Gabe Abbott, director of business development at Locus Energy.
In a recent webinar Gabe Abbott, director of business development at Locus Energy, offered four predications he saw for the future of solar monitoring. Here’s a recap of his presentation. You can watch the full webinar here.
1. Deeper cross-band technical integrations
Abbott believes the industry will start to see deeper technical integrations to help streamline business processes even more. This can cover everything from O&M to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and asset management. “Monitoring providers need to recognize that they may not be able to build the best ERP and CRM system within their platform, and their customers may not want them to do that,” he said. The same thing goes for O&M and asset management. “There may be other providers that their customers would rather use. As a monitoring provider, I think it’s important to be open to building out those integrations with third party platforms and services so that your customers can get the full value of those elements and the best solution for their business use case.”
2. Financers are more interested in fleet analytics
Abbott expects fleet analytic capabilities will continue to evolve and improve. “We’ve seen a lot of advancement in this realm and monitoring players and other players that are coming to the forefront in terms of having these capabilities,” he explained. Continuing providing deeper insights into causes of underperformance will also be of particular interest to the financial community. “Financial communities are becoming more engaged in discussions, and want to understand more what the characteristics of solar are, as well as what insights one can drive out of the performance data. They want to understand how they should expect these assets to perform over the long term especially since this is still a very, very young industry.”
3. Increased inverter control requirements
Inverter control requirements are increasingly seen on large-scale sites and even some smaller sites down to the rooftop level. “We’re already seeing some providers allowing control of their products via third party integration,” Abbott said.
4. Monitoring working with storage
Lastly, Abbott discussed how monitoring will work with increased storage and home area network devices. “As homes incorporate more smart devices, the monitoring companies will need to figure out how they fit in the picture, and whether they are the brain or an important component that talks to the other pieces,” he said. “This will be one of the interesting developments to watch over the next couple of years. “It’s certainly an exciting time for monitoring.”
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