# Solar & Renewable Energy GPS tracking for solar and renewable energy fleets that follows install crews and service trucks from rooftop jobs to utility-scale sites, records panel deliveries and site check-ins, keeps working without cell coverage, and turns every O&M visit into a service record the asset owner can audit. Source: https://www.highpointgps.com/industries/solar-renewable-energy Last updated: 2026-09-21 A solar or wind fleet is really two fleets in one. The install side runs crew trucks, panel delivery trailers and equipment to residential rooftops in the morning and to a utility-scale site an hour past the last cell tower in the afternoon. The operations and maintenance side runs service trucks to sites the company may not own, on contracts that pay per visit and require proof of each one. GPS tracking for solar and renewable energy fleets puts both on the same map. A Geotab GO device in each truck records the trips, the stops and the time on site, and a geofence around each project or each turbine pad writes an arrival and departure record without the crew doing anything. When the site is out of coverage, the device stores the trip and uploads it when the truck is back in range, and the record is complete. Bluetooth asset tags on panel pallets, inverters and the trailers that carry them show which load reached which site. Driver ID ties each trip to a crew lead, and electronic inspections in the Geotab Drive app catch a trailer light or a tire before a delivery is stranded. For the O&M contract, the platform's visit history is the service record: which truck, which technician, how long, at which site. High Point GPS sets the zones, the reports and the offline behaviour up for how a renewable fleet actually works. ## Common problems - Crews spread across residential rooftops and a utility-scale site on the same day, with no single view of who is where - Panel deliveries that arrive at the wrong site, late, or without any record of when the pallet was dropped - Remote wind and solar sites with no cell coverage, where the trip record used to stop at the last tower - O&M contracts that pay per visit and asset owners who ask for proof of each one - No record of site check-in for lone technicians at a substation or a turbine base - Trailers and equipment left at a site for weeks, and nobody sure which site ## Highlights - Live location of every crew truck, service truck and delivery trailer on one map, with each project site drawn as a geofence - Site check-in and check-out records from the geofence, with the crew lead identified through the IOX-NFCREADERA reader - Trips recorded offline at remote sites and uploaded when coverage returns, so the site visit is in the record either way - Bluetooth asset tags on panel pallets, inverters and racking bundles, showing which load reached which site and when - Battery trackers on trailers and skid equipment left at sites between phases, reporting position daily without vehicle power - O&M visit history per site: the truck, the technician, the arrival time and the time on site, exportable for the asset owner - Electronic pre-trip inspections on trucks and trailers in the Geotab Drive app, with defects sent to the shop before departure - Driver scoring and hours reporting for crews on long rural drives, with AI dash cams where the fleet wants the video ## One Map for Rooftops and Utility Sites The install manager's morning starts with the question of which crew is where. Residential jobs are a list of addresses, each one a geofence drawn from the sales order, and the crew truck arriving at one writes the check-in for the whole crew. The utility-scale site is a single large geofence with the laydown yard and the array blocks drawn inside it, and the trucks moving between them show up on the same map. Nobody radios in an arrival; the record is already there. When a customer asks why the crew left at two, the departure record and the trip to the next address answer it. Deliveries are the second question. A pallet of panels that reaches the wrong site costs a day of crew time. Bluetooth asset tags on the pallets and the racking bundles report to the GO device in the truck or trailer carrying them, and the platform shows which tagged load crossed which site geofence. The delivery record has the time the trailer entered the site and the time the tagged pallet stopped moving with it. High Point GPS configures an alert for a tagged load entering a site it was not scheduled for. ## Sites Past the Last Cell Tower Wind sites and utility-scale solar are built where land is cheap, and cell coverage is often the first thing missing. The GO device does not need a connection to record. It logs the trip, the stops, the engine data and the geofence crossings to its own memory, and it uploads all of it the moment the truck is back in coverage. The site visit shows up in MyGeotab an hour or two late, but it shows up complete, with the same arrival and departure times it would have had on a city street. A truck that spends three days on a remote site appears on the map at its last known position, with the trip filling in when it comes out. That matters most for lone technicians. A service tech at a turbine base or a remote inverter station has a check-in record from the geofence, and the platform can flag a truck that entered a site and has not left by the time the ticket said the job would take. The GO RUGGED device fits the side-by-sides and the site vehicles that never leave the project, and battery trackers on the trailers and skid-mounted equipment left between phases report a position each day, which is how a fleet knows the trailer is still at the site it was left at. ![Three-card diagram showing the records a renewable energy fleet gets at a rooftop install, at a remote wind site with no coverage where the trip uploads later, and at an operations and maintenance site where the visit is exported for the owner.](https://www.highpointgps.com/images/guides/solar-renewable-energy.webp) *The same GO device produces a different proof at each kind of site: a tagged delivery on a rooftop, a stored trip at a remote site and a visit record for the O&M contract.* ## The O&M Visit as a Service Record Operations and maintenance contracts on solar and wind assets are written around visits: a scheduled inspection every quarter, a corrective visit within a set number of hours of an alarm, a cleaning cycle. The asset owner wants to know each one happened and how long it took. The platform's geofence history per site is that record. For every visit, it shows the truck, the technician logged in on the NFC reader, the arrival time, the time on site and the departure, and it exports by site and by month for the owner's report. A corrective visit that beat the contract's response time is visible as the alarm time against the arrival record. The same history shows the O&M manager what the contracts cost to serve. Sites that take longer than their scheduled window, technicians whose visits run consistently short and drive time that eats half the day are all in the same report. Engine-hours maintenance keeps the service trucks themselves on schedule, and fault codes from the truck reach the shop as they happen, which matters when the nearest shop to a site is three hours away. ## Long Rural Drives and the Trailer Behind the Truck Renewable crews drive further than most fleets, often before dawn, often pulling a trailer. Driver scoring tuned for that reflects it: speed on two-lane rural roads, hard braking with a loaded trailer, and the long idle at the site gate while the paperwork clears. Trucks that fall under hours-of-service rules run the Geotab Drive ELD on the same device, and the crew's hours are in the same database as the site records. AI dash cams, where the fleet adds them, record the road-facing view of a deer strike on a county road and the driver-facing view of a crew lead nodding off on the way home. The trailer is its own vehicle in the platform. A battery tracker or a tethered GO device on each trailer reports where it is, which truck it is behind and how long it has sat at a site. Electronic DVIR in the Geotab Drive app covers the trailer as well as the truck, with a checklist for lights, tires and the tie-downs on a panel load, and a defect logged at the yard reaches the shop before the crew is on the highway. High Point GPS builds the checklists around the equipment the fleet actually pulls. ## FAQ ### Does it work at sites with no cell coverage? Yes. The GO device records trips, stops, geofence crossings and engine data to its own memory when there is no connection and uploads everything when the truck returns to coverage. The site visit appears in MyGeotab later, but with the same arrival and departure times it would have had otherwise. ### How does it record a site check-in? Each project site or turbine pad is a geofence, and the platform writes an arrival record when a truck enters it and a departure record when it leaves. With the NFC driver ID reader, the record names the technician or crew lead, and no one has to check in by phone or app. ### Can it prove an O&M visit for the asset owner? Yes. The geofence history for each site lists every visit with the truck, the technician, the arrival time and the time on site. It exports by site and by month, and a corrective visit's arrival time can be set against the alarm time to show the contract's response requirement was met. ### How are panel deliveries tracked? Bluetooth asset tags on panel pallets, inverters and racking bundles report to the GO device in the truck or trailer carrying them. The platform shows which tagged load entered which site geofence and when, and can alert dispatch if a load enters a site it was not scheduled for. ### What about trailers and equipment left at a site? Battery-powered trackers on trailers and skid-mounted equipment report a position each day without vehicle power, for months on one charge. The fleet sees which site each trailer is at, how long it has been there and whether it moved, and gets an alert if it leaves the geofence.