CMMS for renewable energy

Maintaining renewable energy installations combines two things that rarely go together: highly repetitive assets, spread out over a wide geographic area, often in places with no signal. A solar farm means thousands of modules, dozens of inverters and kilometers of cabling; a wind farm means identical units separated by service roads.

That makes two things critical: how work is logged in the field, and how travel is organized.

No signal isn’t the exception, it’s the norm

It’s the requirement that rules out systems before any other.

The technician app stores work orders, assets and documents on the device itself, and every action taken offline — changing a status, logging hours with a timer, consuming materials, filling in a checklist, collecting a signature — goes into a queue that empties itself as soon as signal comes back. If an action fails to sync, it doesn’t disappear: it’s flagged with the reason.

The alternative always produces the same result: the technician jots it down in a notebook, transcribes it back at the office, and the hours and readings come out rounded off.

Travel is the big line item

In scattered installations, the dominant cost isn’t the repair: it’s getting there.

From the app the technician can sort their work orders by route using GPS, and can see unassigned work and take it on themselves, because they know if it’s on the way. Grouping three minor jobs into one trip instead of making three separate trips is, in this sector, the single biggest efficiency lever there is.

In asset management each piece of equipment carries its location, including its geographic position, which is what makes that kind of planning possible.

Thousands of identical assets

A farm is the ideal scenario for configuring by family instead of unit by unit. Assets are grouped by system, family and model, and the checklist resolves in cascade — asset, model, subfamily, family — so the inspection protocol for one type of inverter is defined once and applied to all of them.

Each unit gets its own QR code: the technician scans it and lands on the right record, with its history and documentation, without relying on a serial number handwritten on a shed wall.

Preventive maintenance by runtime hours

This is where the calendar falls short: two inverters installed on the same day can rack up very different service hours.

An asset can carry a counter — runtime hours, cycles — with a limit and a warning percentage. When a reading is logged that pushes past that percentage, the system generates the preventive work order automatically, with its asset and the matching checklist.

It’s worth combining this with time-based scheduling, because they cover different things: time-based covers what degrades whether or not the asset is in service — cleaning, corrosion, tightening; counter-based covers what wears out through use. A single asset can carry several schedules at once.

Measuring, not ticking boxes

In renewables, the value of the record is in the numbers: inverter temperatures, torque values, earth resistance, module condition, thermography readings.

Checklist fields support a minimum and maximum value, so a reading outside range is logged as an anomaly on the spot. That anomaly then needs to turn into an incident with its priority and owner; if it gets logged and nothing follows, the technician stops logging it and the system loses its purpose.

It’s also the route by which an inspection round turns into something close to predictive maintenance without installing anything: a series of manual readings is already enough to spot a trend.

What has to be proven

In the energy sector documentation requirements are high: periodic inspections of the electrical installation, certificates, maintenance reports contractually committed to the owner or the financier.

The document manager attaches documents to the asset, the installation, the client or the work order, with visibility set per document and an expiry date, and a daily check runs on anything about to expire, which triggers the notification. Certificates carry their number, scope, issuer and holder.

And legal maintenance — worth knowing — isn’t a separate module: it’s handled with the preventive maintenance mechanism, and the proof comes from the work order history, completed checklists and that documentation.

Subcontractors and owners

In renewables it’s common for the operator not to be the owner, and for part of the work to be done by specialized companies.

Providers are registered and receive the work orders assigned to them, with their times, materials and signature. And the asset owner can have their own dedicated access to see the status of their orders, download reports and check upcoming preventive maintenance: in a sector where the operation and maintenance contract usually includes reporting obligations, that replaces a good part of the monthly report.

Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, giving access to owners and subcontractors isn’t a financial decision.

The KPIs that matter

The reports on downtime, MTBF and MTTR and cost per unit are the ones that translate into availability, which is the sector’s key metric: every hour an inverter is out of service is energy not produced.

The most useful one is usually the cross between anomalies and equipment model: when a fault repeats on the same model across the whole farm, it stops being a breakdown and becomes a case to raise with the manufacturer.

Spare parts, when the warehouse is two hours away

In scattered installations the material problem isn’t having it: it’s having it where it’s needed. A failed visit for lack of a part costs double, because the trip has to be repeated.

Two things reduce that. The first is minimum stock per item in warehouses and items, which warns before you run out of what a job needs. The second, and more important here, is registering each technician’s van as its own warehouse: on a farm, a large share of the material lives in the vehicle, and until it’s in the system the inventory never adds up.

Transfers between warehouses record who requested them and who approved them, which is what turns a movement into a reliable data point instead of a discrepancy nobody can explain.

Where to start

With one installation and its critical equipment, with its maintenance plan, its schedule and its counter. That’s enough to get preventive orders generating and reports closing in the field, and to see what needs adjusting before rolling it out across the rest of the farm.

If you want to see it on your own installations, you can request a demo.