Australian software developer PV Lighthouse has secured nearly AUD 1.97 million ($1.32 million) to develop its SunSolve Yield advanced simulation engine, which is designed to improve yield forecasting for utility-scale solar projects.
Sydney-based startup PV Lighthouse has been awarded AUD 1.97 million by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to fund the continued development of its SunSolve Yield energy and yield modeling platform.
The company said the platform provides a digital twin of the structures and PV modules used in utility-scale solar projects, allowing developers to determine the annual yield of their projects and assess the impact of different weather conditions, locations and mounting structures to research.
Keith McIntosh, founder and CEO of PV Lighthouse and SunSolve, shared pv magazine The company’s software can quickly and accurately answer design questions that previously took months to research and days to calculate.
What is SunSolve Yield and how does it work?
SunSolve Yield is a powerful simulation environment that developers use to model their utility-scale projects more accurately than standard industrial software. SunSolve takes a physics-first approach to reduce the simplifications that currently reduce confidence in yield predictions.
SunSolve Yield allows developers to quickly and easily create a 3D model that accurately represents a system’s structural components and the PV modules themselves. Using SunSolve Yield’s high-quality, physics-based models, developers can determine the annual yield of their solar projects and investigate the impact of different weather conditions, locations and mounting structures.
What are the challenges that SunSolve Yield is trying to solve?
The high level of detail in the SunSolve Yield model means developers can have more confidence in their yield predictions for both internal and project financing purposes. As the cost of financing utility-scale projects escalates due to higher global interest rates, financiers are looking for a greater degree of accuracy and sophistication in their forecasts to reduce financing costs.
Before SunSolve, developers didn’t have a modeling solution that could accurately represent their structures and modules. This meant that they had to estimate various loss factors needed for their return predictions. Now developers can quickly calculate these factors with SunSolve, giving them more confidence in their predictions – a key benefit when negotiating project financing.
Who is already using SunSolve Yield technology?
Released in 2021, SunSolve Yield has already been used by nine of the top 25 developers, five tracking companies, a few large independent engineering firms, and a handful of institutions. Some customers use it to optimize their PV installations, others to improve the accuracy of their yield forecasts, still others to quantify the losses due to shading and mismatch, and the gains due to edge brightening and optimal tracking routines.
The partner product, SunSolve Power, was launched in 2014. It has been used by many of the top module manufacturers to support their R&D, including four of the top five manufacturers. In fact, SunSolve Power subscribers will have shipped approximately half of the global supply of modules by 2023. Some of our better known subscribers include Longi, Trina, Qcells and Maxeon. SunSolve Power has been referenced in more than 100 academic publications.
What can you achieve with this new financing?
The ARENA funding will accelerate the development of SunSolve Yield by hiring additional programmers and researchers. We start by improving the methodology to quantify yield uncertainty. This will help developers and lenders make more reliable forecasts, reducing project risk and therefore financing costs.
Applying that improved methodology, and with feedback from industry partners and customers, we will then extend and validate the physical models – weather, optics, thermodynamics, electronics – that have the greatest potential to reduce uncertainty.
Where do you see the opportunities for PV Lighthouse?
Our flagship product SunSolve Power has helped drive innovation in cell and module research. It has been used by leading cell and module manufacturers to design world record-breaking cells and explore next-generation technologies.
SunSolve Yield is already used by some of the largest and most advanced utility-scale developers. Our goal is to have SunSolve Yield’s refinements applied to the evaluation of any utility-scale project over 100 MW. This will ultimately help reduce financing costs and promote innovation at all levels of the solar industry.
We believe that more accurate predictions lead to better decision making. They enable everyone in the industry to identify the most valuable path forward. Wherever you are in the supply chain, you are faced with choices between competing alternatives. Without an accurate model that rates one choice over another, you might as well be flipping a coin.
What benefits does the platform offer beyond the actual design?
One of the biggest obstacles to the green energy transition is the cost of financing utility-scale projects, that is, the interest developers pay on the loans needed to build their solar projects. To put this barrier into perspective, the cost of financing a project in Australia is half the total cost of a utility-scale project. One reason for the high financing costs is the difficulty of accurately predicting the energy output of a given project before that project is built, and therefore of accurately predicting the project’s future revenues. Therefore, if a lender has little confidence in a project’s returns, it will view the project as risky and offer worse financing terms.
At PV Lighthouse, we believe that our greatest contribution to the PV industry will ultimately increase the confidence lenders have in yield forecasts, reducing the cost of financing the green energy transition.
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