“Migrating 1,400 power plants in one go – hard to imagine – but you just have to get organised!”
A year ago when energy transition advocate and leading photovoltaic energy producer in France Irisolaris, decided to adopt a new, single monitoring solution for all its power plants, it had to come up with a plan and ask a whole series of questions. What solution? For what gains? What data for what company stakeholders? What timeline?, etc.
Clément Faucherre, Director of Operations at Irisolaris, and his team were tasked with migrating 1,400 of the group’s power plants spread evenly across France.
Stage 1: It all started with a review of the various solutions available on the international market. Once identified, these solutions were screened using a scorecard containing no less than 40 criteria, including some that were deemed “essential”, “important” or “good but not essential”.
Stage 2: Once this initial assessment was completed, Irisolaris tested 3 solutions on operational power plants. This stage lasted 3 months, from June to September 2022. Clément Faucherre states that “it was an opportunity to better understand the way the platforms worked, how user-friendly they were as well as their most useful features for our business. We also had to get to grips with working with the customer relations teams”.
Stage 3: Finally, after the trial period, Irisolaris unanimously opted for Energysoft!
“What swung it for us is a combination of a user-friendly and accessible tool and the way plant energy production is modelled. It’s easy to calibrate and the friendly, flexible and proactive teams are readily available”.
At this point we had to prepare the migration itself using this three-step plan:
- Create all the user profiles for those who will be in contact with the software, at all levels: maintenance, construction, customer relations, etc.
- Define the structure of information and classify all Irisolaris power plants
- Draft procedures to format all the data
After that, we got the green light to hit the button! The migration process actually took place from January 2023.
“In 12-months, we’ve managed to merge our production monitoring into a single procedure, with all the sophistication to track and analyse that we expected. The Energysoft solution is subsequently a key asset in our “performance-driven” maintenance strategy, not just for our own solar farms but those of our clients too”, sums up Clément Faucherre. Another challenge successfully met by S4E!
For further details on Irisolaris: https://irisolaris.com
Contact us here if you have plans to migrate your power plants.
