Industry

Renewable Energy, Utility

Platform

Desktop

Solution

Heliostat + Solar Array Monitoring Workstation

eSolar heralds a new era of solar energy with the unveiling of Sierra SunTower. Challenges that once thwarted widespread solar thermal power generation —including cost, speed of deployment, and environmental sustainability—have now been met. eSolar delivers a new blueprint for solar energy in California and beyond.

THE CHALLENGE

Technicians who monitor solar arrays are responsible for managing a dynamic set of information. A from elastic energy demands, environmental impacts, faulty or dirty mirrors, warnings, and maintenance alerts. When you scale this across multi-array installations, you need an information monitoring and management system to match.

Limina was engaged to analyze the system requirements, usability and human factors and synthesize the recommendations into a cohesive system design.

OBSERVE & ANALYZE

Limina conducted extensive review of the functional specification, existing prototype, as well as a 3 day site visit for user, task and environment analysis.

  • Expert UI Evaluation
  • Documentation Review
  • Contextual Inquiry
  • Workflow Analysis

ENVISION & DESIGN

Immediately following the research and analysis, we generated design concepts to spark critical dialog with the key stakeholder.  Our concept designs set the direction for a final experience model that encompassed the functional requirements, environmental and cognitive requirements of the user and the lifecycle of the field operators tasks.

THE SOLUTION

Our solution provides the field operators with a dual monitor workstation with monitoring and management interfaces to support routine and ad-hoc tasks and workflows.  We provided the operators with a means to maintain both broad oversight of a multi-array installation as well as drill into the specific datasets of an individual mirror or configuration setting.  Our alerting model provides contextual awareness, severity and drill down.

The deliverable and the process was well above and beyond what I personally expected, the work output will be (I foresee) extremely useful in the development of our software….It’s snazzy, it’s professional, it follows the operator workflow (which is important), and it makes operation clear and easy. THANK YOU!
Matt Hartshorn
eSolar Development Engineer