In the first edition of the Client Highlight series, we’re honoring Cypress Creek Renewables, one of the United States’ leading solar and storage companies and a partner of ours.

Who is Cypress Creek Renewables?

Cypress Creek Renewables is a nationwide integrated solar and storage company that develops, owns, and operates an extensive portfolio of utility-scale and distributed solar PV systems. Based in North Carolina, Cypress Creek has over 1.6 GW in its portfolio, spanning 14 states.

In addition to managing its own portfolio, they also offer hire-able Operations & Maintenance (O&M) and Asset Management services. To date, the Cypress Creek O&M team maintains over 3 gigawatts of solar assets distributed around the country. As one of the country’s largest O&M providers, they offer 24/7/365 monitoring from their NERC-certified Networks Operation Center to ensure the maximum production of sites under their management. Their O&M and Asset Management services provide contract and compliance management, technical and financial performance review, and fleet optimization.

Cypress Creek’s impressive internal drone program was one of the first comprehensive drone programs developed in the industry, launched in 2016. To date, Cypress Creeks’ drone program has scanned multiple gigawatts of modules. They can comply with IEC 62446-3 standards, the global standard for aerial thermography, when necessary.

Our Story

Cypress Creek Renewables chose Raptor Maps to support their self-operated drone inspection and analyze the massive amounts of data produced. Through the years of our partnership, Cypress Creek has inspected hundreds of megawatts of solar PV systems and used our software to receive inspection analysis and reports. They quickly realized the value of combining aerial thermography with ‘boots on the ground’ when it resulted in minimized truck rolls and reduced O&M costs.

“Cypress Creek’s in-house Unmanned Aerial Systems team has performed over 10GW of aerial thermal inspections, including Raptor Maps and in-house analysis. With IR scanning, we see advantages with improvements to safety and cost reductions. 

With IR scanning, we were able to remove IV curve tracing, which involves physical interaction with electricity, from our annual maintenance.  Instead, we’re able to perform non-contact testing while increasing our efficiency and the quality of our results.

Comparing IV curve tracing to IR scanning, we can IR scan 100% of a solar facility in 5-10% the time, or less, it would take to IV curve trace. There is also equipment downtime associated with IV curve tracing that is not necessary when IR scanning. We are also able to now diagnose specific module anomalies to a precise location, which was not possible with IV curve tracing.

Additionally, we have been able to perform predictive maintenance on overhead medium voltage hotspots during off-peak hours, preventing un-planned site outages, equipment damage, or potentially dangerous events. We can also utilize our internal UAS fleets to react to events such and ground faults, underperformance, floods, natural disasters, without requiring technicians to be in the array. When responding to ground faults or underperformance, the use of our thermal UAS fleet turns days of searching into a few-minute flight.” 

– Mitchell Durant, Reliability Engineering Program Manager at Cypress Creek Renewables. 

Raptor Maps is proud to have Cypress Creek Renewables as one of our clients and partners. Their great depth of knowledge and experience in the industry is invaluable to us, and we’re inspired by their accomplishments.