Over the last two years, climate insurance provider kWh Analytics has been studying common points of failure of solar systems and exploring ways to get sites back online quickly and efficiently. Now, on the wings of continued support from the U.S. Department of Energy, the company will persist in pursuing a “safe driver” discount for solar asset owners that would incentivize them for reliability.
The DOE has greenlit kWh Analytics to continue phase two work on a $2 million award under the Increasing Affordability, Reliability, and Manufacturability of PV Cells, Modules, and Systems award, an initiative under the Energy Department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) aimed at extending the lifespan of photovoltaic (PV) systems.
The award allows kWh Analytics to continue research it started in 2022 on building a program that incentivizes solar asset owners to keep their stuff online by taking care of it. Over the last 24 months, kWh Analytics used natural language processing of operations and maintenance (O&M) service logs to learn what makes solar assets reliable. These field insights inform upstream stakeholder decisions, such as O&M preventative maintenance and spare parts strategies. In phase two of the project, kWh Analytics will explore ways in which field data can inform insurers’ decisions to incent asset owners to put reliability measures into practice.
“As an insurance stakeholder, we are continuously collecting and analyzing data, and looking for opportunities to incentivize reliable and resilient behavior,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics. “We are grateful to the Department of Energy for enabling us to share important findings that will impact how the industry designs and operates solar PV facilities and reward those reliability measures, as we collectively work to build a reliable clean energy future.”
GO DEEPER: Jason Kaminsky, CEO of the clean energy project insurance provider kWh Analytics, joined Episode 51 of the Factor This! podcast to share the data behind solar’s biggest risks, along with pathways to avoid potholes down the road. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
kWh Analytics’ research on equipment reliability has shown that while inverters tend to fail the most often, modules take the longest to replace. Under a “safe driver” sort of plan, sites with operations and maintenance staff experienced in inverter repair and/or sites with modules in their spare parts inventory should be eligible to receive favorable insurance rates.
The company plans to publish the results of its research project in 2025.
kWh Analytics, which has insured more than $30 billion of assets to date, utilizes a proprietary database of more than 300,000 zero-carbon projects and $100B in loss data to fuel modeling and insights that support its underwriting decisions.
The company has a long-standing relationship with the DOE; In September, kWh Analytics was awarded $2.4 million via the Materials, Operation, and Recycling of Photovoltaics (MORE PV) Funding Program as part of a $40M tranche of investments in the U.S. solar supply chain. This summer, the insurer debuted a “first-of-its-kind” wind proxy hedge risk transfer product for a 59-megawatt, 14-turbine project in Maine.
Each year, kWh Analytics releases its Solar Risk Assessment, a comprehensive report providing a data-driven evaluation of solar risk. This year’s report suggests standard modeling assumptions can underestimate solar project losses from weather-related physical damage by more than 300%.
