Operations & Maintenance for rooftop solar
The importance of O&M
The Operations & Maintenance (O&M) Best Practices Guide Version 3 was released last week at the annual O&M and Asset Management Conference in London. The latest version, developed by Solar Power Europe together with industry experts, now includes a chapter on distributed solar of which Autarco is very proud to be the leading author.
“You can’t guarantee long term performance of the best products in the world without taking long term care of them.”
- Dan Horan, Autarco CFO
The Guide is an excellent resource and we highly recommend all of our Dealers to take the time to read it carefully. O&M is not only critical to guarantee the long term performance of systems, but is also a huge opportunity for Dealers to develop long term relationship with their customers and generate stable and recurring revenue.
Recognition of Autarco's industry leadership.
The Guide covers key topics such as;
- Key Performance Indicators
- Recommended Response Times
- Innovations and Trends
In recognition of the hard work and expertise provided by Autarco in the development of this chapter, our CFO, Dan Horan, was invited to make a keynote speech to introduce the new chapter. He explained during his presentation, “In the utility sector, asset owners are professionals who are knowledgeable about the risks of solar and have assistance from independent engineering, legal and insurance experts. As a result manufacturers, EPC’s and O&M suppliers are held accountable over the full 25-30 year life of a system. In contrast, distributed/rooftop system owners are preoccupied with other matters and don’t necessarily know the first thing about solar. This is made worse by the traditional distributed supply chain which involves a flow of individually branded components that flow through distributors, installers and then finally to the system owner. In most cases the risk and complexity flow down with the components and accumulate with a system owner who is ill-equipped to deal with them and often forgotten after installation.”
Best practises maximise return on investment.
One of our primary purposes at Autarco is to simultaneously remove that risk from both the system owner and the installers. We do this by remaining a stakeholder in the systems performance:
- Being accountable for the quality and performance of our products.
- Providing the necessary tools to our Partners to ensure the system design, install and financial modelling is done to the highest standard with the highest ease.
- Providing intelligent operations (monitoring, alerting and diagnosis) and asset management (reporting) software to our Partners to enable them to easily provide maintenance services (or outsource if preferred).
- Insuring the risk of lower irradiance and product defects
In partnership with our dealers
We have complete confidence in the quality of our products, we know our partners do a great job on install and design, the final piece is to make sure long term operations and maintenance is done to the same high standards. As Horan states “You can’t guarantee long term performance of the best products in the world without taking long term care of them”. Together with our Dealers we can provide the same level of security and profitability that utility asset owners demand to our rooftop customers. Of course, if Dealers only want to install we can arrange another O&M provider to take over this responsibility.
If you are a solar installer who wants a full service end-to-end hardware and software solution that improves your bottom line, while offering your customers the best proposition in the market please get in touch with us today.
