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PART 2 The Energy company of the future: Use case - photovoltaic powerplant - preparing the offer and signing the contract

4 min read •

Product manager for Utility and Energy solutions

One ESCO product is a photovoltaic powerplant. The whole photovoltaic powerplant lifecycle con-sists of three major phases:

design & installation,
operation & maintenance,
decommissioning & recycling.

Read the first part here.

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Photovoltaic powerplant ESCO lifecycle.

The focus of the ESCO company is on the first two phases, where industry-specific knowledge and experience can impact the project performance and benefit the customer and supplier. Design & Installation Design & installation is a very intensive process where we do all the design and installation of the new equipment and arrange all the necessary paperwork for obtaining an operating permit. During this stage, we must correctly capture all the information required to properly design and scale the project so that performance meets expectations.

Preparing the offer and signing the contract

1. Information catalogue needed to calculate an offer for the ESCO project

Before every ESCO project, it is wise to carry out a targeted energy audit to determine project po-tential and calculate all aspects of the ESCO project. For this purpose, we send a field technician to inspect the site and gather all necessary information. The technician is provided with the guided process flow to capture all the required information and to avoid potential mistakes. We can sup-port this functionality through a Dynamics 365 support for field service module, which can provide a guided checklist and the possibility of supplementary data simply by using internal mobile device resources such as a camera, GPS location, and an internal gyroscope. The platform automatically saves all captured information to the cloud for further use by the engineers designing the solution.

Every ESCO product has its specifics, so different information catalogues must be filled out de-pending on the project. If the project contains more than one ESCO product, we must combine information catalogues to cover all information needed for a project and avoid duplication of in-formation gathering. For the Photovoltaic powerplant, the following information catalogue is re-quired.

2. Client information

The client information section contains all the client information needed to perform credit checks and billing. The client can also be the site owner, but it is not obligatory. This part of the information catalogue is common to most ESCO products.

Example: Contact and owner details

3. Site information

ESCO products are, in most cases, location-dependent, so we must gather location-specific data. The set of data depends on the actual ESCO product category. This data will determine the offer’s scope and supplement the requested documents.

Example: Location information photovoltaic specific.

In some cases of ESCO products, in addition to all data, customers must also prepare copies of specific documents such as:

a copy of the monthly electricity bills,
a copy of the building permit,
a copy of the identity document (including co-owners)

Furthermore, we must provide photographs from different angles of an installation location for some ESCO products, for example, pictures of the roof from three different angles and shots of the electricity meter from which all technical markings of the meter must be visible.

Example: Photograph of electricity meter with all technical markings visible

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4. Site owners‘ information

Some ESCO products are permanently installed on a property and connect to the infrastructure, so we need to obtain the owners‘ authorisation for installing them. We must support the tracking of location owners and if they have agreed with the installation of the ESCO product (answer pend-ing, disagreed, agreed)

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About the Author

Matej Fröhlich Novkovič