EI Fleet Manager offers a user-friendly interface backed by centralized, near-real-time data for crucial fleet insights such as detailed system health metrics, critical fault identification, commissioning performance, and data visualization tools.
Tigo Energy Intelligence (EI) Fleet Manager
Q&A with | Tigo Energy
Tell us about your product and what you feel sets it apart from similar products.
The Tigo Energy Intelligence (EI) Fleet Manager is a cutting-edge solar fleet management solution that delivers a comprehensive approach to optimizing the installer experience around monitoring and maintaining solar fleets, maximizing system performance, and reducing operations and maintenance costs. EI Fleet Manager offers a user-friendly interface backed by centralized, near-real-time data for crucial fleet insights such as detailed system health metrics, critical fault identification, commissioning performance, and data visualization tools which make it a valuable asset for installers.
Tell us about the R&D behind this product. Who is this product designed for? What problem is it solving?
Tigo development of the EI Fleet Manager was driven by a clear focus on solar installers as our primary customer as well as a response to the solar industry's rapid growth and the resulting need for solar installers to efficiently manage ever more systems in their expanding fleets. Module-level monitoring has become the cornerstone of identifying and responding to performance issues because of the granular visibility it provides into system performance. EI Fleet Manager uses the vast amount of data points ingested by system monitoring to provide extensive insights, ranging from the status of installations in progress to comprehensive indicators of system health and energy production. It delivers deep insights into more than a dozen critical performance metrics for solar systems. This high level of visibility simplifies the identification and swift deployment of mitigations, bridging across devices from various manufacturers, whether at the system or module level. Our goal is to empower installers to optimize system ROI for their customers and exercise better control over O&M costs by tailoring data views to specific stakeholder groups such as operations managers and field engineers. The EI Fleet Manager accommodates systems of all sizes, including residential, commercial, and industrial solar deployments, and caters to a wide range of users, from installers with large multi-system fleets to those managing individual installations.
Give us an idea on the installation process.
Following installation of a Tigo system, installers can access Tigo’s fleet management solution from either an Apple or Android smartphone app, or from a desktop browser. Once connected, customers have access to an ‘All systems’ view that offers a convenient and efficient way to access vital information across all sites within a fleet with a single glance. Users can also set up customized data views to keep an eye on systems grouped by customer, alert urgency, or even module or inverter types. This unprecedented ability to customize and filter solar fleet data allows installers to tailor the display to their specific needs, because maintenance workflows and schedules tend to vary from system to system and installer to installer.
How is your company setup to support the users of your products?
Tigo Energy recognized the need for a more connected approach to training and quality control in the evolving solar landscape. To support great solar outcomes, the company is focusing on the installer experience, from design to installation and commissioning, to service, and throughout the O&M part of the life cycle.
To this end, EI Fleet Manager is backed up by the Tigo Green Glove program, a service that enhances the installation process from beginning to end. Through Green Glove, Tigo support personnel collaborate with installers to provide a no-cost design review before installation, on-call support during installation, and a post-installation review. This systematic approach actively drives the efficiency and quality of installations deployed by Tigo customers. Green Glove exists to address common challenges with the quality and reliability of commercial and industrial solar installations that go beyond hardware reliability.
What feedback have you received from the field? Can you share a use case and the results?
An example of recent feedback about EI Fleet Manager from the field comes from De Bortoli Wines, a leading Australian winemaker, and their engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) firm, SCE Energy Solutions. De Bortoli aimed to reduce their energy consumption by 10% and selected Tigo Energy and SCE Energy Solutions for the task of expanding the vintner's solar capacity to 1.15MW. With EI Fleet Manager, SCE achieved significant improvements in managing system performance and the ability to address issues resulting from soiling problems unique to winery operations. SCE Energy Solutions uses Tigo EI Fleet Manager to monitor system performance and manage operations and maintenance (O&M) across the more than 20,000 solar modules deployed in its fleet of customer systems. This C&I-focused installer operationalizes system performance data down to the individual component and makes full use of the customizable groupings of systems by common attributes like equipment type, location, size, or customer.
"Tigo Fleet Manager has been a game-changer for us because it provides unprecedented visibility into our customer fleet, allowing us to deliver on our system performance commitments and offering valuable new services," said Jon De Martin, CEO at SCE Energy Solutions. "As our solar portfolio continues to grow, it would have been nearly impossible to consolidate the countless data points we rely on to deliver best-in-class customer service. Beyond performance monitoring, we now have such fine-grained visibility into the hardware we’ve deployed that it has completely transformed our operations and maintenance. Tigo EI Fleet Manager, combined with the TS4 MLPE platform, allows us to deliver superior performance as we grow into more and larger solar systems."
Tarek Heiland, head engineer at De Bortoli Wines, was quoted saying in part, “...we are excited to have the latest Tigo technology for safety and performance. This solar system now covers 30-35% of our total energy usage in full generation, and we could not be happier about this investment.”
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of AltEnergyMag
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