SunEdison Australia is one of Australias largest companies solely dedicated to solar energy. The Australian business was founded in 2006 and has since installed over 23,000 solar systems on homes, schools and commercial buildings.
The Energy-Management Specialist Solare Datensysteme spoke with Sun Edison about the photovoltaic projects in Australia and the special challenges of the Australian PV market.
a) A brief intro to SunEdison Australia: your company, mission, and ongoing development of relevant customer and market segments
SunEdison Australia is one of Australias largest companies solely dedicated to solar energy; with warehouses around the country and a staff of around 100 people. The Australian business was founded in 2006 and has since installed over 23,000 solar systems on homes, schools and commercial buildings. SunEdison was behind the engineering provision, procurement and construction (EPC) services for Australia's largest single solar rooftop system, 1.23 MW Casuarina Square Shopping Centre in Darwin.
SunEdison is committed to helping Australians live in a world of energy abundance by providing quality solar systems at affordable prices. Its nationwide team of passionate and knowledgeable solar advocates, expert installers and reputable brands are the foundation of its success.
b) How do Solar-Log solutions contribute to monitoring and management of SunEdison Australias growing PV portfolio (also with regard to O&M services)?
Our Solar-Log fleet consists of many different inverter brands from centrals to string, optimisers to micros. The Solar-Log allows us to monitor all the inverter brands we use through one user friendly portal. This is crucial to be able to provide our fleet customers a one stop PV solar monitoring solution as a part of our O&M service, as well as giving us the flexibility to adapt to the ever changing inverter market with minimal teething problems.
c) Can you briefly describe one or two specifically challenging situations where the monitoring and management features of Solar-Log come in handy to support your day-to-day business and to maximise performance?
In some states in Australia, there are zero export rules set out by the distributor. The Solar-Log seamlessly integrates with a Plc to provide an accurate and conforming Ramping solution, ensuring our customers receive the maximum benefits of a PV solar system.
Solar-Logs ability to compare the instantaneous production of trackers across multiple inverters, regardless of model or manufacturer, is instrumental in managing the operations and maintenance of large systems, allowing for production losses of any size to be reliably detected without generating false negatives. Reliability and the elimination of false negatives are essential when managing large fleets of systems, and the support Solar-Log provides makes monitoring fleets a far less labour intensive task.
d) How do you see the development of Australia's commercial PV market in the coming 2-3 years; not least in view of new technological developments such as integrated storage and energy management solutions?
The Commercial PV market in Australia has recently enjoyed strong growth rates, exceeding 50% p.a.; Commercial PV is still a smaller part of the market, 23% of the market according to available estimates (excluding Plus 100kW LGC market), but commercial offers the greater opportunity for experienced players like SunEdison. We expect the small commercial PV market to keep growing, and after a complex 2015 political landscape for large scale solar in Australia, we expect a 2016 including some major large scale solar PV projects, a market that it still to show its potential.
Knowledge, scale and safety are the keys to unlocking the potential of commercial-scale solar projects. Solar developers at advanced stages of experience and scale, will be able to outpace low quality providers that dominated the residential market. SunEdison has 56 years of commercial experience to help customers navigate the complexities of the commercial PV sector.
For Battery Storage, its early days but we expect to see a very rapid adoption rate. We are seeing strong trends towards interest in batteries. The commercial sector will adopt batteries to reduce peak power needs from the grid, and they will also be readily adopted in residential. SunEdison is in a great position to deliver innovative solutions in the sector, being one of the few Tesla Energy Authorized Reseller in Australia. The higher cost of batteries currently mean they have a longer payback at the moment, but that will change in the same way the price of solar units has dropped sharply over time. It hasnt quite hit its sweet spot, but its all moving very quickly.
e) anything you would like to add in view of the growing relevance for professional monitoring in your PV business.
Monitoring systems have become an expected default feature on ever solar PV system development. However we believe that the ability to understand, provide preventive monitoring services and provide professional advice based on the data collected, is the value proposition that high quality developers can offer to ensure the monitoring information is transformed into monitoring insights that can be actively used. Few solar developers in Australia currently have a dedicated team with the skills and capabilities to provide such advance services.
