Le Moule: 7,704 modules checked by thermography, together with Antilles Drone
The Creuilly ground-mounted photovoltaic plant in Le Moule has 7,704 modules. We first inspected it by thermography in October 2022, then in December 2024 and November 2025. The last two campaigns were flown by our Guadeloupe partner Antilles Drone, on missions prepared by Sentinel, which processed the images and wrote the report.
Ready-to-fly missions
The quality of a thermal survey is decided before the flight. On 3 November 2025 we sent Antilles Drone’s team two programmed thermal missions, at 34 m above ground for 3 cm per pixel in infrared, with the White Hot palette and a sensor calibration on the first panel at every flight, together with the footprint of the visible orthophoto: 80% overlap, slight underexposure, shutter speed of at least 1/400 s. At 70 m the visible camera gave 1.92 cm per pixel. Antilles Drone measures irradiance with a solarimeter and does not fly below 600 W/m², the threshold under which defects do not show well.
The flights took place on 5 November, under an irradiance of 906 W/m². The report, issued on 7 November, classifies the defects by type, module by module.
Comparing campaigns
With three campaigns, the plant can be compared with itself, category by category: hotspots, constellations, module defects, string faults, shading by vegetation. For each category the report gives the number of modules affected and their share of the plant. From one campaign to the next, the change in these figures points maintenance either towards the modules themselves or towards the strings.
Why a local partner
Sending a team and its equipment from Martinique or French Guiana is expensive and depends on commercial flights, on which the batteries of heavy drones are not accepted. By entrusting acquisition to a Guadeloupe operator who applies our instructions, we keep control of the result and cut lead times: two days passed between the flights and the report.
