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Australian software development company PV Lighthouse has secured nearly $1.32 million to support the development of its SunSolve Yield advanced simulation model, designed to improve performance forecasting for large-scale PV projects.
Sydney-based PV startup Lighthouse has received A$1.97 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to fund the continued development of its SunSolve Yield power and performance simulation model.
According to the company, the platform offers a digital twin of the PV modules and structures used in utility-scale solar projects, allowing developers to determine the annual performance of their projects and study the impact of different weather conditions, locations and mounting structures.
Keith McIntosh, founder and CEO of PV Lighthouse and SunSolve, told pv magazine that the companys software enables rapid and accurate answers to design questions that previously took months of research and days of calculations.
What is SunSolve Yield and how does it work?
SunSolve Yield is a powerful simulation environment that developers use to model their large-scale projects more accurately than industry-standard software. SunSolve takes a physics-based approach to limit simplifications that currently reduce confidence in yield forecasts.
With SunSolve Yield, developers can quickly and easily create a 3D model that accurately represents a system’s structural components and the PV modules themselves. With SunSolve Yield’s high-performance, physics-based models, developers can determine the annual yield of their solar projects and explore the impact of different weather conditions, locations, and mounting structures.
What challenges does SunSolve Yield aim to solve?
The SunSolve Yield model’s high level of detail enables developers to have greater confidence in their yield forecasts, both for internal and project finance purposes. As the cost of financing large-scale projects increases with rising global interest rates, investors are seeking greater levels of forecast accuracy and sophistication to reduce the cost of financing.
Before SunSolve, developers did not have a design solution that could accurately represent their structures and modules. This meant they had to guess at many of the loss factors required for their performance forecasts. Developers can now quickly calculate these factors with SunSolve, giving them greater confidence in their forecasts – a key advantage when negotiating project financing.
Who is already using SunSolve Yield technology?
Launched in 2021, SunSolve Yield has already been used by nine of the top 25 developers, five monitoring companies, a couple of large independent engineering firms, and a handful of institutes. Some customers use it to optimize their PV plants, others to improve the accuracy of their yield forecasts, others to quantify losses due to shading and mismatch, and gains due to edge clearing and optimal monitoring routines.
Its companion product, SunSolve Power, was launched in 2014. It has been used by many of the leading module manufacturers to assist with their R&D, including four of the five largest manufacturers. In fact, SunSolve Power customers shipped nearly half of the world’s module supply in 2023. Some of our most well-known partners include Longi, Trina, Qcells, and Maxeon. SunSolve Power has been cited in over 100 academic publications.
What will you achieve with this new financing?
Arena funding will accelerate SunSolve Yields development by hiring more programmers and researchers. We will start by improving the methodology for quantifying yield uncertainty. This will help developers and investors make more reliable forecasts, reducing project risk and therefore the cost of financing.
By applying this improved methodology, and with feedback from industry partners and customers, we will expand and validate physical, meteorological, optical, thermodynamic and electronic models with greater potential to reduce uncertainty.
What opportunities do you see for PV Lighthouse in the future?
Our flagship product, SunSolve Power, has helped drive innovation in cell and module research. Leading cell and module manufacturers have used it to design world-record-breaking cells and explore next-generation technologies.
SunSolve Yield is already being used by some of the largest and most sophisticated utility-scale developers. Our aim is for the sophistication offered by SunSolve Yield to be applied to the evaluation of any project over 100 MW. Ultimately, this will help reduce the cost of financing and foster innovation at all levels of the solar industry.
Our view is that more accurate forecasts lead to better decision making. They enable everyone in the industry to identify the most valuable path forward. No matter where you are in the supply chain, you have to choose between competing alternatives. Without an accurate model that weighs one option against another, its like flipping a coin.
What advantages does the platform offer beyond the design itself?
One of the biggest barriers to the transition to renewable energy is the cost of financing large-scale projects – the interest developers pay on the loans required to build their solar projects. To put this barrier into perspective, the cost of financing a project in Australia is half the total cost of a utility-scale project. One reason for the high financing costs is the difficulty of accurately predicting the energy performance of a given project before it is built and therefore accurately predicting the future revenues of the project. Thus, if an investor has little confidence in the revenues of a project, they will view it as risky and offer poorer financing terms.
At PV Lighthouse, we believe our greatest contribution to the PV sector will ultimately be to increase lender confidence in revenue forecasting, thereby reducing the cost of financing the transition to renewable energy. |
