An example of 3-D shading analysis from Bright Harvest.
If your sales pipeline is thick with opportunity, but your design team is running thin, a residential-solar design service may be the solution. One such company, Bright Harvest, uses remote shading analysis to design layouts for residential PV installers.
NREL recently analyzed the company’s remote shading analysis technology. In a report, researchers said their investigation found “a high level of scientific equivalency between the remotely-calculated values completed by Bright Harvest and on-site measurements taken by NREL for multiple residential sites.”
The report said soft costs have become a major driver of PV system prices, and aggressive soft-cost-reduction strategies must be developed to achieve Department of Energy goals for PV prices. The SunShot Initiative aims to reduce the total installed cost of solar energy systems to $.06 per kWh by 2020.
NREL estimates software solutions, including remote site assessment and improved bid preparation software, could save installers an estimated $.17/W for residential systems when used at scale. Although NREL did not certify the soft cost savings of Bright Harvest products, the estimated savings of this type of tool, deployed at market scale, would probably impact soft costs to a similar degree.
In designing solar layouts for residential installers, Bright Harvest uses high-resolution aerial imagery to build 3-D models of a site, including on and off-roof shading.
The company uses its software to run a detailed shading analysis with per-module resolution for every part of the roof where a module will fit. Using this information, Bright Harvest designs two PV module layouts based on customer preferences: a layout with a target system size and a layout showing all possible module locations on the roof.
According to CEO Joel Lusk, Bright Harvest lets installers:
- not get up on the roof until day one of the install
- know what the system will produce per-module
- supply the funder with those figures (if financed)
- give the sales person the optimized design to finalize the contract
- add our scaled site plan to the permit set
- know the system can be built as designed
For more information: www.brightharvestsolar.com
