A solar irradiance simulation from the Aurora Solar design software.
Solar Power World caught up Christopher Hopper, co-founder of the solar design platform Aurora Solar to learn more about the company’s product and what he hopes to share with attendees at Intersolar North America. This is what Hopper had to say:
SPW: What will you be sharing with the Intersolar audience when they stop by the Aurora Solar (booth No. 7237)?
Hopper: We will be demonstrating how solar installers can boost their sales, perform sophisticated engineering design and streamline their operations using Aurora. We will be giving demonstrations of our software to anyone interested in learning how Aurora can meet the needs of his or her organization.
Sophisticated solar design software seems like a no-brainer, but how much of the residential solar industry is actually using a program like yours?
It is becoming clear that in order to stay relevant in the market, all installers will need to use some sort of software that helps the streamline their sales and design process. Looking at our case, since launching in January of this year, Aurora has been used to design over 550 MW worth of PV installations. We are now processing over 1,000 projects a week from a growing number of solar installers across the US and overseas.
Our clients are flocking to Aurora for many reasons: Some clients want to win more jobs by generating professional sales proposals with beautiful 3D visualizations. Others want to easily perform sophisticated financial analysis. Everyone wants to reduce truck roll by remotely performing shading analysis. Once they seal the deal, clients want to save time by automatically generating single line drawings of their system designs. One of Aurora’s key selling points is you can do all of these things in one place with just a few keystrokes.
Is the Aurora Solar program more of a prospecting tool or a final-step design tool?
Aurora is a one stop application for both of those functions. Our clients go from prospecting through sales and final engineering in less than 15 minutes.
In your opinion, what’s the most impressive functionality of your program?
We think it is our remote shading analysis. Since we launched the feature Aurora’s shading analysis has been used on over 20,000 sites globally. Several of America’s top 10 solar installers rely on it for calculating solar access percentages and deciding where to place modules. We think our proposal generation is a close second – you can create custom, beautiful proposals with 3D visualizations of the installation within a matter of minutes.
More design tools are coming onto the market for aforementioned reasons: how can a solar installation firm choose a program that’s best for them?
It is important to select an integrated one-stop application – otherwise you will waste a lot of time trying to cobble together several different solutions. Solar installers needs to ask themselves: Which product makes my life easier? What application is easy to use and has strong customer support? Which product helps me create efficiencies, scale my business and drive more revenue? At the end of the day that is all that matters.
How can firms learn more about your product and services?
Visit our website (www.aurorasolar.com) and request an invitation to Aurora.
