Video: The value of ‘data on demand’ for smaller C&I solar developers
When buying large quantities of solar panels, making quick decisions is a huge competitive advantage — especially when that solar panel purchase decision provides optimal economic value for the specific project. The sixth episode of Dispatches From the Energy Transition shows how Working Power — a very cool, mission-driven solar developer — is using Anza’s solar module and BESS procurement platform to do just that and scale its organization. You can watch the full webinar right here:
Dispatches is a webinar series from Mayfield Renewables and Outfit. Watch the full Value of Data Demand webinar above to learn how Anza helps the solar + storage industry save time, reduce risk, and increase profits on projects. Or skip to a timestamp below.
- 05:03 – Anza Renewables
- 11:00 – The Anza Platform
- 21:06 – Working Power
- 25:55 – Optimal Development Decisions
- 49:08 – The Value of Data
- 59:10 – Key Takeaways
- 59:52 – Speaker contact information
The next episode of Dispatches, The Promise of Long Duration Energy Storage, will include metal-hydrogen battery providers Enervenue and Storlytics Energy Storage. It is set for Thurs. Dec. 12 at 3 pm ET. Register for that here.
Scaling solar development with optimal decisions
Working Power develops small C&I projects that center climate justice and create strong community benefits. They partner with community organizations, nonprofits, and small contractors that don’t have the capacity to take on 1 MW+ solar projects and usually have to sell them off to larger developers. Ian Fischer, Co-Executive Director of Working Power, explains:
“We offer them a co-ownership and a co-development model where we will do as much of the work as they want us to, but we bring them into the decision making; we bring them into the ownership, and then we try to drive as much of the benefit back as possible into the community.”
Having evolved the company over time, Ian says they’ve “learned how to become project developers, and we realized it’s really hard, especially at these smaller scale projects.”
Fischer gives a lot of the credit for their growth to Anza, allowing them to:
- Gain insight into market pricing instantly, without having to call multiple vendors or distributors
- Receive clear guidance on timelines, technical questions, import considerations, and more
- Access detailed data such as domestic content levels and testing,
- Understand trends in panel pricing and full value of a particular panel for a particular project
The value of data
Mike Hall, CEO of Anza Renewables, has the vision for Anza to be the place the solar and storage industry go to rapidly make design and procurement decisions. The Dispatches discussion focused on the most common use cases for Anza’s platform, and how Anza eliminates manual data collection and analysis, enabling developers to make more financially attractive decisions.
As an example, Hall showed a case study in which a customer had previously gravitated to the lowest price module that meets their vendor counterparty risk criteria.
“They had identified module using some of our data that was low cost. We engaged with them on the procurement and actually got into their project looked at their revenue contract, looked at their locations, so that we could do the production and install cost modeling. What we realized was that by going from the Mono PERC module that they had selected to a TOPCon that we ultimately recommended … while the module is actually a penny more expensive, we estimated that it would save them 1.6 cents per Watt on install cost and the production benefit was pretty massive for their particular PPA contract. That extra production was worth 3.8 cents.”
This customer spent an extra penny to get 4.4 cents of net value.
And it’s really hard to be able to do this math without using the Anza engine because you need to be able to rapidly run production and install cost models, and have all the technical inputs and the pricing inputs to be able to do this.
This is a fairly common, mundane example of what Anza can do. Be sure to watch the full episode for much more insight.
Mayfield Renewables is a technical consultancy providing strategic support for solar and energy storage projects and products. Outfit is a purpose-driven marketing agency built to meet the needs of cleantech and renewable energy companies.
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