• 50 MW
• De Aar, South Africa
• Power 19 000 Homes

De Aar Solar Power is a 50 MW PV facility and is one of the first utility scale solar plants on the African continent. The plant is located about 5 km outside the town of De Aar in the Northern Cape, on about 100 hectares of land. The plant uses 167 580 photovoltaic panels to produce approximately 85 GWh per year. This is enough energy to meet the annual needs of about 19 000 average South African homes.

This is another project which has helped me gain knowledge in the renewable energy field. Some of the tasks I have undertaken at this site are:

• Managed, monitored and optimised maintenance systems and infrastructure 
• Facilitated and conducted workshops for the reviewing of asset care plans to ensure that the correct maintenance activities are carried out on plant equipment
• Optimised the maintenance plans to ensure that preventive maintenance activities are carried out thus reducing the frequency of corrective maintenance and thereby improving plant availibilty
• Ensured that all asset care plans are configured and generated within the CMMS (Computerised Maintenance Management System)
• Standardised the planning and scheduling of maintenance activities with other solar plants. Also ensured that the CMMS is used to plan tactical and non-tactical work
• Performed data quality inspections on work orders by reviewing work order feedback and ensuring that RCA’s (Root Cause Analysis) are conducted for critical assets
• Ensured that there is a comprehensive equipment register of all assets which is up to date with new acquisitions, disposals, all asset movements and asset information changes
• Identified critical spares and developed spare part strategies to ensure availability of spare parts for maintenance activities
• Reported on spare parts usage on a monthly basis
• Developed the equipment tree for the solar plant
• Responsible for running the overall project of linking spares to objects in the equipment tree 
• Populated the asset management scorecard on a monthly basis and presented this to the asset management committee
• Ensured that all maintenance and spare part reports are generated within the CMMS and sent out to the relevant stakeholders on a weekly basis
• Provided training and support to all technical staff on the usage of the CMMS
• Supported all requests from staff around the CMMS: Asset Care Plan Changes, Equipment Register Changes, Maintenance plan updates, Rotable Management and System Administration (adding new users, changing roles and user rights)
• Performed data migration between 2 CMMS’s