Villanueva Solar Park

The project was carried out in the city of Torreon, Coahuila in Mexico where the largest solar plant in America called “Parque Solar Villanueva” is located, which currently produces 828 MW.

Approximately 150 Ha of the total plant were inspected by subfields, RGB and thermal images were acquired for the generation of RGB Orthomosaics and reflectance maps for the analysis of that information in third-party software.

The interesting thing about the project is that all the companies that carry out inspections in solar parks do so through third-party platforms, the photogrammetric reconstruction with Pix4d is not used. We are one of the pioneer companies in the generation of these reflectance maps with robust overlap for the generation of reflectance maps using pix4d mapper.

Context

Something that could be solved is the problem of having to acquire the information with a high overlap and the problem of deformations of the structures (solar panels). Everything was solved with the use of pix4d mapper and GIS software. Being able to have very good resolutions and a GSD between 3.2 to 3.5.

The project was necessary because it was required to use a GSD of 3.5 per standard, it was also required because the companies that tried to carry out the reconstruction had not been successful in doing so due to ignorance in the management and processing of thermal information.

The company was involved in this project to perform the consulting and planning of the acquisition of RGB and thermal data as well as the processing, generation of RGB and Thermal orthomosaics and orthorectification of the generated rasters.

Challenges

The challenges in the project were to optimize the resource in the processes given that the acquisition was very special due to the resolution requirements expected for the delivery.

Another challenge in this type of work is to coincide with the weather conditions since the acquisition is not valid if it is not done in the range of more than 600 W/m2 of solar irradiance.

Technical Details