How Technology Is Reshaping Modern Solar O&M in Europe — and What It Takes to Make It Operational at Scale

The new O&M reality: Europe built fast, now it must operate smarter

Europe’s solar buildout has moved from “deploy as much capacity as possible” to “operate an increasingly complex fleet profitably and reliably,” and that shift is hitting O&M teams first. In a pv magazine Week Europe 2025 session on technology for solar operations and maintenance, speakers pointed to a converging set of pressures: assets and components entering midlife, the growing need to pair PV with storage to be more grid-friendly, and a rapidly rising cybersecurity threat surface that can translate directly into downtime and lost revenue.

If early utility-scale PV carried the misconception that “simple design” meant “minimal maintenance,” that confidence is fading as operators see the real cost of under-maintaining, higher degradation, performance losses, and missed revenue that only becomes visible after weeks or months of accumulated underperformance.

From “more tools” to “one ecosystem”: why data-driven maintenance is the real inflection point

One of the most useful reframes from the session is that modern PV O&M is no longer a set of disconnected inspections and reactive work orders; it is moving toward an integrated, data-driven maintenance ecosystem. The tools getting attention, UAV/drone inspections, thermography, condition monitoring, AI diagnostics, digital twins, and automation are not the destination; they are inputs to better decisions. The best way to read this is cause-and-effect: as portfolios scale and plants get larger, manual analysis stops being merely slow and becomes structurally unreliable, which forces operators to standardize how they collect, contextualize, and interpret signals across sites; that standardization then becomes the prerequisite for automation that actually reduces workload instead of generating more alarms and dashboards.

Digital twins, drones, and AI: powerful—if interoperability and data quality come first

Digital twins are increasingly positioned as the “single pane” for plant-level understanding: a virtual replica continuously updated with real data, enabling owners to compare expected vs. actual behavior and identify deviations earlier. 

But the session also surfaced the hard truth that determines whether a digital twin is a competitive advantage or just an expensive visualization: interoperability. If your SCADA, inverter monitoring, metering, weather, PPC/EMS, and maintenance systems do not speak the same operational language (timestamps, asset hierarchies, event semantics, availability definitions), the twin can’t stay trustworthy.

The same pattern applies to drones: prices have fallen, and evolving European rules have helped make drone-based inspection more accessible, yet the value comes from turning imagery and thermography into prioritized, trackable corrective actions—not simply collecting more images.

And on AI: multiple panelists emphasized that organizations often have siloed, “muddied” data and are still forming a digital strategy, so the win is not adopting AI in abstract, but defining a clear outcome roadmap (what decisions will be improved, what KPIs will move, and how workflows will change).

Cybersecurity is now an O&M KPI, not an IT checkbox

A standout point from the discussion is that cybersecurity has become operational technology risk with direct plant-level consequences. Speakers warned that attacks can trigger shutdowns and revenue loss, or even alter plant behavior with grid-impacting implications, making cybersecurity relevant not just to asset owners but also to investors and, increasingly, national resilience conversations.

The practical implication for utility-scale teams is uncomfortable but clear: if your modernization roadmap includes more connectivity (more sensors, more remote access, more integrations), then cybersecurity design must advance in lockstep, not as a delayed add-on when a compliance audit appears.

The market problem behind the buzzwords: scaling O&M without scaling chaos

Put the themes together and the market problem becomes specific: solar O&M is being asked to scale across bigger fleets, with more technology layers (PV + storage, multiple OEMs, multiple monitoring tools), while maintaining bankable performance and availability, yet many organizations still operate with fragmented data, inconsistent definitions, and reactive workflows that waste expert time on manual triage.

The result is predictable: “silent losses” (strings, combiner issues, inverter underperformance, degradation effects, curtailment confusion) accumulate, root-cause analysis becomes slow, and maintenance prioritization turns into a negotiation rather than an engineering decision. Delfos was built to address exactly that operational gap, turning plant and portfolio data into decisions that are fast enough, standardized enough, and actionable enough to keep performance engineering and maintenance aligned as complexity rises.

Where Delfos fits: turning monitoring into prescriptive action at portfolio scale

Delfos is as an AI-powered performance platform for renewable portfolios, explicitly focused on reducing downtime, accelerating monitoring, and keeping unavailability low across large fleets. 

This matters in this context because it maps directly to the “ecosystem” requirement: instead of adding another standalone tool, you want a digital foundation that unifies monitoring, analytics, and alarms into a single operational workflow, so SCADA behavior and performance deviations are translated into prioritized tasks with measurable impact.

In solar specifically, Delfos frames performance management around continuous monitoring integrated with SCADA, predictive analysis to anticipate failures before unplanned downtime, and data-driven diagnostics that guide teams to root causes without wasting cycles on broad manual inspections, exactly the bridge between “we have lots of data” and “we can act before revenue is lost.”

The practical outcome is not just prettier dashboards; it is governance around what to fix first and why, supported by automation such as analyst-grade exploration and scheduled reporting that helps align multiple audiences (O&M, performance, asset management) on the same version of operational truth.

Modern solar O&M is becoming a systems discipline: platforms win over point solutions

The core takeaway from pv magazine Week Europe 2025 is that modern solar O&M is being reshaped by technology, but success depends on sequencing: get data quality and interoperability right, define outcomes before chasing tools, and treat cybersecurity as a first-class operational requirement.

As PV fleets age and hybridize with storage, the winners will be the operators who can convert complexity into repeatable workflows, where anomalies become diagnoses, diagnoses become prioritized actions, and actions become recovered MWh and protected revenue. 

Delfos is designed to be that conversion layer: a portfolio-scale performance and predictive maintenance platform that helps technical teams standardize monitoring, accelerate detection-to-decision cycles, and operationalize data-driven O&M without drowning in siloed tools.