O&M Services: Maintaining safety, availability while striving for optimal system performance

Ranked fourth for utility-scale solar O&M providers in the US by managed capacity, Cypress Creek O&M Services offers best in class business solutions for owned and third-party assets across 19 states. Our four-pronged approach consists of 24/7/365 Operations & Engineering, Account Management Services, Special Projects, and Field Services and Predictive Maintenance. 

In this post, Cypress Creek O&M Services’ Senior Director of Operations Fernando Rodríguez Alvarado describes our approach to operations. Fernando oversees Cypress Creek Control Center Operations and Operations Engineering. Prior to joining the company, he held engineering and management roles in O&M for a leading international oil and gas company. 

Cypress Creek Control Center in Durham, NC

The Cypress Creek Control Center (C4) located in Durham, North Carolina, is at the core of Cypress Creek’s ability to operate secure, distributed and utility-scale solar sites and maximize production. The C4 is just one of a handful of North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) – Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) compliant control centers in the country operated by a solar energy-only company. 

Our team around the C4 consists of Operations Engineers and Operators working 24/7/365 to maintain safety, compliance and a high-level of system availability and performance. Many of our operators and engineers, including me, have a background in traditional energy, such as oil and gas. We leverage our operational experience from mature industries to maintain high availability rates and scale efficiently. 

High Availability Rates 
O&M availability is the primary metric that we track to understand our team’s effectiveness in identifying and resolving performance issues as efficiently as possible. Our owned assets and third-party fleet consistently trend at more than 99.5% availability. This metric represents plant up time, excluding events outside of our control. When addressing site performance issues, the team follows the same process for third party, as our owned assets, bringing an “owner’s mentality” to our approach to every project we manage on behalf of third-party owners. 

Scaling Efficiently 
Our team has a track record of creating innovative solutions and processes that make us more efficient and effective. For example, our Operations Engineering team develops knowledge and systems to allow us to troubleshoot equipment remotely. This allows for a more prompt and informed collaboration and response between our C4 Operators and technicians in the field. These capabilities aid in both minimizing truck rolls and making the ones that do take place to be more efficient as technicians arrived armed with knowledge of the fault or issue. 

Leveraging automation, we have also been successful in creating systems that allow us to communicate with equipment, increasing our capabilities to diagnose effectively and adding value to our platform. 

Our experienced people, our technical capabilities, our drive to be more efficient, and our honed processes are what separate us from the competition and have allowed us to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the growing solar O&M industry. To speak directly with a member of Cypress Creek's O&M Services team, please send us a message.