SB Energy to Use SenseHawk’s SaaS Tech for Solar Site Ops Digitization

SenseHawk, a solar software as a service (SaaS) startup, has announced that SB Energy, SoftBank Group Corp’s US-based solar and storage platform, has adopted its solution for digitizing solar site operations.

The deployment will enable SB Energy to achieve quick event-response time while increasing operations and maintenance (O&M) efficiency, resulting in robust savings and higher returns on their investment, said the company.

Abhijit Sathe, Co-CEO of SB Energy said, “We believe the SenseHawk digital workflow solution for our operating sites will result in substantial productivity gains for our O&M team. It is the type of innovation essential for scaling renewables.”

SB Energy’s implementation of the SenseHawk field mobility and asset information solution for solar will enable remote management of all assets through a single, powerful dashboard. The included “digital twin” system fuses real-time performance data, drone feeds, and more, with a full-featured digital model of the site to facilitate efficient workflows that can be visualized on a map.

The ability to seamlessly integrate with SB Energy’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is expected to allow users to select and prioritize the alarm notifications, and quickly translate them into actionable, geo-located tasks for field teams.

“Our goal is to make on-site operations as simple as opening your favorite maps application and finding a restaurant in a new city while also making communication and coordination simpler. The SB Energy implementation stands testament to the real dollar value that our platform can deliver,” said Swarup Mavanoor, CEO of SenseHawk.

Solar software is seeing increased traction with the acceleration of solar installations worldwide. However, aggressive cost reduction in construction and O&M is creating challenges for O&M teams tasked with ensuring optimal plant performance. Since legacy computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) for plant maintenance are not intuitive for field personnel use, O&M team members still rely on emails and deep personal knowledge of solar farms to pinpoint tasks in a work order. This results in specific personnel being dedicated to specific sites, increasing cost.

SenseHawk’s digital twin, which simulates the asset and its environment on the platform, makes onsite task management simple and seamless, even for techs that are on-site for the first time, says the firm. With the SenseHawk app, a technician can move to a new site and immediately become productive without needing time to “study” the site. It is said that savings of 20-30% are easy to achieve with the productivity gains SenseHawk delivers. The SenseHawk platform is enterprise-ready with an extensive system of collaboration, access control, and single sign-on (SSO) capability.

Every component, event, and spare part on the site is digitized and loaded into SenseHawk’s map-based platform. A SCADA alarm, for instance, will trigger a workflow with tasks tagged to specific components or parts on the map. O&M technicians can use SenseHawk’s mobile map interface to find and complete these tasks. All task updates, including pictures, files, and remarks, are synced to the cloud, ensuring that everyone is up to date.

Don Nista, Director of O&M, SB Energy said, “We hope that the SenseHawk platform will help our technicians and operators to locate an issue and then easily and quickly know what specific actions to take to resolve the issue and maintain, or exceed, site yield targets.”

While SB Energy has already used SenseHawk’s drone analytics capabilities to monitor construction quality and progress, it now plans to use SenseHawk’s task management tools and Therm solution for infrared thermography at its operational plants.