The use of drones in solar/PV inspections is growing rapidly. PES caught up with Vishal Punamiya, CEO at Sitemark, to find out how this is moving the solar/PV industry forward. Drone inspections provide more accurate data and with Sitemark’s Fuse platform, the exact status of an asset is known at all times. Allowing applications to integrate and provide full asset management remotely. Time and costs are saved and efficiency is increased.
PES: Hi Vishal, Welcome to PES Solar. It’s great to talk to you. We know you work in several industries, and we would like to know how important the solar/PV industry is to you?
Vishal Punamiya: The solar/PV industry is hugely important to us, it’s 50% of our core business today, but it wasn’t always the case. Let’s back up a little, and I’ll give some background about how Sitemark came to be, as the solar/PV industry wasn’t always our number one market.
Originally the concept for the company was to offer a networked drone package delivery service; we even went as far as building a drone and wanted to call the company Dronegrid, hence our original name. We quickly realized this may have been a little too crazy at the time, but we knew we were onto something with drones.
The drone industry was starting to explode, and the more we read on the internet, everyone was using them, or so we thought. Our initial goal was to lower the cost of data acquisition and make using drones cheaper and more accessible for enterprises. Once we started meeting customers, we quickly realized that we were a little ahead of the game, and some of our earliest customers weren’t even using drones at the time.
However, Eneco, a Belgian energy company, saw the potential and became Sitemark’s first customer in the solar/PV industry. Eneco started with an inspection of one site and was so impressed with the insight we provided they decided to inspect their entire Belgian portfolio that summer and the rest is history.
