Darling Downs, QLD · August 2026
120 MW solar farm thermal audit
Radiometric inspection of 300,000 modules in three days, with AI defect detection and a ranked repair list.
- Modules inspected
- 300k
- Anomalies classified
- 1,412
- Flight to report
- 3 days
The challenge
Manual IV-curve testing could only sample a fraction of the array each year, and string-level monitoring hid cell- and diode-level faults.
What we did
We flew the full site with a radiometric LWIR payload at 1.5 m/s and 20 m AGL, under steady irradiance above 600 W/m². Our model detected and classified hot spots, diode faults and string outages, and mapped each one to the operator’s panel IDs.
Outcome
The O&M team received a ranked repair list with an estimated energy impact for each fault. Fixing the top 5% of faults is projected to recover most of the lost yield.