Any shape, size or color, we all need food to survive. Through the process of cellular respiration, the energy in food is converted into energy your cells can use. Solar panels or wind turbines are similar to your body in that it's all about converting one type of energy to another (electric). But we have more to learn from nature and our body than simply the conversion of energy, and at Prediktor, we mimic the body and learn from millions of years of evolution when optimizing our solar offering.
Reflexes and synapses
The first part of this mimicry is about your reflexes. If you imagine yourself in the kitchen preparing a meal you'll have a lot of potential situations where you just react without thinking. You'll redraw your hand from a hot stove without giving it any thought. If you slip up while slicing the vegetables and the knife touches your skin, your reflexes will kick in. Countermeasures will happen almost instantaneously as it does not involve the higher-order faculties of your brain - they are called spinal reflexes.
Just as input from your sensory system can activate reflexes, you want the same thing at your solar park or any other system. No sending data off to another location to be processed and reflected upon, just algorithms running at the edge and immediately issuing alerts and potentially countermeasures. Where many of our competitors only do collection at the edge, we preprocess the data right there - giving our «solar offering body» a set of reflexes that can evolve with new equipment and sensors.
Experience as part of the picture
Another interesting part of our food preparation and consumption is experience. As your experience with different tools and ingredients grow, you'll be abilities as a cook will improve.
At the most basic level, you want to avoid potentially harmful ingredients, using your vision, sense of smell and evaluating the tactile qualities with your sense of touch. Making wrong choices at this stage could have harmful consequences by making you and your guests sick in the short or long term.
On the other end of that scale is where you go beyond just consumption and use your experience to get the most of your ingredients. The problem with building experience is that it takes time, no matter if you learn from others or by yourself. Also, you want your reactions that are based on experience to happen quickly. The processing power in your brain needed to recognize a tomato on your countertop, picking it up and then establishing that it is rotten in minimal, and certainly a lot less than you would expect if you look at what actually goes into the process.
At your solar park (or wind, hydro, hybrid for that matter) you want to react based on experience, and you want to use your experience beyond a single vendors equipment. That means that you need low latency and the ability to transcend specific equipments.
We have two aces up our sleeve at this point: One is the computing possibilities on the edge, and the other is information models. Just as you understand what you are looking at because you have a «mental model» of it (you don't spend any time or processing power separating a potato from a tomato), we understand a solar park when we see one. We build our experience on top of that model, regardless of the equipment, and keep on feeding it with new experience that will trickle down to all your parks, giving it reflexes and experience enough to understand when something is off.
Analytical abilities
There is a difference between just eating and tasting, and I think we can agree that the latter elevates the experience. Tasting food will allow you to perceive and hopefully understand all the nuances. You'll translate your knowledge of the ingredients and the process of cooking into what you're tasting and as such separate out what is expected from what is unexpected. On top of that you can apply your analytical abilities to make the process better - becoming a better cook or refine your choice of restaurants.
Tapping into all those years of experience on food is just like how we tap into our 10 years in solar and 25 years in industrial automation. We parse the sensory input and compare it with the environment, the status of your equipment and our extensive knowledge. Based on that we can «feel» the park as part of our extended body. We know what parts are not performing optimally. We know what to expect and when a good clean would be good :-).
We even predict how the near future will be, when parts need to be changed, equipment needs to be maintained, what the weather will be like, and how the production will be based on the information gathered.
The human body is amazing. We've modeled our systems on it, and we keep learning from it every day.
.svg)