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The O&M economics of a five-year rooftop portfolio

Cleaning is the line item everyone budgets and the one that matters least. Five years of maintenance data from a 28 MW rooftop portfolio, itemised.

RSRohit ShahCommercial Analytics
2 September 20261 min read
The O&M economics of a five-year rooftop portfolio

Where the maintenance rupee goes

Ask an asset owner to name their biggest O&M cost and most will say module cleaning. Across 28 MW of commercial rooftop over five years, cleaning was the third line — and the cheapest of the three by a wide margin.

Line itemShare of five-year O&M spend
Inverter replacement and repair38%
Unplanned site visits26%
Module cleaning17%
Monitoring and connectivity11%
Structural and civil8%

Unplanned visits are a data problem

A quarter of the budget goes to driving somewhere to find out what is wrong. On sites where string-level monitoring was commissioned correctly, that line fell by slightly more than half — not because fewer things broke, but because the van left with the right part already on it.

54%
fewer unplanned visits with string-level data
₹0.11/W
median annual O&M, five-year average
2.1 yr
payback on retrofitting string monitoring
The short version
  • Inverters and truck rolls dominate O&M; cleaning is a rounding error beside them.
  • String-level monitoring pays for itself in avoided visits inside two and a half years.
  • Budget the diagnosis, not just the repair.
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Rohit Shah
Commercial Analytics

Rohit builds the financial models behind ReDesk's portfolio tooling and has spent a decade on the asset-owner side of solar.

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