{"id":37570,"date":"2023-10-20T14:50:55","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T14:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/energy-startup-out-to-prove-solars-not-a-dirty-word-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T14:50:55","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T14:50:55","slug":"energy-startup-out-to-prove-solars-not-a-dirty-word-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/energy-startup-out-to-prove-solars-not-a-dirty-word-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy startup out to prove solar\u2019s not a dirty word – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Energy startup Smart Commercial Solar<\/a> has turned to data analytics and reporting in order to make solar energy a more attractive prospect to businesses.<\/p>\n

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It has launched a pay-as-you-go solar model that allows businesses to install solar panels without any upfront costs. Smart Commercial Solar then bills them for the power they consume from the panels, until they\u2019ve paid for themselves, at which point the business takes up ownership of the system.<\/p>\n

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Smart Commercial Solar founder Huon Hoogesteger says he founded the startup three years ago, when he looked into the viability of solar energy for large enterprise. He noticed that while in the years prior solar energy had been too expensive and hadn\u2019t made financial sense for businesses, this was starting to change. Prices of the solar cells were being driven down by advances in technology.<\/p>\n

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But there remained significant risk in outlaying between $30,000 and $100,000 for a solar energy system.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe need to be able to monitor and measure accurately, because where an investor is concerned, they want to have some assurance that there\u2019s 99% uptime and their investment is being realised,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe realised we were at a point where we could supply these solar systems free of charge and bill businesses for the energy. So we were able to bring the tech together with the financial modelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Smart Commercial Solar now monitors its customer\u2019s solar energy through monthly reports, catching problems before they start to cost the businesses money. He says solar had started to become a bit of a dirty word because consumers and businesses were installing panels, but had no way of knowing how well they were performing, or if something was wrong.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen a small system is worth $32,000 all the way up to many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it\u2019s taking three to five years to break even, an investor needs to know when that investment is being realised, and that\u2019s the assurance we bring,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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One church group, who invested in a kilowatt solar system with no monitoring, didn\u2019t realise that it hadn\u2019t been working for two years, taking $8000 worth of saving out of their investment, Hoogesteger explains.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t blame the consumer for not understanding if you get a saving or not by looking at their power bill,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cMost consumers don\u2019t understand their power bills as is. There really hasn\u2019t been the financial viability to do monitoring. It does cost money; it\u2019s about $1000 worth of hardware per system.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Once consumers have paid off the cost of the system, they\u2019re then given the opportunity to continue using Smart Commercial Solar\u2019s monitoring service for two cents per kilowatt of power.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe future of solar is local. It\u2019s about on-site generation and turning your premises into the power plant,\u201d Hoogesteger says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s about using the best monitoring and analysis to maximise system performance and make sure it aligns to what the enterprise needs. Pay-as-you-go embodies this approach and we believe it has the potential to transform the way enterprises do solar.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Follow <\/i>StartupSmart <\/i>on <\/i>Facebook<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>Twitter<\/i><\/a>, and <\/i>LinkedIn<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Energy startup Smart Commercial Solar has turned to data analytics and reporting in order to make solar energy a more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37570"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}