PV enclosurea software-as-a-service company that specializes in designing solar energy projects has secured a $100 million co-investment, bringing the company’s total funding to over $123 million. Highland Europe, Energize and an existing investor Elephant everyone participated in the round.
Despite significant investments in the solar market, the solar machinery industry lacks the digitalization needed to keep up with demand, the company claims. PVcase adds speed, efficiency and accuracy to solar project planning while addressing the growing problem of information risk in the solar industry.
Data risk is caused by many factors. The rapid global growth of utility-grade solar energy has led to a shortage of qualified designers and engineers, which has contributed to the use of developer software to automate design tasks and ongoing operations. However, the data sources for the software – especially in Europe – are in older formats, such as PDF files and paper versions. And most PV software platforms were designed independently of each other and are built to automate only a handful of tasks.
As a result, developers now have to use up to 70 different data sets, most of which contain data fields that must be manually matched when moving from one software platform to another. These multiple, time-consuming and customized transfers inevitably reduce data quality and create data risk.
“Solar data has no standards for how much to collect, when and how often to collect, and what the data should cover,” says PVcase CCO Douglas Geist. “PVcase’s momentum won the confidence of these investors that we could meet this challenge.”
PVcase streamlines every step of the design and operation process on one platform. This investment stems from the company’s recent acquisition of solar investment firm Anderson Optimization. The data fields of the two platforms are already matched, which enables the transfer with just a few clicks of the mouse. A combined product line has many advantages. The biggest is making sure developers only spend time and resources on viable sites, says David Trainavicius, CEO of PVcase.
“When it comes to designing and building utility-scale solar, the physical output can only be as good as the software and data inputs,” says Peter Fallon, Elephant’s General Partner. “PVcase builds a comprehensive solution in its class, which allows customers to more efficiently plan and develop measured solar projects.”
