To Clean or not to Clean ?

Optimize Your PV Cleaning Costs — Clean Less, Earn More!

In a context of tightening margins on solar assets, every cost factor matters. For large PV fleets, cleaning budgets can easily reach hundreds of thousands of euros per year—often without centralized economic optimization for each individual plant.

The right question isn’t “When should we clean?” but “When is cleaning actually profitable?”—taking into account intervention costs and the specific feed-in tariffs of each site.

Heliocity supports you at three levels:

1. One-Time Audit — Our Helioflash service establishes the optimal cleaning schedule for each plant and quantifies the residual losses associated with this strategy. Indeed, Helioflash uses its multiphysics model to measure the apparent soiling rate of the PV installation. Over a representative period, the seasonal variation in soiling allows us to infer the site’s natural soiling and cleaning dynamics. This trend can then be projected over several years. If we also have the electricity resale price and cleaning cost, our algorithms simulate different cleaning schedule scenarios (frequency and months) to define the optimized cleaning calendar and the residual soiling losses associated with this optimal strategy.
2. Custom Tool — We build a calibrated model based on about fifteen of your sites, scalable to your entire portfolio. The principle is to leverage a set of soiling profiles representative of the various configurations in your PV portfolio (environment and plant typology) and transpose these results to similar sites by adjusting plant size, cleaning costs, and electricity resale rates. This consolidation of all soiling models and optimized schedules from audited installations into a single tool allows you to have, for every plant in your portfolio, a hypothesis for cleaning frequency and average soiling rate to consider in energy yield estimates. It is therefore a data-driven decision-support tool that you can expand at any time with new audited plants (via Helioflash).
3. Continuous Monitoring — A new advanced module of Helio Smart Guard Grid (HSG-G) enables daily monitoring of your plants via meter data and recalculates the optimal cleaning schedule for your entire fleet every month. HSG-G regularly tracks the evolution of soiling rates across your PV portfolio and refines the optimized cleaning calendar as it accumulates data across the fleet. This gives you a forward-looking view of cleaning needs, automatically updated with your data, allowing your teams or contractors to plan and optimize their cleaning interventions.

In the end, the question of cleaning photovoltaic installations is no longer about a simple, arbitrarily fixed routine, but about a smart, data-driven economic strategy. Heliocity turns this constraint into a lever for both operational and financial performance. Cleaning at the right time thus becomes the key to maximizing the return on investment of your solar portfolio, plant by plant.