Off-Grid quotes
Hi guys,
What is the best way to quote an off-grid system on Open Solar? The charts, figures and financial reports take into account a grid connected system.
Regards,
Tarcisio
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Commento ufficiale
Hi Tarcisio,
Thanks for writing in! There are some settings in the proposal that you would want to turn off for an off grid system. An example of the proposal settings (Control>Purchase Experience>Proposal Template>Edit>Proposal Settings) for an off grid proposal could look like this:
In Studio>Advanced settings you can also set the export limit to be 0 which would mean that all of the excess energy would be limited and there would be no export to grid.
Hope this helps. Feel free to let me know if you have further questions.
Kind regards,
Dion
Azioni per commenti -
Hi Dion,
Yes sure! I have some suggestions:
1) I think it would be useful having personalised energy flow charts (for example, excluding the grid side).
2) The customer is isolated and cannot sell or buy energy to/from the grid. Although, I believe we could find a new way to include the bill savings on their quote. For example, we could keep the "Electricity Bill Savings chart", but remove the "New Bill" column, as they are not connected to the grid anymore. This way, the customer can have an idea of how much they would be spending and how much they are going to save in 20 years.
3) I think we could also keep the financial impact on it. Of course, we would have to adapt the parameters that are being considered as they will not be buying/selling energy from the grid in any scenario. But, once we know the initial cost and how much they are "saving", it should be enough.
4) Sometimes, the customer will opt to go with solar because the cost to build a transmission line to their place is too expensive. So, if the customer has provided a quote for it, I think we could include this price in the financial impact as well. Maybe, comparing the payback of being connected to the grid to the proposed off-grid system could be beneficial.
5) I know you gave a "shortcut" to me as a solution (and it worked well), but I think it would be more effective having an option to be able to tick and say "it's off-grid" and then all the information that is not necessary is automatically excluded or adapted. Such as, export limit, feed-in tariff, energy flow chart, etc.
Just some thoughts, but I hope it can be useful.
Regards,
Tarcisio Prest Bernabe
TFA Solar
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Hi Tarcisio,
Thanks very much for taking the time to write this out. Regarding your points for 2 and 3. I think you are definitely right that you could leave the financial benefit in, if you were to change the proposed tariff. You could change the proposed tariff on the projects page to be a custom empty tariff which has no charges or export rates.
Number 4, again could be taken care of by editing the current tariff to add the cost of being connected to the grid as a fixed cost.
Thank you again for taking the time to put this down. I will be sure to pass this on.
Kind regards,
Dion
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Hi Dion, could you explain how to do the number four? I wasn't able to find this "fixed amount". Actually, I've seen a way to include regular fixed prices (daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly), which considers an increase in energy cost each year, due to trends in the raising cost of energy.
In fact, this is not exactly what I meant. For example, I have a customer, who lives in a remote place and has to opt between being connected to the grid or buying a stand alone system. In the first case, he has to spend a lot of money to bring energy to his place, i.e building the entire utility infrastructure (distribution lines, transformers, etc.). Let's say it costs $100k. He can pay that in cash upfront or in 20 years, for example (20 parcels of $5k). This amount will not be affected by the energy cost inflation each year.
Following, the second option, which is going off-grid, is $50k, for example. Well, it's cheaper and we know it's viable. However, without considering the first option, his payback period, ROI, etc... is going to be huge or even economically unfeasible.
So, can you guys do something about it?
I hope I was clearer when explaining this time. =)
Tarcisio
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Hi Tarcisio,
Thanks for reaching out again and apologies that I wasn't more helpful in my original description.
One other way that you could show the savings from choosing to go with an off grid system would be to create an Other Component which has additional costs like this:
And then this would be incorporated into the ROI for your off grid proposal. This would also show under the quotation table like this:
Would something like this work for you?
Kind regards,
Dion
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