Off grid solar power components

Energy Matters’ range of quality remote solar power components have been carefully selected through years of hands-on experience in the renewable energy industry in remote locations. We’ve searched and tested turbines, panels and associated equipment from around the world in order to offer equipment you can rely on in an off grid application.

Our substantial buying power and ability to bypass the middleman by negotiating direct with manufacturers means we can offer the best pricing on off grid equipment; further reduced by subsidies if eligible!

Solar panels are the most expensive aspect of a solar power system, but with our buying power, we can offer you top quality panels with a 20+ year guarantee for prices far below many of our competitors. Whether it’s polycrystalline, thin film or monocrystalline solar panels you need, Energy Matters has you covered!

All the solar panels we offer comply with IEC 61215, the International Electrical Commission’s standard for Solar Panels. The IEC 61215 is the international certificate of quality and long durability. 

To protect your battery investment, you need a quality solar regulator that provides maximum efficiency and won’t give up in Australia’s harsh conditions. Energy Matters stocks the world’s best brands such as Morningstar, Steca, Plasmatronics and Apollo Solar.

offgrid-deep-cycle-battery Energy Matters range of flooded, AGM and Gel deep cycle batteries have been tried and tested in Australian remote power systems in order to assure you of the maximum life and performance for your money. We have the largest range of 2v, 4v, 6v, 12v, 24v and 48 volt deep cycle batteries in the country!

Inverters are the heart of every solar power system. The prerequisite for a well designed system is the careful matching of modules and pv inverters. Energy Matters offers, the very best in grid connected inverters, which have been tested for years in the field and offer the highest levels of reliability, efficiency and ease of use. 

Energy Matters only offers the very best in mounting systems to ensure ease of installation and protection for your renewable energy investment. We also offer solar trackers so you can squeeze ever possible bit of energy out of the sun! 

The new style of solar energy business

Creating a sustainable long-term DPV market will require aligning the interests of utilities, solar companies , technology providers, and customers. With support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative, a new Rocky Mountain Institute report—Bridges to New Solar Business Models.

Opportunities to Increase and Capture the Value of Distributed Solar Photovoltaics—looks at enhancing legacy solar business models or building new ones by creating an expanded value pool, one that makes DPV affordable and accessible to far more customers, bridges beyond individual customer-centric DPV value to include value delivered to the grid and society, and allows the electricity grid’s myriad stakeholders to share in that value.

To date, a series of misalignments and market failures—including pricing structures and lack of performance-based incentives—have prevented electricity system stakeholders from taking a holistic approach to the deployment of distributed PV. Solar companies and utilities have focused on low-cost deployment onto the grid without accounting for the operational benefits and costs of integration into the grid . As a result, significant value potential is being left on the table.

For example, solar companies have worked in isolation to reduce the pre-interconnection components of distributed PV cost, such as installation labor efficiency. Further cost reductions are possible, but the most significant of them will require involvement from both solar companies and utilities together to achieve, such as with streamlined site identification, PII, and customer acquisition.

Solar Company Role: Solar companies coordinate site selection with utilities and design and install projects on the distribution system where they can provide high net value. The solar companies would work in a competitive market for projects, either responding to utilities’ RFPs or installing projects based on utility pricing mechanisms.

Solar Company Role: Solar companies sell broader energy services to customers via technology packages the utility has screened and approved. Revenues could come from the company’s ability to package DPV with complementary technologies, increasing revenue per customer and expanding the potential market to include customers who see less risk if the technology package has utility approval.

Moving forward, to refine and implement innovative solar business model solutions across the U.S. will require direct engagement from regulators, utilities, and solar companies. This will include assessing current abilities to identify value and customer needs and developing multi-stakeholder processes for assessing value.

Sun shine brightly on solar energy projects

An incomplete picture of resource variability results in poor quantification of risk with negative impacts on project finance. Indeed, in some countries, energy generated from solar is on course for grid parity – that is, able to compete, in some cases un-subsidized, with traditional sources of energy.

During the due diligence process, financiers and developers will debate the levels of solar irradiance at the project site in order to gauge the potential power output and peak delivery.  But typically what they are debating is the long-term average resource availability at the site.  The variation of the resource from year to year is implicitly understood, but often never quantified, leading to difficulties when actual generation in any one year needs to be compared to expected long-term average generation.   

Most often the solar irradiance information used to set expectations is based solely on one year’s worth of modeled TMY. Yet, weather rarely follows “typical” behavior and given increasingly erratic weather patterns, the actual conditions during any one year at a particular site generally varies significantly from the single “normalized” year’s worth of data provided by a TMY file.

It’s fairly obvious that returns are governed by the amount of power generated and subsequently sold to the grid offset by the costs of operations and the cost of capital.  Investors will have a projection of these sales based on energy assessments from the TMY data bounded by a statistical distribution and so have a rough idea of the return to the portfolio.

Except that, by screening out the natural inter-annual variability, investors and developers don’t actually give themselves a realistic idea of what the variability of their annual returns will be over the lifetime of the project. They understand only the average conditions represented by the TMY and the worst-case scenario represented in the P95 distribution.

Industry wide figures suggest that a 5% negative anomaly in solar irradiation during only the summer months for a CSP or PV site can translate to a 1-1.5% decrease in annual revenue for a solar developer or operator, highlighting a clear industry requirement to take a more comprehensive approach to gathering long-term weather data.

A better understanding of average irradiance, variability and risk is, in short, why Vaisala compiled 15+ year records of solar irradiance across the globe to help consult clients on solar assessment and forecasting issues.  The Summer Solar Performance Map of the United States, developed for the past five years, analyzes solar irradiance variability during the three-month period when peak production is commonly expected.