The funds will be used to further develop the product and develop AI-based care technology for PV installations. The solution not only helps you take better care of the safety of your installation, but also makes it easier to manage its repairs, thus increasing the return on investment.
Operating since 2017, Solytic has built a strong presence in the German PV market by creating a system for monitoring and analyzing PV panels. Thanks to the Berlin-based team’s solution, both companies offering installations and their customers have access to real-time analysis of the installation, and can increase the sheer lifetime of the panels. The company works with international brands such as Kostal and Vaillant. Together with its partners, Solytic is already monitoring more than 180,000 photovoltaic installations, continuously processing a huge amount of data. In the coming months, the company plans to start operating in our country, and is already actively looking for partners among companies installing photovoltaic panels.
Solytic’s solution based on PV monitoring becomes particularly useful after several years of installation operation. Then a few percent drops in efficiency can quickly accumulate into a multi-percent drop in return on investment. This is a challenge that can be particularly observed in Western markets, such as Germany, where photovoltaic installations became a popular source of energy a little earlier than in Poland. In our home market this problem will become significant and persistent over the next few years, but it is already becoming quite a challenge for some installation owners
The company first developed the monitoring system offered in the SaaS model. At the moment the Solytic 2.0 platform is being intensively developed, in which the connection process has been automated and more emphasis has been put on the development of the analytical tool for the introduction and improvement of the fault diagnosis system. Currently the Solytic team is working on building an AI system that, taking into account individual conditions such as inverter model, installation type, latitude and sunshine, can automatically indicate whether the installation is functioning properly and whether improvements can be made.
Manufacturers will primarily benefit from the white-label analysis platform, which will increase their attractiveness in the eyes of their customers and eliminate the need to develop this type of solution internally. On the other hand, the end user of the installation will receive a system reducing losses and helping to control efficiency, as well as a marketplace created by the company ensuring easy maintenance of the installation.
– Our solution gains a huge advantage due to the wide range of benefits offered to both manufacturers and their customers. Currently, the most popular monitoring tools are systems offered by manufacturers of PV panels or inverters complementary to the panels. These are systems with limited functionality that mainly provide basic plant efficiency parameters. Hardware manufacturers lack competence and strong expertise in software development. Therefore, using Solytic instead of their basic system frees the company from having to build complex software just for their own needs, while providing a better quality product to the end users. It is worth mentioning that during the development of the system for monitoring and analyzing PV panels, we incur costs not only for the construction of the tool, but also significantly higher maintenance costs. – enumerates the benefits of the solution Johannes Burgard CEO & Co-Founder Solytic
– Companies building large PV installations can afford to hire analysts to monitor the performance of the installation and understand when repairs need to be made. For smaller PV installations, from a few KWP to a few dozen KWP, this is of course completely uneconomical. It is to this type of customers and the installers who take care of them that we address our tool. Thanks to our solution, which works in the background, the owners of the installations receive intelligent notifications about the efficiency of the system and suggestions when repairs or improvements should be made. So you could say that Solytic provides a PV analytics service in the form of software. It is also worth mentioning that in Germany there are several hundred thousand installations smaller than 10KWP and this number is growing all the time. With great interest we started to look at the Polish market, which although smaller, is becoming comparable to the German market in terms of the number of small installations. The partnership with SpeedUp fits perfectly into our strategy and provides us not only with capital for further expansion, but also with knowledge of the markets of Central and Eastern Europe. – comments Johannes Burgard CEO & Co-Founder Solytic. At the moment, our main focus is on the development of our panel plant performance analytics model. We monitor more than 180,000 independent distributed PV installations, which translates into a huge database of more than 70 TB, which is delivered to the analytics system in real time. So we are obviously looking forward to expanding our team with Polish specialists in areas such as software engineering and data science,” adds Burgard.
The main task of the Solytic software is to increase the efficiency of PV installations. As a result, it translates into an increased amount of clean energy produced. The solution is in line with the European Commission’s objectives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving the operation of systems that produce electricity without emissions. An additional goal of the German company is to popularize photovoltaic installations by reducing the inconvenience associated with their ownership. By doing so, Solytic wants to attract new customers and thus increase the number of photovoltaic installations in Europe, supporting the development of environmentally friendly electricity production.
– Solytic operates in the fast growing market of distributed photovoltaics. This market has been increasingly profitable for PV manufacturers and installers over the past years. This has given rise to a number of software companies in the market such as Aurora Solar, which is valued at up to $2 billion and helps automate the design process of PV installations. What is more, according to BloombergNEF, the total cost of generating one MWh of electricity from a new project (taking into account the costs of development, construction and equipment, financing, raw materials, operation and maintenance – eng. levelized cost of energy) is globally the lowest for PV solar and has decreased by more than five times in the last ten years. – comments Bartłomiej Gola, Managing Partner of SpeedUp Energy Innovation. Admittedly, photovoltaic installations require less maintenance than, for example, wind installations. However, already after the first few years, the lack of monitoring and maintenance work even for the smallest installations may significantly reduce the return on investment. Solytic comes from the German market, where this problem has already become very important. In our western neighbors, the high rate of new installations was recorded between 2010 and 2015, and consequently many installations are already at least 5 years old. For this reason, Germany was the perfect place to develop this type of technology. In Poland and other countries in the region, this problem will become increasingly important in the coming years and we believe that Solytic will have the best possible solution on the market – adds Gola.
The company plans to reach 260,000 PV units connected to the platform within the next year. Solytic is in the process of raising a round B financing to allow it to scale further globally. The company is currently the market leader in Germany and plans to strengthen its presence in other markets, particularly the EU and the US.
