Origis Energy holds its fleet to a demanding standard: operate every plant at 98% of expected energy or higher. It’s an exacting bar for any operator, and Origis is chasing it at scale. As a leading U.S. developer and operator of utility-scale solar and storage, Origis runs a 24/7 Remote Operations Center (ROC) overseeing roughly 4.6 GW across about 30 sites today, with a development pipeline north of 20 GW, and growing.
Reaching that performance across a fleet that large — and growing that fast — takes more than effort. “Our company goal is to operate each plant at 98% of expected energy or higher,” says Chad Nelson, Senior Director of Digital Technology at Origis Energy, which means hunting down “every little loss of energy, responding to it, and correcting it.” Finding those losses across a portfolio of that size is only possible with the right platform underneath.
For Origis, that platform is Unity Asset Performance Management (APM). Unity APM brings together actionable performance intelligence and automated workflows across Origis' entire portfolio of assets, turning data into insights that teams can act on.
Unity APM ingests SCADA, inverter, and BESS data into a single performance model, then automatically detects and categorizes losses, vegetation, soiling, DC-side degradation, and curtailment -- before a plant falls short of expectations. Configurable dashboards and heat maps turn those signals into a prioritized queue highlighting which assets, which loss types, and which actions close the gap fastest. That's the mechanism behind a 98% target: monitoring that tells a team exactly where to look.
Golden Triangle I Solar + Storage Lowndes County, MS (image courtesy of Origis Energy)
A performance standard only holds if everyone is measuring against the same numbers, whether they're responsible for real-time operations, performance engineering, fleet-level oversight or stakeholder management. As portfolios expand and tools multiply, that gets harder: the same plant can show up differently in different reports, causing teams to spend their time trying to understand discrepancies, instead of solving issues.
“Your leadership team is looking at different numbers from different groups, and you don’t know which ones to trust,” Nelson says. Processing and calculating data across disconnected point solutions, he found, “was causing more harm than good.” So Origis made a deliberate call: put its effort into one trusted, unified platform, and make those the numbers the entire business runs on, from the control room to the boardroom.
The payoff is confidence. With everyone reading the same data the same way, the “which number is right?” debate disappears. “With Unity APM, every one of our teams is working on the same page,” Nelson says. And a team that trusts its data is a team that can act on it.
Origis is now pushing that same exacting standard further back in an asset’s life. The company now aims to have new plants live on Unity APM before the plant's commercial operation date (COD), rather than coming online months after the plant does, so the platform is watching before day one.
The reason is straightforward: the earliest weeks of a plant’s life are when problems are both most common and most fixable. If issues go unseen until data catches up, the losses compound. “Not only did we lose that energy for those three or four months,” Nelson notes of the old way, “but we lost the opportunity to go back to the EPCs while they still have boots on the ground to repair some of the issues.”
Making that possible is an implementation goal, not an accident. Origis structures its Unity deployment to come online in lockstep with the plant — configuring sites and validating data early, so that when the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor’s crews are still on-site, Unity APM is already surfacing what needs their attention. It’s the difference between catching a defect under warranty and living with it for years.
Rice Creek Solar, Putnam County, FL (image courtesy of Origis Energy)
That standard lives or dies in the ROC, where operators turn signals into action. Unity APM’s configurable dashboards, heat maps, and event categorization surface what’s actually costing energy or revenue instead of burying operators in noise.
Unity APM's event categorization does much of the triage for him: “Instead of having to go digging for it, I already know that I can go to event categorization and see the losses.”
Johnson and his team were early adopters of Unity REMI (Renewable Energy Management Intelligence), the native AI engine embedded across the Unity suite. REMI is critical to the ROC’s day-to-day workflows, surfacing answers in seconds when users need to dig deeper on calculations. “I use REMI a lot,” Johnson says, “because it has the definitions whenever you pull up any metadata or data signal, including just pulling up the straight equation or a logic-based flow path from Power Factors documentation.” Work that once meant digging through documentation for anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours now surfaces on demand.
The hunt for lost energy doesn't stop at the control room. Unity APM's dashboards give field technicians the same visibility engineers rely on, including DC-side health issues that are easy to miss, like an inverter that's online and running but quietly underproducing.
"Our field technicians are telling us, 'This one dashboard is giving me a lot of insight into how this plant is performing, especially DC health,'" Nelson says. "Getting our performance data into a platform that displays that in a way that lets you identify those issues is something I've seen our field technicians really benefit from."
When an issue needs a truck roll, the same event can generate a work order directly in Unity Field Service Management. Operators simply create or assign a work order straight off the event log. One unified system carries the signal from the ROC to the crew on-site – all pointed at the same goal.
Swift Air Solar, Ector County, TX (image courtesy of Origis Energy)
Technology can only take an operator so far. What Nelson credits for the rest is direct access to the people behind it, and it’s the difference he points to most emphatically.
“A lot of vendors set up a wall around their highly skilled folks, but Power Factors doesn’t do that with Unity,” he says. “It makes a meaningful difference to have that level of access to expertise.” At Origis, complex implementation questions didn't disappear into a queue: “Back and forth on a ticket just doesn’t cut it” with highly specific configuration issues, Nelson says. Instead, his team worked directly with Power Factors’ experts. People who understand the platform at a level that actually resolves the problem, rather than “talking to someone that doesn’t really know how the platform calculates things on the back end.” That access, he says, “is by far the biggest game changer for us.”
Johnson sees the same thing from the operator’s seat. “I definitely appreciate the Power Factors team a lot,” he says of the Power Factors experts who join his team’s weekly calls. “They really make a difference as far as understanding the platform, helping with configurability, and helping everybody succeed in understanding the why behind the problems.”
Ninety-eight percent is a target that gets harder to hit as a fleet grows, and every new plant raises the stakes. For Origis, the combination of a single trusted platform, intelligence that reaches every team, and a partnership built on real expertise is what makes the standard achievable and repeatable across every gigawatt it adds.
Ready to see what a single source of truth could do for your portfolio? Request a demo or talk to your Power Factors team.