The Digital Transformation of a Solar-Power Business
The global market of the solar-energy system has grown over 20% since 2012, which is more than 3 million units installed. Photovoltaic (PV) investments have taken off much faster than expected.
Industry | Energy
Opportunity
Today over a billion people have no access to electricity. There is steady progress made in this area, but the figure is still forecasted to be at 500 Million by 2020. Expanding the power grid may be part of the solution but is not sustainable and the only one. Many countries are exploring and effectively adopting off-grid solutions. The global market of the solar-energy system has grown over 20% since 2012, which is more than 3 million units installed. Photovoltaic (PV) investments have taken off much faster than expected. There is compression of costs throughout the solar-energy system, from sourcing raw materials to manufacturing to installation and service.
With governments, corporates and small firms all considering solar as a viable alternative, the industry is witnessing a massive demand for solar projects across the world. This need for sustainable power solutions provides an immediate business opportunity in the current market.
Dare
This Solar-energy power company (Crinis Power) with offices in India and Wyoming was founded with a mission to provide reliable solar power at affordable rates to consumers. They pioneered solar financing and EPC models to optimize solar installation costs in India. For better economics, they wanted to extend their financial model to investors and fund private solar projects with PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) of different tenures and IRRs. They called upon Synapse to build the underlying technology platform to support their business development and logistics management efforts.
Transformation Value-Chain
Discover
Working with the C-Suite of the company, the Synapse team analyzed the company portfolio and operational processes. The team focused on developing some fast levers for business development.
A few critical findings during this exercise were that the company could have a higher sales conversion rates if they could provide a quick turn around on cost-benefit analysis, prediction on the energy-production scale and a mobile interface for customers to monitor savings and power generation on a real-time basis. The mobility of such a solution was an essential ingredient of winning customer trust and satisfaction during and after the sales process.
In order to scale the technology up, it was equally desirable to utilize a cloud platform that would provide scale at a reasonable cost.
” With Google Cloud Platform, Crinis is improving efficiency and speed, gathering and analyzing billions of data points to support better environmental decision-making “
Chief Technology Officer, Crinis Power
Impact
Synapse team created a comprehensive application leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including a feature-rich Android mobile application allowing energy buyers and project investors to assess location-specific Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI), Energy-generation forecast algorithm, and an economic computational engine to provide real-time profit and loss, and cash-flow forecasts based on different debt-equity combinations. This application allowed our client to expedite deal-sourcing, deal-closure, and asset management activities significantly.
The scalability of cloud services allowed the supporting technology stack to scale effortlessly across different regions.