Hornbill SolarWise™: Solar Module Inspection
AI-powered solar inspection platform designed to monitor utility-scale and rooftop solar assets, covering drone thermography, IV curve testing, and Electroluminescence (EL) testing.
Why Hornbill SolarWise™
- Data Collection: pre-flight safety procedures & compliant checklists, high-resolution imagery, secure data upload and processing pipeline.
- Risk & Compliance: inspection in line with the IEC TS 62446-3 standard, aligned diagnostics and documentation for owners, insurers, and large assets.
- Revenue Protection: hidden issues can cost 2–5% of energy per year; Hornbill SolarWise™ quantifies losses, verifies replacements, and supports warranty claims.
- Digital Twin: live plant view with defect history and module traceability, high-resolution RGB + thermal orthomosaic, ΔT measurement and severity classification.
- Lower O&M Cost: drone → AI → report workflow reduces manual inspection effort by 70–90%.
Drone Thermography, IV Curve & EL Testing
Drone Thermography: detailed dashboard analysis of anomalies at multiple severity levels, with overlayed site layout views and downloadable reports.
IV Curve Testing: analyzes current-voltage characteristics of solar panels to identify degradation, shading effects, and cell mismatch. Supports Seaward PV200 (15A/1000V), Solmetric PVA 1000 (20A/1000V), and Solmetric PVA 1500 (30A/1500V) instruments, across ground-mounted, rooftop, and floating solar. Testing follows IEC 60891 (temperature/irradiance correction) and IEC 60904 (PV device characterization).
EL Testing: Electroluminescence testing detects hidden cell cracks, inactive regions, and manufacturing/handling defects that are invisible to standard visual inspection or thermography — supporting warranty and insurance claims with objective evidence.
Inspection Tiers
- Overview Inspection — infrared at 10cm/px, RGB at ~5cm/px. Detects offline inverters, string-level issues, and module faults. Best for routine monitoring and portfolio overview.
- Standard Inspection — infrared at 5.5cm/px, RGB at ~2cm/px. Cell/substring-level anomaly detection with GPS-located, ΔT-measured results. Best for preventive maintenance and performance optimization.
- Expert Level Inspection — infrared at 3cm/px, RGB at ~1cm/px. Precise anomaly classification with normalized ΔT, supporting insurance premium reductions and multi-country compliance. Best for bankability, compliance, and insurance validation.
- Thin-Film Delamination — HD RGB at ~0.5cm/px. Precise delamination coverage calculations valid for insurance and warranty claims.
Success Stories
Sorigin (46 sites, 7 solar parks, 107+ MW): drone thermography, reporting, and portal access across a 3-state portfolio. The inspection identified 3,155 anomalies, 431.25 kW of power loss, 646,875 kWh/year of energy loss, and USD 53,272.06/year in revenue loss — informing a follow-on plan for IV Curve and EL testing across the portfolio.
Actis x Stride Climate Investments (370+ MW, 7 Indian states, 21 projects): Hornbill SolarWise™ unified 21 projects onto a single platform after Actis’ acquisition of Stride’s renewable portfolio, replacing manual compliance and PPA billing workflows. Results included $1.2 million in annual savings, a 7% improvement in plant uptime, 40% faster onboarding of newly acquired assets, and audit-ready investor reporting.
Related reading on solar inspection
- How IV curve testing pinpoints per-string losses — the definitive electrical diagnostic for utility-scale PV.
- Electroluminescence testing for solar modules — finding microcracks that thermal and IV scans miss.
- What IEC 62446-3 requires of a thermographic report — irradiance limits, defect classes and evidence.
- Potential induced degradation (PID) explained — how it forms, how to detect it, how to reverse it.
- Detecting single-axis tracker misalignment from the air — stalled, stuck and drifting trackers.
- Measuring soiling losses and timing panel cleaning — a data-driven look at cleaning ROI.
- Performance ratio (PR), the KPI behind plant health — how PR is defined and benchmarked under IEC 61724-1.