
Introduction
Over the past five years, as my team and I developed what we call a "clear box" solution for utility scale solar Analytics, I have noticed a disturbing pattern of data protectionism and even flat out hostage taking by popular dashboard and kpi vendors operating in the space.
Almost weekly, I am helping clients and prospects navigate the industry’s toxic dependency on "dashboard solutions" acting as data lake providers. As the field of data analysis for solar has expanded over the past five years, asset managers, performance engineers and data scientists have been forced to work with "the vendors api" to get their own data.
I’m going to break down a few points on why this is unhealthy; also, I’ll share a roadmap for those of you who want to take control of your data – and start creating new value for your organization.
How and why are we, as consumers of this data, allowing vendors to do this?
In every case that I have seen this occur, it started with data collection devices or "data loggers"; this is the physical hardware installed at each site that connects to your solar assets, collects the data and then transmits it. Typically, we see Moxa IA240 and UC81112 data loggers doing this, but there are many types. Normally, the solar operators own these devices.

The issue arises when the "dashboard and kpi" vendor configures the device to send the data to /their/ service. That is the exact moment the hostage situation begins.
Why is this bad?
- You have to get API keys and access to your data via the vendor; this may come at a cost or even rate/volume limiting.
- Oftentimes, your vendor will not provide API keys or access to other third party contractors or vendors you are working with.
- They hold the data to drive you towards using often subpar solutions for utility scale solar reporting and analysis.
Roadmapping our way out of this data hostage situation

As the owners of the data logger at your sites, you have the control and ability to put an end to this abuse.
Diagrammed above is a simple example that will cost you about $15,000 a year to operate. It liberates your data. If you still want the dashboard and kpi vendor to do their thing, they can do it just as easily from your data lake.
By having the data loggers transmit the data to your private cloud and storage, you enable an immense amount of value creation for your organization:
- Often, different sites compute KPIs and reporting differently, not taking the one size fits all approach offered by your vendors.
- You can truly go beyond monitoring and leverage any number of open source solutions and libraries that are freely available in the solar space today.
- You can more easily leverage better dashboard and true analysis solutions.
It is your data and you control it; you can easily leverage your SQL/REST interface and do with it what you like.
Conclusion
As you commission new solar sites, insist on data loggers being programmed to deliver data to your own data lake or historian. If you don’t want to deal with owning and managing your own, lean on popular commercial solutions like Snowflake or OSISoft’s PI offering. Ultimately, retaining full access and control to your data is the only way you can go beyond these dashboard and kpi monitoring solutions to create real value for your organization.
I wrote more about that in my recent article, Create Value With Your Energy Data.
I have spent much of my professional engineering career developing applications that help people get more value out of their data and content.
This experience ranges from building "hurricane proof" newsroom applications for TBO.com in Florida to "photo contest" applications for National Geographic and, now, these past five years, creating tools that allow operators to improve performance and impact availability of assets in the energy sector.
>>> import this