"With the expected decline of government incentives, the industry fears less willingness to invest in solar and wind products and technologies," says Eugenio Pasqua, research analyst. "However, IoT-based technologies and services provide the means to optimize the performance of solar and wind power generation systems and reduce production variability, two areas which detractors have historically cited as major shortcomings of renewable energy sources. In our view, the Internet of Things is an important component fueling the next stage of growth for the solar and wind industry."

Key IoT-based services for solar and wind power are remote monitoring of energy production and condition monitoring of the equipment, often coupled to cloud-based analytics platforms. In the utility sector these solutions offer a cheaper and simpler alternative or even an additional set of features to more traditional control and monitoring systems like SCADA, and in the solar residential and commercial sectors they will play an important role both for suppliers and customers. Cellular connectivity will also play an important role and is expected to garner the majority share of connections by 2020.

“Given the mix of traditional and modern solutions the market for solar and wind power remote monitoring services remains quite fragmented, with different players holding the leadership scepter depending on the target sector and the geographical area,” says Pasqua. Some examples are represented by Mita-Teknik for the monitoring of wind farms and ABB for both solar and wind farms, while in the non-utility sectors it’s worth mentioning Locus Energy and AlsoEnergy among the leaders in North America and Rtone and Solar-Log in Europe.

These findings are from the Solar and Wind Energy IoT Services Report, which is part of ABI Research’s M2M and IoT Modules and Devices Market Research.

Source: ABI Research