pwr_january-2025 - 13

O&M
Technology Has Transformed
Energy Deployment; O&M Is
Next
Deployment operations management
(DOM) systems were born of necessity
to help telecom, renewable energy, electric
vehicle (EV) charging, and other critical-infrastructure
developers tackle the
simultaneous design, build, and rollout of
huge numbers of often-dispersed assets.
In renewable energy, these systems
have become fundamental tools
of digital transformation. They capture
and centralize data available across a
project portfolio, whether those projects
are in the early planning phases
or delivering electrons, and across
site acquisition, interconnection, planning,
permitting, design, financing,
engineering, procurement, construction,
contractor management, and operations
and maintenance (O&M). Staff
and leaders can then use that captured,
centralized data to make better
strategic and tactical decisions, communicate
better, work faster, and make
fewer mistakes. That brings efficiency
gains and cost reductions.
DOM's cloud-based platforms integrate
all sorts of project data-maps,
images, designs, schematics, project
trackers, financials, field-team assignments
and notes, and more-to help
renewable energy and EV charging
companies plan and manage their growing
portfolios of job sites, assets, and
crews in real-time (Figure 1). These systems
are best known for combining the
strengths of project-, asset-, and workmanagement
software, sharpening
the planning and development phase,
speeding construction and implementation
timelines, and streamlining vendor
and labor management.
O&M a Logical Emerging Focus
of Deployment Operations
Management
While DOM leads with " deployment, "
renewable energy and EV charging
companies are now paying far more
attention to efficiently and effectively
operating and maintaining what they've
already built. The buildout frenzy driven
by low-interest-rate, land-grab environments
is over. It's time to profit from
what's been deployed.
Optimizing O&M will be a big part of
that. Renewable energy and EV chargJanuary
2025 | POWER
scroll through many screens of information
across multiple sources-assuming
they bother at all. And not bothering can
mean reinventing the wheel, and that
costs money.
1. The more information asset managers
have about their systems, the better the
chance that operations and maintenance work
will be optimized. Workers in the control center
will be able to access information and be
able to streamline and better organize their
check lists. Courtesy: Sitetracker
ing firms have built a ton of infrastructure,
a lot of it widely dispersed. Service
level agreements (SLAs) and government
rules come with stringent uptime
requirements, and O&M now begs for
rationalization as desperately as the
deployment side did a few years back.
Energy and EV charging businesses are
already using DOM for O&M. And why
not? Their DOM systems have tracked
site-specific data as well as every element
of every system from the moment
each was procured. These systems also
track the numbers, skills, locations, and
job-performance histories of in-house
and contract O&M resources.
So, the table has been set for DOM in
O&M. What exactly can these systems
bring to it?
Precise Asset Status and History
A single solar installation can involve
more than a thousand individual assets,
each catalogued and, as time
passes, its maintenance and repair
history chronicled. Field techs want to
know about them. Has a particular asset
broken or failed in the past? Have
similar assets failed elsewhere? Are
the parts for fixes in local inventory, or
in Taiwan?
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)
is playing a role here, a situation that
reflects DOM developers' increasing
investments in O&M-related features.
GenAI can summarize asset history,
maintenance logs, spare parts inventory,
technical manual instructions, and other
information in accessible ways. That
helps field techs avoid having to tap and
www.powermag.com
Smarter Scheduling
O&M teams are drowning in work orders.
That's no surprise when more than
170,000 utility-scale and commercial solar
installations; 75,000 wind turbines;
and 77,000 EV charging stations are in
place in the U.S. alone. And those numbers
grow with each day.
Absent a strategic approach to managing
O&M work, recency bias becomes
a dominant service philosophy. Rigid
scheduling based on limited criteria is
also a shaky approach. A DOM system
can help O&M managers prioritize and
schedule more wisely. If there's highpriority
corrective-maintenance repair
needed at a remote EV charging station,
how about taking care of lower-priority
preventive-maintenance work while
you're there and saving a truck roll?
DOM systems enable that sort of dotconnecting,
and it translates into more
efficient O&M.
The
more
information
dispatchers
have at their disposal, the better the
chance of O&M optimization. Among
that information is technician skills, availability,
location, and schedule on one
hand, and jobsite locations and the nature
of the O&M tasks and priorities on
the other.
Figuring out rational schedules based
on an array of inputs is a strength of machine
learning, and that's also the case in
DOM-powered O&M. But GenAI plays a
key role here: scraping from and assessing
digitized SLAs to make sure those
SLAs influence O&M decisions.
Such input can be decisive. For example,
various factors may point to the immediate
servicing of solar installation A.
But if installation B also has an issue and
B's SLA stipulates a more pressing turnaround
time with nastier consequences,
that might bump up B's priority. Without
GenAI-accessible SLA data, a dispatcher
might make the wrong call, which could
be costly.
Improved O&M Safety and
Security
The integration of jobsite safety and
security functions into DOM systems
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pwr_january-2025

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