Madison Energy Infrastructure (MEI) is one of the largest commercial and industrial solar owner-operators in the country, with a portfolio approaching 1 GW of operating assets. Recently, after acquiring a ~300 MW portfolio, MEI used Raptor Maps' platform to find and restore hundreds of offline strings that its existing monitoring systems could not see. Dubbed ‘Project Slingshot,’ MEI deployed 24 technicians across six states, restoring 3 MW of production within three weeks of receiving data from Raptor Maps. This case study covers how that response came together, and what the broader partnership has delivered across MEI's portfolio.
The Challenge: Inherited Blind Spots
Earlier this year, MEI acquired a roughly 300 MW portfolio of solar sites, bringing their total AUM to almost 1 GW. The average age of the assets in the acquisition was 7 years, and they carried the kind of performance issues that come with aging assets.
However, many of these issues were not visible to MEI’s existing monitoring systems. Conventional SCADA and inverter-level reporting can flag an inverter failure or a full site outage, but typically has no visibility down at the string and combiner level, where many of the root causes of underperformance live. MEI refers to this as the “sub-remotely-monitorable” layer of the fleet.
With that many new assets entering the portfolio at once, even with strong O&M partners and adequate regional labor, it was not practical to perform a detailed physical inspection of every site immediately. MEI needed a way to see the condition of the full portfolio quickly, and to know exactly where and how to deploy technicians once it did.
The Solution: Granular Data at Portfolio-Wide Scale
MEI brought in Raptor Maps to fly drone inspections across each of the newly acquired sites. The drone inspections focused on an array of site infrastructure: inverter pads, points of interconnection, erosion, vegetation, and infrared thermography. This imagery was then uploaded to Raptor Maps’ analytics platform, where the raw data was converted into a digitized, geolocated punch list of prioritized tasks that MEI's operations teams could act on immediately.
These inspections, completed in June, surfaced hundreds of offline strings across the portfolio. Mitchel Gehlig, a Regional Asset Manager at MEI, illustrates this point, saying:
“On many of our older systems, we do not have string or module level visibility. A site can therefore look broadly healthy while individual strings or modules are underperforming. Raptor Maps helped close that gap.
Because Raptor's reporting isolates failures down to the individual module, MEI did not need to send crews out to search for issues site by site. About ten days after the scans, MEI had a fully prioritized repair list ready to dispatch.
The Result: 3 MW Restored in Three Weeks
With the data in hand, MEI mobilized at scale. Over the following 20 days, the team deployed 24 technicians across six states, working through the prioritized list to restore roughly 3 MW of production.
The data that Raptor Maps provided enabled technicians to work efficiently. Each string had its own underlying root case, and the MEI knew exactly what to look for when they got to the site. Matt Messer, Vice President of Asset Management at MEI, shares:
“As soon as a report came in, we reviewed the identified string and module level issues, prioritized the highest impact items, and dispatched technicians, often as quickly as the following day. Because the inspection data told us exactly where the problems were, our crews could arrive on site with a defined scope of work and the right materials. At our portfolio’s scale, being able to move directly from inspection data to targeted field repairs is a major operational advantage.”
Beyond the Acquisition: A Portfolio-Wide Program
The post-acquisition sprint is the clearest example of the partnership's value, but MEI's relationship with Raptor Maps covers its full portfolio, and the returns extend well beyond this one event. MEI estimates the broad program recovers approximately 2.5% in additional production fleet-wide annually, all from that same sub-remotely-monitorable layer, and at a lower cost than traditional field inspections.
Raptor Maps’ ability to deliver this broad return to MEI is, in part, due to the centralization and consistency of data. MEI now has 100% of its sites and inspection history in a single platform, giving asset managers and O&M teams one shared system of record instead of a patchwork of site-level reports. Raptor Maps also proactively tracked down historical drone inspections from before the acquisition and added them to the platform, providing a complete, digitized performance history for each asset.
As MEI's portfolio grows toward 1 GW of operating assets, that kind of visibility only becomes more important. Esteban Schrick, Senior Manager of Analytics at MEI, shares:
“I’m responsible for monitoring nearly a gigawatt of solar across roughly 800 sites in 30 states. Having inspection history centralized in one place is critical. Our team needs to be able to quickly understand what has happened at a site, what issues were previously identified, and how conditions have changed over time. Raptor Maps gives us that history in a well organized, fast, and accessible platform, which makes it much easier to move from data to action."
For MEI, the Raptor Maps partnership has become part of how it operates at scale. When there is a signal that an asset is underperforming, MEI can quickly dispatch a drone to diagnose the root causes of the power loss and equip their team with a detailed punchlist of specific action items for when they arrive on site. This hastens the loop from signal to action, which, at scale, can have a meaningful impact on performance across a portfolio.
Conclusion
As solar portfolios continue growing in the Hyperscale era, owners and operators are reinvesting in systems that lower the latency from signal to action. Each year, we see increasing levels of investment flowing into the ability to more rapidly and consistently detect issues that legacy monitoring systems cannot. In particular, the ability to get granular, string-level data at a more rapid pace is becoming a wedge for owners to realize gains in production. The MEI story is a look at where the industry is headed. Low-latency, granular data is moving from a monitoring upgrade to a core part of how operators protect returns at scale.
If you’d like to learn more about how Raptor Maps is supporting solar asset owners increasing power production, please contact our team at the link below.
Next steps
From the civil engineering on your site down to the wiring on the back of your panels, the Raptor Solar platform provides you detailed, up-to-date data on the conditions and performance of your solar fleet so that your team has the intel they need to do their jobs effectively, quickly, and safely.
