What DATA means for the GROWTH of RENEWABLES
As part of our PRECAP journey leading the effort, with the Tallaboa project owner, to launch the first community microgrid in Puerto Rico, we’ve been spending a lot of time researching data to evaluate how much the microgrid’s EPC cost will be. EPC stands for Engineering, Procurement and Construction which represents the technical design study (engineering), the equipment acquisition (procurement) and preparing the site, installing the energy generation, storage and distribution equipment (construction).
Most of the time, microgrid project owners are industrial and commercial entities that want sustainable and resilient electricity at lower costs. They either have access to collateral and/or land/real estate they can use to deploy the microgrid. Their next step is to raise capital and doing so requires both technical and financial modeling abilities, which is challenging for these project owners to handle on their own. There are great programs for capital raising like the PRECAP program mentioned earlier, and it’s also possible to hire a technical/financial consulting company.
However, in both cases, it can get complicated to assume what cost, line items and other important data sets need to be used for a specific project. How to model the funding need for a project without knowing what the cost of the underlying pieces of the EPC puzzle should be used? Of course, it’s a negotiation process happening at some point with the EPC contractor when looking at a turnkey solution but it’s still important for project owners to gauge what these unit costs are. CAPEX may vary a lot depending upon the right sizing and what the actual purpose of the microgrid is. For instance, if a microgrid’s initial purpose is only for the owner’s self consumption, will this objective remain as is or can it evolve in the future into something else, something bigger?
The same way energy generation and storage technologies evolve, customer-facing and microgrid systems technologies evolve as well. What if this self-serving microgrid is introduced with the potential to generate attractive profits by selling its excess energy generation to its neighbors? Would the assumptions about capacity and off-taker sizing need to be revisited? Would the financing agreements need to be renegotiated as well? Renewables tremendously gain from these technologies enabling microgrids to grow in size and become more efficient in scaling electricity needs for communities. Because these technologies are being deployed faster than ever, the need for accessible and verifiable data on EPC and O&M (Operations & Management post EPC in turnkey solutions) is more important than ever.
DexGrid captures data at the energy production and consumption sources. Through its machine learning software, it aggregates this data at the microgrid level, essentially enabling a better system integration for the equipments, therefore improving their performance. We strongly believe that accurate data access (actually coming from within the microgrids and accessible through our secure API), its reliability and transparency in our processes will prove to be what’s currently missing for all microgrid owners to successfully lead their projects throughout the capital raising, development and deployment phases.
Let us know how we can help you get your project going and scaling at info@dexgrid.io
