Navigating Challenges in Renewable Energy Markets

Rising costs, increased competition, and regulatory uncertainty are the main factors that are leading many Renewable energy (RE) producers to feel the squeeze.

Meanwhile, an estimated 70% of renewable assets still are not reaching their performance targets. Clearly, this inefficiency has to be addressed by asset owners and managers and the industry as a whole.

Understanding Margin Pressures

Let’s explore some of the issues that cause RE producers to lose money, and look at how smart monitoring and management offers major support for asset owners, helping them to withstand narrowing margins, by making more energy with greater ease and by allowing businesses to be scaled up without increasing headcount.

Management and Maintenance

When it comes to managing and maintaining solar assets, many owners and managers suffer from a surprising lack of visibility and control over their assets. And when there is a production issue, if continuous performance monitoring is not taking place, it can often take a long and costly time to identify where the problem lies and if repairs are successful. This is an especially big problem with large portfolios that contain systems supplied by multiple vendors.

And given that most vendors provide their own management solution that provides a basic set of data via its own dashboard, managers of large asset portfolios often have to juggle multiple systems. This can lead to a very fragmented view of the overall business, and a managerial nightmare that makes fault detection, maintenance and production optimization into complicated and difficult issues.

The responsibility for the latter does lie in the hands of energy producers – and as we will soon explain, there is a single and complete solution.

Before we get there, let’s give a brief mention to forces that can narrow energy production but tend to lie beyond the control of RE asset owners.

Energy Market Price Volatility

The first is market forces and the price fluctuations that come with it, especially in the case of energy trading. Fluctuating prices for renewable energy certificates (RECs) or power purchase agreements (PPAs) can also impact revenue streams.

Regulatory Uncertainties

The various levels of International, national and local government policies and regulations influence RE producers hugely. Changes in policies including subsidies do happen, and this creates considerable uncertainty and potential losses for producers.

Weather Variability

Obviously, renewable energy by its very nature has to be flexible to the variabilities of the weather, but with climate change comes more frequent and extreme storms. With these extreme storms comes more damage, increased insurance claims and higher premiums.

Strategies for Sustainable Growth

The solution

enSights is the solution to the pitfalls associated with maintaining and managing renewable energy. The foundations of our platform are a broad set of best practice protocols that are born from our considerable experience in the development and operation of RE projects.

Our platform enables you to coordinate full production decision intelligence across your portfolio. In this way, enSights gives you the freedom to make more energy with greater ease and to scale your business without increasing your headcount.

enSights offers real-time monitoring of energy production, system performance, & equipment health across your entire portfolio from one dashboard, giving you immediate access to the key information you need, as well as a clear sync between finances, energy production and O&M.

enSights gives you automatic and fully customizable alerts to all performance issues allowing you to address them promptly. Our ticketing system allows all parties both in the office and in the field to stay in the loop until problems are resolved.

Of course enSights can’t yet fix the weather, though we do provide weather alerts. We’re not able to make the energy market more stable, nor can we affect government policy, but our financial module allows you to produce the precise reports you need and automatically checks that you get paid correctly for the energy you provide to electricity companies.

Some people call a system like ours a Renewable Energy Management Solution or REMS – we prefer to describe our platform as – the renewable energy operating system or REOS. It is the most comprehensive platform of its kind, and given that it significantly increases efficiency and productivity while decreasing the cost of maintenance, it also pays for itself. We must not forget to mention that to use enSights, you need no added hardware, and the onboarding process is simple.

If you are interested in more information about enSights, please visit our website and get in touch for a demo:

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