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Why hasn’t your apartment installed solar yet?
Managing a body corporate in South Africa is no trivial task and trustees are constantly being challenged by owners of a section in scheme.
One of the common demands over the last few years is the deployment of renewable energy generation to assist with immunity from load shedding. However solar panels and inverters alone are insufficient to deal with the issue. Grid-tied inverters, by design, are not able to generate without the presence of the grid and therefore during load shedding all the impressive panels on the shared roof space are unfortunately rendered useless.
Of course, this is where hybrid inverters come into their own which, when paired with batteries are able to see the grid disconnection and continue to supply essential loads through their UPS load functionality.
This is great but what happens when we need to have this UPS function deal with hundreds of individual apartments. Essentially two scenarios are possible with many solar installers and consulting engineers following the first route of having individual inverters and batteries per apartment. While this is logical it loses out in three main areas:
- Economies of scale, ie a large inverter (and similarly battery) is always going to be more cost effective than multiple smaller inverters (and batteries in a similar way)
- Extremely difficult, if not, impossible to install solar to such multiple numbers of inverters in a practical and neat fashion
- Backup support will always be less effective for multiple small inverters and batteries versus large industrial-sized inverters and batteries. Suppliers employ higher skilled technicians and support for their industrial units by their nature.
The other more effective, of the two scenarios is having this large-scale industrial inverter and containerized battery solution which benefits from the points above. However, two distinct disadvantages arise when you have a centralized system such as this:
- Potential abuse from one or more tenants with large loads draining batteries while other tenants never get to benefit from their investment in the shared battery.
- Complex distribution wiring since the multiple sub-distribution boards in the apartment block need to have their large loads reduced when running on batteries.
At agile digital we have developed a novel solution that integrates smart metering, automation philosophy and real-time analytics to deal with both of these issues. Our Energy Share Unit ensures an equitable share of the battery per apartment so no tenant may abuse the capacity to the detriment of another tenant.
We also ensure real-time load management to reduce the large appliances such as geysers, stoves and air-conditioning which nobody can afford to drain the battery during extended load shedding outages. This is done seamlessly across the entire building. To create visibility for tenants we also provide a mobile friendly chatbot to always update the tenant on how their virtual slice of the large battery is being used and provide some outlook on when they may run out of the battery.
When partnered with a long-term power purchase agreement and installed as part of the initial solar and battery system this provides users with effectively lower costs than their municipal energy tariff whilst having all the benefits of a hybrid solar inverter with storage.
With our solution more tenants will be asking their body corporates why they haven’t moved to solar yet.