PVcase in the race for the BNEF Pioneers Award

It's with great pride that we announce our nomination for the 2024 BNEF Pioneers Award. PVcase has earned a spot among the top six contenders in the Challenge 1 category, focused on “Relieving Bottlenecks in the Deployment of Clean Power.”

BloombergNEF organized the BNEF Pioneers competition to identify critical challenges in establishing a net-zero economy and highlight innovative companies developing technologies to overcome them.

Significance of the nomination

Challenge 1 zeroes in on smoothing out the roadblocks to deploying clean energy. While solar and wind farms are being installed globally at an unprecedented rate, annual solar and wind installation must increase three times by 2031 and six times by 2050 to achieve net-zero emissions.

Currently, slow grid build-out, grid connection backlogs, permitting challenges, and supply-chain constraints are four significant factors hindering renewable energy deployment. Around 600 GW of solar and wind projects are awaiting grid interconnection in the top five European renewable energy markets, while about 1250 GW is pending in the US.

It's noteworthy that software solutions represent five of the six finalists in this challenge, underscoring a growing recognition of software's role in dismantling these barriers. Innovative design tools hold the key to this issue because of their capabilities to improve efficiency, reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, increase calculation accuracy, and improve the quality and speed of projects.

Considering PVcase’s motto of battling climate change through software, such recognition shows that we are on the right track in pursuing our mission. And yes, we are really eager to win!

The practical benefits of PVcase tools

PVcase tools address one of the most critical bottlenecks: the shortage of skilled workers necessary to deploy solar PV at the speed needed to mitigate anthropogenic climate change and reach net-zero emissions successfully. In the EU, the solar sector will need to attract more than 500 thousand new workers in the next 3 years. Surveys done in the US indicate that engineers and other STEM graduates are the third most in demand profiles by solar companies, closely after installers, electricians, and construction workers.

PVcase tools, including Ground Mount, Roof Mount, and Yield, increase the efficiency of solar engineering processes and the accuracy and speed of developing increasingly complex solar projects. Our tools enable less human power to do more work without compromising the quality.

To automate tasks, numerous developers create their own manual, ad-hoc software, and internal workarounds that often pose severe risks to data integrity.

Additionally, it’s common for engineers to use several unrelated solar software platforms in different project cycles. Our findings suggest that such practice creates significant inefficiencies in data transfer between project lifecycles, increasing data risk and time resources while converting data.

The most striking example of existing inefficiencies in the PV sector relates to the transition from construction to operational phases. Interviews with sector experts showed that onboarding an average 20 MW PV asset onto advanced O&M platforms requires up to 320 person-hours of work.

In response, we aim to digitalize the entire PV asset lifecycle and create an end-to-end solution, a standardized platform to develop, engineer, analyze, construct, operate, maintain, and eventually dismantle or repower PV assets. PVcase aims to help solar companies overcome data risk, process inefficiencies, and skilled worker scarcity issues.

PVcase suite has become even more powerful with the recent integration of PVcase Prospect, a cutting-edge site selection software. Together, PVcase and Anderson Optimization ensure comprehensive support for all complex calculations required to select the optimal site for your solar plant.