For those who have been following the SolarPlus story, you will remember it started as a simple solution for residential installers while my co-founder Glen and I were working at the Smart Energy Council in 2011.
The goal was simple: give installers a single platform where they could design a compliant system, model performance and present a professional quote, without juggling spreadsheets, PDFs and half a dozen different tools. We built SolarPlus to reduce the admin load and help small teams deliver high quality work at scale, from first enquiry through to installation and handover.
Over time, something interesting began to happen.
The economics of commercial and industrial solar shifted. Globally, the cost of PV systems for commercial rooftops has fallen by around 70 per cent since 2010, as modules have become more efficient and hardware costs have dropped. At the same time, lithium battery prices have fallen by more than 90 per cent, with recent surveys putting average battery costs close to one tenth of what they were a decade ago.
This meant that projects which once sat on the wish list for boards and asset managers suddenly started to make financial sense. Demand charges, complex tariffs and resilience concerns pushed more businesses to ask a simple question: ‘what would it take for solar and storage to change the way our site uses energy, not just trim a few per cent off the bill’?
At the same time, the activities of SolarPlus users were changing. Residential focused businesses increasingly grew with commercial opportunities and commercial teams sought to shift from one-off designs to a repeatable C&I pipeline. Our team found more and more users looking to stretch our software design tools in order to handle large-scale, complex on and off grid commercial sites.
That was the moment we decided SolarPlus needed to expand with them.
Fast forward 10,000 engineer-hours to today…and SolarPlus still delivers fast, accurate residential proposals, but with the added features that are key to the C&I solar and storage professional:
- A performance engine that can handle complex commercial load profiles, tariffs and storage strategies
- Detailed financial modelling that speaks the language of boards and CFOs, not just simple payback
- Tools for hybrid and off-grid design, backup hours and critical load coverage
- Proposal outputs that help engineers tell a clear story to multiple stakeholders, from tenants to landlords
In many ways, the software has followed the market. As PV and storage costs have fallen, the expectation on designers and engineers has risen. It is no longer enough to draw a layout and quote a system size. You are expected to present bankable numbers, defend your assumptions and compare scenarios with confidence.
Our job at SolarPlus is to give you one environment to do that work properly.
