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Every day, thousands of solar sector leaders make critical decisions affecting the trajectory of their businesses. From project financing to asset sales, access to reliable data on project performance is key to understanding the true value of solar assets and making profitable business choices.
We spoke to Solargis’ CEO Marcel Suri to learn how Solargis Analyst simplifies and standardises data analysis to foster a culture of high-quality resource data in the solar sector, and why it is so important for solar decision makers to be able to trust the data underpinning their growth strategies.
I have two roles – managing the company and overseeing the key company processes. In the business of solar consultancy, high-level executives often perform the final review of deliverables. I feel it is very important to ensure Solargis continues to deliver at the highest level of accuracy.
When looking at a dataset, Solargis Analyst allows me to quickly open the project and determine how the data has been processed by my colleagues. This gives me peace of mind that any anomalies have been dealt with unlike with Microsoft Excel files where you have little to no control. For managers, it is important to have quick access to project files to verify results easily and in a standardised way.
Solargis Analyst has a transformational effect on our processes and procedures, allowing a level of standardisation which wasn’t possible before. Instead of using ad hoc solutions, team members are empowered to follow set pathways to achieve reliable results. Solargis Analyst means no oversights, no shortcuts, only guidance and documents logged along the way. As a decision maker, you can rest easy knowing that each task meets company standards.
At the top of the chain, you rely on teams delivering work in a standardised format so that you can make wider strategic decisions quickly and easily. For crucial documentation, such as energy simulation, performance evaluation outputs, forecast analysis and financial reports, the industry needs to get to a point where you have a trusted and standardised data analysis outputs attached to the report to aid decision makers – a mark of quality.
The analysis output reports are designed to show the level of detail relevant for the discussion without opening topics that can distract from the decision making.
Solargis Analyst, therefore, is a toolbox that can directly integrate into business-wide standards, as well as data analysis work.
Compared with existing approaches of solar data quality control, Solargis Analyst leads to a dramatic reduction of time for analysts, as well as increasing transparency and traceability throughout the business. It reduces tedious, boring work, which might encourage mistakes, and instead empowers skilled employees to add value.
Solargis Analyst also means more accurate outputs for energy yield calculations and operational performance checks, allowing business leaders to confidently justify investment decisions.
A key industry pain point – one that we hear often from customers – is the lack of solar specific data handling tools.
They may have good data, but they need the right tools to extract value. The industry also needs a way to highlight best practice data, tools, processes and responsibilities. With these, you can create a strong culture of data quality, backed with control systems.
Without those tools, you need to build your own ones using software – usually Python or macros in Excel. But such tools have various limitations. One may encounter a challenge that is beyond the knowledge or experience of a particular data operator, but pressure or desire to complete the job means mistakes creep in. It’s human nature. Solargis Analyst ensures that new team members are onboarded correctly, and that standards remain consistent.
Every company that deals with data in the solar industry should have a set of data tools designed to solve their specific tasks. Today, Microsoft Office is used by almost every single company as a basic productivity tool. Going forward, companies need a standardised software package to efficiently manage the data acquisition and analysis. Solargis Analyst is primed to play this role as the industry continues to mature in its approach to data.
As part of this evolution, data processing and the interpretation of results will become more automated. Solargis Analyst starts as a semi-manual set of tools, but we invested into a dedicated team working on automating and streamlining the processes. In time, we can expect that data analysis will eventually leave the domain of manual work altogether, freeing up analysts to delve into pre-processed data to extract key insights and add further value to businesses in this burgeoning sector.
Solar assets are becoming more complex. More data types are being used to sharpen the understanding the asset owners have of their project sites: from solar resource, temperature, albedo to precipitation. Solargis Analyst helps solar Data Analysts compare datasets easily and extract insights faster. To find out more about the new Solargis Analyst platform and explore how it can boost productivity for your solar data team, get in touch at https://solargis.com/about-us/contact
