【AEA 2018 Alumni】
Girasol Energy Inc. was founded in February, 2017 based on the power line communication technology invented by Dr. Hideya Ochiai, Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. The company provides IoT platform for the solar power plants. By using patented power line communication technologies, the company enables the power plant operators to monitor the solar panel modules remotely. Monitoring of solar panel modules is a big problem for the solar power plant operators since the degradation of a single solar panel among hundreds of panels causes significant performance loss of the entire PV system. By installing a simple IoT sensor to each PV(Photovoltaic) panel, power plant operators can gather data from hundreds of sensors over the power line without installing any extra communication lines or additional nodes. Data from IoT sensors are collected at a gateway unit and then sent directly to the cloud platform. By using PPLC system, solar power plant operators can monitor the performance of each panel remotely in real time and can detect the degradation of a PV panel automatically. The maintenance cost of solar power plants will be reduced significantly by using the company’s platform.