 2014 alone.

This huge increase in utility-scale capacity has led the industry to focus on optimizing the performance of operational plants in order to get higher return on investments.

Having a robust operations & maintenance (O&M) strategy in place is the way to achieve this. As a result, there is now demand for a universal understanding of what 'O&M best practices' are for plant operators to refer to as guidelines.

Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working together to lay the groundwork for the standards and will be examining the tools, techniques and data analysis that improve plant operations and create higher levels of plant reliability. With a better understanding of best practices, operators will be able to plan their O&M strategies more effectively and cut down costs in the long run.
Geoff Klise, a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and Andy Walker, a principal engineer at NREL will be participating in the PV O&M USA conference (18-19 November, San Jose) to discuss and debate how to identify the challenges of O&M, such as predictive methods for reducing risks, and what the operational and cost impacts will be on the plants.

Klise and Walker will be joined by TJ Keating, the Development Director at SunSpec Alliance, a trade alliance of distributed energy industry participants who are working with the industry in the USA to develop standardized O&M best practices.

To learn more about how these topics will be addressed at PV O&M USA this November, view the full agenda here:
http://www.pv-insider.com/usa/conference-agenda.php

Or contact Sarah Kingham on sarah@pv-insider.com for full details.