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An Interview with Heliocity

December 23, 2022

Heliocity is a French startup offering smart remote inspection tools for solar power plants. At the crossroads of the digital and energy transitions, our SaaS solutions translate readily available monitoring data from solar installations into key performance indicators, diagnostics and action recommendations. Operators and owners thereby gain insights into the health of their installations and the possible remedial actions to correct the losses duly identified and quantified by cause. They can then make informed decisions to maximize (financial) productivity, reduce operating costs and prioritize human and technical resources for maintenance.

Your company provides smart remote inspection tools for solar power plants. How can these tools help to promote sustainability?

 

Heliocity positions itself as a motor for productivity in the solar sector with an additional focus on rooftop solar. Boosting the performance of existing installations helps to deliver an immediate improvement to the energy carbon footprint, whilst enhancing the business case for future deployment in urban areas. This is essential in a global context of growing urbanisation and energy insecurity.

 

Moreover, by increasing the detection rate of faults and automatic diagnostics and by optimising onsite interventions, Heliocity promotes effective maintenance practices, which enables operators to make economically viable investments.

 

Enhancing the economic viability of solar energy increases its accessibility, thereby enabling more people to benefit from clean local energy generation and helping achieve the EU Commission's goal of having all buildings equipped with solar by the end of the decade.

 

Your project has been incubated at SATT Linksium in Grenoble—the 2022 European Green Capital. Has this been mutually beneficial for the project and the city?

 

Yes, Grenoble is the 2022 European Green capital. As a Grenoble-based Greentech company, we are, of course, very proud and happy for this focus on all Green initiatives and on our home city.

 

We also enjoy an ongoing partnership with "Energ'Y Citoyennes", a Grenoble-base community solar initiative, to see how our tools can help them to manage their solar fleet in the Grenoble region.

 

Part of the award from PLATOON was an invitation to join the Technology Transfer Programme. How has this benefitted your company?

 

The Technology Transfer Program has been a great and productive experience. In close collaboration with the Pilot mentor (Veolia-Giroa), we had the opportunity to experiment with a real operational testbed where we could test our developments.

 

We could therefore develop a performance analyser MVP for rooftop solar installation with a bare minimum of available production data. In the same manner, we developed and tested a "virtual sensor" demonstrator which could replace measurements of local environmental conditions for the site of a functioning PV power plant.

 

Finally, we also had the opportunity to discover the IDS community and make our solution compliant, which will allow a future smooth integration into any other IDS platform.

 

What do you believe the most important impact of PLATOON will be?

 

The Key challenge in the energy sector digitalisation is to ensure all stakeholders (solution providers and customers) can easily interconnect without costly and time-consuming ad-hoc development for IT integration. We do believe the greatest impact of PLATOON is to promote interoperability among all building blocks to avoid the frictional costs of point-to-point connection customisation, whilst enabling innovators across Europe to collaborate. Digitalisation will fully deliver on its promise once the connection barrier is overcome, and PLATOON has helped achieve this common objective.