Hail Has a New Nemesis

Jun 18, 2023

As climate changes cause rough weather to increase across the country, different industries are facing new challenges and threats. The solar power industry, for example, relies on physically fragile components that are susceptible to damage from storms, particularly hail.

Indji Systems Inc., a software company that designs weather monitoring technology, is stepping in with a way for solar generation projects to avoid storm damage. The West Hollywood-based company has launched a hail-detection software for Indji Watch, its long running platform for weather hazard monitoring meant for utility-scale solar projects.

Its customers include Southern Co., EDP Renewables, BP and American Electric Power Co. Inc. Indji has its international headquarters in Perth, Australia, in addition to its West Hollywood headquarters.

Indji Watch was originally released in 2008 to monitor hazards such as lightning, high wind events and wildfires for electrical utilities. It said that by 2009 it was monitoring the entire connected Australian electrical transmission network, and by 2010 it had launched Indji Watch in North America.

"Hail detection is a new area for us," Indji Watch product manager Mark Carniello said. "Hail really impacts solar sites in a major way. Obviously, you know, you’ve got the glass solar panels, so hailstones are not going to be friendly to those glass panels … (I)t's mainly targeted at solar panels, but we have other customers that also will get their staff under cover into safety when there's severe hail."

A utility-scale solar project sells the power that it generates back to the electric grid, though the amount of energy that needs to be generated in order for a solar project to be considered "utility-scale" varies in definition. For example, renewable energy project developer Urban Grid states output must be 20 megawatts or greater, while the National Renewable Energy Laboratory places the threshold at only five megawatts. Most California utility-scale sites are condensed in the south, particularly in Kern County and San Bernadino County.

Chuck Parker, vice president of Indji, said that panels being damaged by a storm can lead to financial losses other than just replacements and repairs. Many solar projects that aren't owned by a utility company have a power purchase agreement in place. These agreements are between an energy producer and a customer, usually a utility company or government entity, and allow the utility provider to purchase energy from the solar project at a pre-determined price.

Performance standards

However, the solar power site is also guaranteeing it will meet certain performance standards. If the site is out of commission and unable to generate power for the grid, which could happen in the case of a hailstorm, it may owe a substantial amount of money under the agreement. Parker said that, depending on how far a facility goes below its forecasted energy production, the solar project could lose between thousands and tens of thousands of dollars every hour.

"One of our clients, they had damage at one of their solar sites in Texas last year and that site was wiped out," Carniello said. "So their revenue for the six months after that storm was essentially zero … and they’ve got power supply agreements in place that they now can't meet."

Parker said that the risk is not only stowing panels away in time before a storm, but also stowing them too long and losing production time. If a company relies on inaccurate data and gets a false alarm for a storm, or incorrect information about when it will happen, it may halt production longer than is necessary, impacting the energy promised to the market or to their customers.

While the National Weather Service provides storm tracking and hail alerts, Carniello said its updates can be hard to decipher. He said that Indji Watch does use NWS data as one of its inputs, but that a solar project that solely relies on NWS may be unable to tell which storm alerts present actual threats to their locations, as they are often regional alerts and aren't specific to a small area. Warnings can be sent out as early as a day ahead of a hailstorm, with short notice alerts being about 30 to 60 minutes out.

"Just using NWS data doesn't give you actionable data," Parker said. "You need more (warning time) to maximize safety operations."

The Solar Energy Industries Association reports that in the United States, about 10,000 solar projects that produce more than 1 MW of energy are operating or are in development. While this is a somewhat limited market, Parker said that the company serves about 40% of the renewable energy sites in North America. He said the variety of services it provides and clients it serves, which includes wind farms, means that Indji doesn't have to rely on having every solar plant as a customer for the company to remain profitable. Most of Indji's funding comes from its board members and the lending associations that they are attached to.

Since solar projects aren't generating power once the sun goes down, Carniello said that staff may be completely gone if a storm hits in the middle of the night. Clients can customize their Indji Watch alerts for specific hailstone sizes: some solar panels may be able to withstand the blow of a 3-inch hailstone, while others may be devastated by a 1-inch hailstone. Indji Watch's services are charged on a per-site basis rather than on the amount of area being monitored, and services are offered with an annual subscription. Parker said a base subscription generally includes all of its hazard-monitoring services, such as hail, wildfires and high-wind events. The company would not comment on exactly how much Indji Watch costs, but a spokesperson said that coverage for a single site would generally be in the thousand-dollar range.

Automatic systems

"There's often nobody actually out at these sites," Carniello said. "The alerts go traditionally to humans. But we also have a (programming interface) where there can be system-to-system communication. So, some of our clients are looking at implementing automatic systems where the alert from us goes into their system and their system then determines, ‘OK, I’m going to store these panels automatically.’"

Indji Watch's services are meant for solar power projects and not home solar power systems. Residential solar panels systems are implanted onto a surface, and don't move.

The panels at solar power projects, especially utility-grade ones, rotate on an axis to follow the direction of the sun over the day. Parker said that when a hailstorm occurs, the panel can avoid damage by being rotated about 60 degrees against the oncoming storm.

"The Indji Watch software enables them to make operational decisions better, to help protect their investment," Parker said. "The investment, whether it be the solar panels, whether it be their people, equipment, wind turbines, we’re helping them make faster and more informed operational decisions to protect those investments."