An industry first for service standards

The ongoing operations management and maintenance of renewable energy plants is crucial to ensuring they operate at peak efficiency. 

A skilled service provider will make the difference between an underperforming plant and one that achieves optimised outputs and higher yields.

But all service providers are not the same. And in a rapidly evolving market where digitalisation is transforming what service providers can offer, investors and owners of renewable energy plants need to make sure they have the very best partners in place. 

To provide transparency and give plant owners confidence they are working with the very best, SolarPower Europe brought together leading service providers to form the Operation & Maintenance (O&M) Task Force.

Their mission? To create an industry first – the Solar O&M Best Practices Mark.

The O&M Task Force consists of 45 members from world leading companies, including Paolo Chiantore, Managing Director at BayWa r.e. Operation Services s.r.l, who is currently the chair of the task force. 

Over a period of three years, the group held numerous workshops and consulted widely within the industry. The culmination was a set of universal O&M guidelines that fully reflected the depth and range of services a modern O&M provider should offer, and which are crucial to the effective maintenance and safe management of solar plants. 

Based on these guidelines, O&M providers can evaluate their compliance across key service disciplines including preventive & corrective maintenance, data & monitoring, technical asset management, organization, and environment, health & safety. All this information is brought together in a technical dossier, available to interested parties, to substantiate compliance and provide complete transparency. 

The Best Practices Mark was launched at Intersolar Europe in 2018, where it was well-received by industry. BayWa r.e. was proud to be one of the first companies to achieve the mark.

While a huge achievement, this is just the start. The number of certified companies is growing quickly, and the work of the O&M Task Force, and Paolo, continues at pace. 

The team is continuously checking and updating the guidelines to ensure they reflect the very highest in standards. A third volume of the O&M Best Practices Guidelines was issued in December 2018. Membership of the Task Force also continues to grow with each new member adding to the group’s experience and expertise.

The O&M Task Force and resulting Best Practices Mark illustrates just what can be achieved when the industry comes together with the shared goal of making renewable energy even better.