You gain resilience
With photovoltaic panels, there are no bad surprises when you discover your bills.
You produce a regular and predictable amount of energy, so you can easily anticipate and control your expenses. Each kWh produced and consumed on site saves you money.
If a sudden increase in the price of energy occurs (familiar?), a well-sized photovoltaic installation can reduce the impact of this price increase on your activities by up to 70%.
Depending on your strategy, you can then offer products that are cheaper than your competitors, forced to increase their price, or increase your margins by following your competitors’ prices.
Greener energy production
About 94% of photovoltaic solar panels are recycled and revalued in European companies (the remaining 6% being lost in the form of dust during grinding).
In addition, photovoltaic panels are a means of low-carbon energy production essential to meeting the climate objectives of COP21.
According to RTE, each photovoltaic installation that replaces the production of gas or coal, highly emissive fossil fuels that must be quickly avoided.
At Liight, we have designed our own tool to calculate the carbon savings of a solar installation. Here are the results for an installation of 60 panels with a string inverter located in Geneva.
You will note that we only consider the impact over 30 years, but the lifespan of current solar panels is estimated at 40 years .
Carbon emissions savings solar installation 60
How to size your photovoltaic solar installation?
There are many factors to consider for an optimal installation. The stakes are high because this step determines your level of production, the cost of your installation, the return on investment time, etc.
The main points to consider are 4 in number:
Your consumption goals;
Your geographical area from which your level of sunshine derives;
The inclination of the roof and its orientation;
Your energy needs and your consumption peaks.
Let’s review them.
Find the right number of panels according to your consumption objectives
The type of dimensioning depends first of all on the objective of your installation:
Total self-consumption
Total self-consumption consists in producing and consuming your own solar energy that you obtain thanks to the installation of photovoltaic panels, equipped with batteries. You therefore obtain the energy required for the number of hours of consumption and the power of your equipment.
This is the option for those who want to make their business completely self-sufficient, but it requires oversizing the size of your installation. As this inflates the initial investment, this solution is often less attractive.
In addition to this, we must add the price and the carbon footprint of the batteries, which is not negligible.
Self-consumption with sale of surplus
The sale of surplus consists, for its part, in selling the energy produced in excess by your solar panels compared to what your appliances consume: this is the surplus of energy production.
As solar energy is an intermittent energy, it happens that companies produce more than they need at certain times of the day. They are therefore totally independent over these periods and can even resell what they do not need