COVERSTORY
Supplying the solar chain
The UK industry may be facing some confusion as the wait is on to clarify government involvement but the truth is a market has been formed and will continue to grow. Regardless of the outcome there is a need to develop infrastructure to support a growing industry. Solar UK asked James Steynor, Managing Director of Monmouth based The Solar Building Company how the company is contributing to the future growth of UK solar.
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Q A
How did the Solar Building Company start and what is the company’s approach to the market?
The Solar Building Company (SBC) was established to create a best value
proposition for PV component supply into the UK. It was clear during the early part of 2011 that the existing supply chain had a long way to go to drive down prices for the consumer. While, at the time, the somewhat generous UK FiT did little to encourage this, trends in Europe were for a reduction in FiT. The stated goal for the sector was to maintain a growth in the industry but, at the same time, give the best value for money to the consumer. It was therefore assumed that a similar path would be taken in the UK at some point and we wanted to model our business around that.
Against this background, core values we immediately identified were focusing on supply from China, regular auditing of the quality and majoring on a high level of technical support to our customers. A key decision taken at the onset was to represent only one company for each technology type. This way we could help promote the particular company’s brand with a 100% focus. From that we believed we could benefit from better pricing points and have no conflict in representing competing brands. Another major decision was not to offer any installation services so in no way offering competition to our customers.
We based our testing model on using a UK-based test specialist company Ipsol. We entered the market in May 2011 with initially
modules (panels) from CETC and inverters from Samil Power. Audits quickly followed, courtesy of Ipsol, and first orders placed. We followed this auditing by additional testing to validate module performance for the UK under more realistic (not Standard Test Conditions) irradiation and temperature conditions (IEC 61853 parts 1&2).
On the technical support side,
reviewing the available modelling/ design software we felt that in many cases the data produced was not as accurate as one could reasonably expect. So we elected to commission a bespoke solution covering our represented products with a partnership with Vela Solaris and utilising their Polysun product. This has proven an invaluable tool to our customers. This also gives them a reason to stay loyal to our business as we can give them additional support on installation design
www.solar-pv-uk.com Issue I 2012
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