Pour tousHow can you perpetuate and develop your solar energy assets?
The concept of energy heritage is Feedgy’s heart of business. We invite you to think about this concept and the sustainability of your investment. Les prochaines pages de ce guide de référence vont vous inviter à vous interroger sur ce concept, à réfléchir à la pérennité de votre investissement.
Focus on the concept of energy heritage
Heritage: masculine noun (Latin patrimonium)
Property inherited from one’s ancestors. All of the alienable and transferable elements that are the property, at a given time, of a person, a family, a company or a public body.
Source: Larousse
Feedgy’s Energy Assets
The future capacity of a facility to produce energy in a sustainable manner, at a competitive cost, and thus generate sustainable revenues for its owner.
Three ways to manage your energy assets
Regardless of the long-term objective, there are several ways for a solar energy producer to manage his energy assets, all of which aim to maximize production and, in effect, reduce the cost of producing solar energy. Doing nothing means exposing oneself to losses or shortfalls and therefore losing value to one’s assets. An active management allows to preserve or even increase its value.
1. Maintain your energy assets
To ensure that the initial objectives are met and to generate the revenues that were initially planned, curative maintenance and monitoring are part of this approach, to avoid losses and control operating costs.
2. Optimize your energy assets
Act to exploit the full potential, reach the maximum level of performance, increase its performance ratio. The performance of a plant can be affected by:
- Defects leading to losses
- Degradation
- An underestimated initial potential
Repowering is a response to this logic – maximizing production by relying on technological developments to fully exploit the feed-in tariff during the remaining term of the contract.
3. Develop its energy assets
The producer anticipating the post-purchase rate period will place himself in a long-term logic, beyond the purchase contract and consider from now on future income perspectives.
Producers choosing repowering and a new investment are in this logic. The idea is to use repowering as an opportunity – in addition to improving the existing plant – to increase capacity by building a new plant on the space freed up. By doing so, the solar producer is providing itself with a tool that can continue to generate stable revenues and capture new opportunities after the 20th year of its contract.
This approach is in line with an investment in its production tool to ensure its future competitiveness.
Energy assets in the post-tariff context
The long-term strategic choice
The notion of energy assets takes on its full meaning in the long term, at the end of the purchase contract and/or in the perspective of economic models that are no longer based on total injection with a purchase tariff.
Indeed, a PV power plant is an asset that is intended to generate income from the production of electricity. The two questions that can be asked are: how and for how long? The answer is simple when you consider the principle of the feed-in tariff, but it is different if you consider that a PV plant has a lifespan of more than 20 years.
We know that new economic models will exist, following the evolution of the energy market as a whole and with the emergence of new uses and new applications. The underlying trends are numerous and the resulting business models are not yet mature.
Nevertheless, we can mention the rise in energy prices at the consumer level, which encourages self-consumption, the rise of the electric vehicle, which leads to a clear need for recharging infrastructure, and the desire to promote green hydrogen, which opens up new prospects for solar energy.
A heritage at the heart of tomorrow’s energy model
Whatever the models considered, the conclusions for solar energy are obvious:
- With a low cost of ownership, solar energy will be competitive in many applications
- The more solar KWh a producer is able to deliver, the more revenue it will be able to continue to generate
- The opportunities for the solar producer will be greater the more reliable and sustainable the production tool is
- The selling price of the KWh will not necessarily be known in advance as it was in the framework of the feed-in tariff, so it is essential to control the cost price
- The lower the cost price, the more efficient the plant is, the better it is maintained and equipped with efficient management tools
- The capacity of a solar power plant to generate a future profitability implies a good management and a vision of the future