Drone monitoring of solar fields is already established for photovoltaic solar. Now a new DLR spinoff – Volateq.de brings drone technology to the very different challenges of monitoring solar field performance, for concentrated solar power (CSP).
“There’s a lot of lot of stuff that can go wrong in a CSP plant, components that can fail, sensors that can be wrong. And in the long term all this affects the performance and also the safety of the solar field,” explained Christoph Prahl, who founded Volateq in 2020 together with concentrated solar research colleagues Anne Schlierbach and Wolfgang Reinalter. The three ...