'Solar Doctor' enhances green development through smart monitoring

In a proactive move to ensure the stable operation of photovoltaic (PV) systems ahead of the peak summer season, the State Grid Jiaxing Power Supply Company recently conducted a targeted inspection of PV systems in Zhouquan town, Tongxiang county-level city, Jiaxing city, Zhejiang province.

The inspection focused on key components such as solar panels and inverters, guided by intelligent alerts generated by the company's in-house monitoring tool, known as the "Solar Doctor".

In recent years, the rapid expansion of the photovoltaic industry has outpaced the development of effective monitoring solutions. The resulting lack of systematic oversight has led to frequent malfunctions and significant power generation losses. In response, the State Grid Jiaxing has independently developed the "Solar Doctor" — a groundbreaking digital tool that enables intelligent monitoring and fault diagnosis for vast numbers of PV stations, without requiring any additional hardware investment.

The "Solar Doctor" accesses and analyzes billions of raw operational data points daily from the State Grid's central data platform. After preprocessing the data, it compiles essential metrics into a summary report, which is automatically pushed to an algorithmic platform for further analysis. The diagnostic results are then displayed in real time on a monitoring dashboard, making it easy for operations and maintenance teams to identify and resolve issues swiftly.

One of the tool's most innovative features is its use of consistent regional weather conditions to calculate the "power generation per unit capacity". By filtering out anomalous data and using the median of the remaining dataset as the regional benchmark, the platform compares each station's performance against this standard. This enables the calculation of the Key Generation Index, offering a highly accurate and adaptive assessment of each station's output capability.

Currently, the "Solar Doctor" covers all district- and county-level power companies across Zhejiang province, making it the first tool in the industry to achieve province-wide, daily PV monitoring and fault diagnostics. The system has been successfully integrated with 370,000 photovoltaic stations, significantly improving operational efficiency and energy yield. It addresses key pain points in the industry such as difficulty in real-time monitoring, slow fault localization and low power generation efficiency. By ensuring that solar energy is fully utilized and efficiently managed, the "Solar Doctor" has delivered substantial economic and social benefits.