A solar farm only earns when you can see what it's doing. Inverter output, string-level performance, metering and alarms all need to reach head office in real time — and on a rural PV site with no fixed line, that data has to travel over whatever connectivity you can engineer. Get it wrong and you're flying blind on an asset that's supposed to run itself.
What has to get off site
- Inverter & SCADA telemetry — generation, faults and performance, ideally in real time.
- Metering — for settlement and performance reporting.
- Security — CCTV and access control protecting panels, inverters and substations.
- Remote access — so O&M teams can diagnose and reset without a site visit.
The rural reality
Most PV sites sit outside the fibre network, so connectivity comes down to satellite, 4G/5G or a fixed-wireless link — and often a combination. Downtime on that link is more than an inconvenience: every hour offline is an hour of blind spots in production data and unprotected assets in the field.
Building it properly
- Multi-bearer design per site — a primary bearer with automatic failover, tuned to the coverage actually available (which we confirm with a site survey).
- Site-wide networking linking inverter stations, metering and the security network — see Networking.
- Power & UPS resilience so telemetry and cameras survive interruptions — see Power & UPS.
- SCADA-ready connectivity and ODBC/SCADA integration so production data flows cleanly into head-office systems and dashboards.
- 24/7 monitoring with alerting, so a dropped link is caught early.
One standard across the portfolio
As with wind, the value multiplies when the same monitored, resilient standard is deployed across every site in a portfolio — consistent, comparable, and visible from a single dashboard. It's the difference between reacting to problems and seeing them coming.