Sunco saves 20+ hours/week with pvPlanner

sunco

Highlights

Country

Spain

Product

pvPlanner

PV stages

Project Development

Highlights

  • Managing assets of USD 9.6 billion
  • Highly experienced team
  • International track record

About Sunco

Sunco is a global clean energy company led by a team with an exceptional track record. The Sunco team has a combined experience in project development of 4.8 GW, construction of 2 GW and operation of 8 GW of renewable energy projects across the globe. Besides offering EPC and asset management services, Sunco also has its own investment platform greenfield and brownfield solar projects. Sunco’s main markets are Latin America, Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The challenge

“As Sunco’s business development pipeline grew with its investment platform, we quickly moved from evaluating 100 MW of project opportunities per week to evaluating 1 GW of project opportunities. At this point we knew that we needed a very efficient process for our pre-feasibility analysis”

Bernat de Miguel, Business Development Associate at Sunco.

The solution

Bernat’s colleague was already familiar with Solargis through previous employment and recommended Bernat to try Solargis pvPlanner. Working with pvPlanner was much easier and faster than other methods.

Bernat found that he just had to pick the location of the site and put in a few other details such as nominal capacity, type of modules, efficiency of inverters and estimated losses. Within 3-4 minutes he would have reliable results ready to download and use as inputs for financial calculations.

“We've been using Solargis for a while successfully, and it has changed the way we work, for good” says Bernat.

“With the pvPlanner, Sunco is able to perform over 100 simulations weekly. Each simulation takes only 2 to 5 minutes. pvPlanner is very intuitive.” Bernat de Miguel, Business Development Associate at Sunco

The results

For a relatively small annual fee, pvPlanner saves Bernat 20+ hours each week which he can use on other tasks. Solargis pvPlanner also offers many other advantages over the combination of PVsyst and Meteonorm, the default meteorological database in PVsyst.

Sunco is very active in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia. Meteonorm database is based on older methodologies and lower quality data inputs that could result is model estimates deviating significantly from reality in these regions. The high uncertainty of solar resource estimates from Meteonorm poses a significant risk to organizations such as Sunco.

Solargis uses high resolution data inputs and advanced methods for modeling solar resource. The Solargis database has been validated extensively and is proven to be most accurate solar radiation data source. The low uncertainty of Solargis data helps Sunco to reduce early-stage development risk.

Solargis pvPlanner also provides information on optimal tilt angle and takes into consideration horizon shading – a useful feature when modeling energy output of PV power plants in areas with hilly terrain.