Ed Albanese has spent two decades in the software space, more than half of it working with O&M companies.

Through his experience, Albanese noticed that the amount of data companies are collecting is increasing exponentially. Sensors in components such as trackers, inverters, combiner boxes, transformers and weather stations provide continuous streams of data, often delivering it to various siloed platforms. Therefore, companies often lack the ability to process and learn from that data.

Albanese teamed up with other big data and industrial software gurus—with histories at companies like Twitter, SunEdison, Walmart and Tesla—to develop a solution to help O&M providers use and learn from their data. The effort resulted in founding Krypton software in 2015.

“It’s a good, smart crew, really focused on helping the renewable space move to the next generation of software—given the growth in both sites and data volumes and, honestly, the need to contain and maintain costs. We believe it’s essential,” Albanese said.

Krypton gathers O&M data from multiple platforms into one place, making it easier for companies to monitor, troubleshoot and solve issues. Furthermore, the software automatically analyzes data so it gets smarter and faster over time.

For example, Krypton can learn from events and anomalies. It can answer questions such as, “Have we seen this before?” This reduces the time it takes to detect and repair issues.

Another differentiator of the software is that it’s focused on condition-based maintenance, while traditional solar O&M is governed by scheduled or reactive maintenance. So instead of washing panels every six months, whether they may need them or not, the software can help alert teams when the modules actually need attention.

“Almost everybody in solar operates in schedule-based maintenance mode—panel washing every six months, rolling out a truck here and there to maintain trackers or vegetation, ” Albanese said. “Frankly, schedule-based maintenance is always more expensive than condition based.”

The software is easy to set up because it’s a cloud-based service that integrates with existing IT systems. It works with platforms such as IBM Maximo, Amazon Web Services, OSIsoft, Microsoft SQL Server, Wonderware Historian, SCADA, EAM and Salesforce.

Because it’s built to scale, Krypton can be used by O&M providers in all market segments, whether it’s a residential provider with ten projects, or a large developer with megawatts to service. It’s also designed to grow with a business.

For example, SunPower services residential, commercial and utility customers with more than 700 sites globally.  To manage this large fleet, the company has two remote operations centers that work around the clock to process billions of data points per day.

“Our operators were getting too many alerts, and had to make too many clicks to get anything done,” said Sarah Herman, senior manager of monitoring operations at SunPower.

SunPower had built some internal software tools, but those became strained as loads increased.

SunPower was able to use Krypton’s software to integrate data from siloed systems into one database, and provide new tools for operators to observe, troubleshoot and diagnose performance and reliability issues in real time. It helped the company monitor more information with half the false or nuisance alerts.

“They do that in a really elegant way where it wasn’t a bunch of software they had to write,” Albanese said.

Krypton continues to work with SunPower to shift its O&M services from reactive to predictive by leveraging the data the developer already has.

“It’s been great how responsive Krypton has been to SunPower,” Herman said. “Krypton listens to our operators and realizes that their ideas can be valuable to the final product.”

After just two years, Krypton is processing a billion real-time events a day, which represents more than 3 GW of solar power. Krypton also serves the wind, automotive, electronics, food and beverage, CPG and metals and mining industries.

“Solar is unique in that it does a pretty nice job of collection data, it just doesn’t harness it as well as it could,” Albanese said. “Solar deserves automation to reduce the cost of O&M, and there are no other platforms I’m currently tracking that do that.”