Driving Real-Time Data Flow from Edge to Cloud
Stellar Renewable Power, a wholly owned subsidiary of global investment firm KKR, builds and manages large-scale solar power projects for major utilities and corporations across the United States. The installations can span hundreds of acres and cost upwards of $100 million per site. Achieving consistent, optimal power output from these assets is critical to meeting financial projections and maintaining high standards for reliability.
To meet these demands, Stellar developed a proprietary asset management and analytics platform designed to monitor and optimize performance across their growing fleet of solar projects. The system ingests real-time data from the field, enabling analytics and insights that improve uptime, detect underperformance, and ensure return on investment. At the heart of this platform is HiveMQ, which supports the secure, high-throughput movement of operational data from edge devices to cloud-based analytics services.
Solving the Challenge of Distributed Monitoring at Scale
Managing remote solar sites efficiently requires a modern, scalable approach to performance monitoring and data analytics. With each site representing a significant capital investment, Stellar must ensure customers realize strong returns by optimizing performance and minimizing underproduction.
“Some of our solar projects span 500 acres and can cost up to $100 million,” said Arun Sugumaran, Vice President of Asset Management at Stellar Renewable Power. “Because the capital investment is so high, my team’s mission is to ensure those returns are met by maximizing each site’s power output and minimizing underperformance. The best way to do that is through technology—using real-time data to drive better performance.
Stellar set out to build a modern platform that could move real-time data from distributed sites into a centralized analytics environment. The solution needed to be secure, and flexible enough to allow for a two-stage architecture: first to a NERC-compliant data center in Dallas, then to the cloud for long-term analysis and reporting.
Why MQTT and HiveMQ
When Stellar set out to design their IoT architecture, the team chose MQTT as the backbone protocol due to its lightweight design, publish-subscribe model, and suitability for networks with high latency or unreliable connectivity. These attributes made MQTT ideal for solar sites often located in remote or rural areas.
HiveMQ emerged as the preferred MQTT platform based on trusted recommendations from system integration partners, including Inductive and Canary Labs. According to Sugumaran, HiveMQ stood out for its flexibility, ease of adoption, reliable performance, and strong customer support. "The combination of high throughput, security, and a flexible tiered offering made HiveMQ the right choice," he said.
An Integrated Technology Stack
Stellar's platform is built on a robust edge-to-cloud data pipeline:
Edge Connectivity: OPC UA provides data collection from on-site equipment.
MQTT Transport: HiveMQ transports data securely from the Dallas data center to the AWS cloud.
Data Processing: Apache Kafka manages high-throughput streaming needs.
Analytics: Data is stored and processed in Databricks.
Visualization: Additional layers of analytics and dashboards support performance monitoring and business decision-making.
HiveMQ integrates into this stack as the central transport mechanism for secure, real-time data movement. Stellar also uses HiveMQ’s Enterprise Security Extension to meet advanced authorization requirements.
Ready to Scale with Confidence
Though the platform is relatively new, Stellar has already signed MOUs to support multi-gigawatt portfolios and currently manages one gigawatt of solar generation capacity through its system. The team expects that number to grow fivefold, reaching five gigawatts of managed capacity in the near future.
They also plan to onboard up to ten customers by the end of the year, a major milestone given the platform has only been in development for two and a half years.
Sugumaran credits HiveMQ with helping the team stay on track during development.
"Ease of adoption was a major factor in helping us move quickly," he said. "Other parts of our stack presented challenges, but HiveMQ was straightforward. We see it as a key part of our data infrastructure going forward."
HiveMQ continues to play a central role in Stellar’s edge-to-cloud data flow, enabling secure, real-time streaming across a complex, high-performance architecture. As Stellar expands its renewable energy footprint, HiveMQ’s MQTT platform will ensure the company can deliver the fast, reliable data infrastructure needed to optimize output and protect the economics of each solar asset.
