How Poor Power Quality Affects Commercial Solar

Huon Hoogesteger: What is the sort of breakeven that we can expect to see from fixing poor power quality?

Aaron Grant: Within two years. Oftentimes it's less than that. It's a compound effect. So you're saving energy. Absolutely. So it's not wasting energy and heat and whatnot. And it's also helping things to run more efficiently. And so you're reducing your downtime as well.

Aaron Grant: Downtime is a huge thing obviously in manufacturing more than anything else. So when you add those areas up you can easily be less than a year. But I would say between 1 and 2 years is a good number for that.

Aaron Grant: I find that one of the easiest ways to think of power quality, and power quality, when you say the word, it doesn't mean good or bad. It's just power quality. It's like health quality. Now, do you have good health quality a bad health quality? Health quality doesn't mean good or bad. It just depends on what the next statement is after that or before that.

Aaron Grant: So when we look at facilities, whether it's a chicken farm, the commercial building, a pump house, a manufacturing facility, they all require energy, electricity specifically, especially as we're going through the decarbonisation journey. Electrification of things is huge. And so we're relying more and more on electricity. But what is being missed is no different than, let's say I want to go on a nice long hike with my family.

Aaron Grant: I haven't done a long walk for 15 years. Am I ready for that? And there's nothing wrong with that journey. The journey is fantastic. We encourage that. Doctors say good for your health, but my body is not ready for it yet. What we've done with a lot of our facilities, if we've gone right into that hike and not actually stopped to go, what's the consequence of this?

Aaron Grant: The hike is good. The energy efficiency journey is fantastic. We need it, but we need to be prepared for it. So what's now happening is symptoms are showing themselves, clutching the chest as you're walking, shortness of breath, stop sweating on a hot day, that sort of stuff. And that's what's happening in these facilities. But meanwhile, most people nowadays even don't have to be a doctor to go, that's not good. I think I need to pause this and go to a doctor.

Huon Hoogesteger: A good example, I think, recently was the chicken farm that we were working on. If we had installed solar on that site because of the on site power quality issues, our solar system would have been significantly curtailed and not produce as much energy as we'd promised. So that presented not only a risk to our client, but also to to me as well.

Huon Hoogesteger: And we want to we want to get good outcomes. The interesting thing, and the thing that you've sort of shown us recently, is that quite often we see the symptom and we don't know the cause. So this client was saying, well, I'm burning out a lot of motors and I'm popping the light globes and either just saw it, okay, high voltage from the grid.

Huon Hoogesteger: What did you see?

Aaron Grant: I saw the symptom suggested it was to do with actually on site issues, but ironically, there is two farms and both from the same customer, and they would both be impacting each other as well. Right? So it was both from upstream, but it was actually from their own other site and then within internally. And that's what the symptoms have said to me.

Aaron Grant: And then when we looked at some of the data that validated that as well, that is actually to do with power quality that was generated within their own facility.

Huon Hoogesteger: I'm a really conscientious business owner. I've fitted out every energy efficiency device I could possibly do. I've saved myself 20% of my kilowatt hours, but suddenly I've got other sort of symptoms. Now I want to put in a solar system. Now I've got all this free energy in the middle of the day. I draw nothing from the grid in the middle of the day.

Huon Hoogesteger: That's another 35%. So, you know, I've saved myself about 50% of my total load. Is there room after that? Is power quality necessary in order for me to say more? And if I was to do it, how much more?

Aaron Grant: I would say, look, power quality is always there. Again, it's whether it's positive or negative. So on a site where there's no symptoms, then it probably means the power quality health is healthy. The health of that power is quite good. Your energy is looking good, but what's in your energy is the gremlin in the machine. And that's wreaking havoc because there's no metering in place to actually identify any indication of that.

Aaron Grant: Number one is the maintenance budget. Is it continuing to increase when it comes to the mechanical and electrical side of things? So VSDs are expensive to fix. Motors. The other thing is too is lights. Are they flickering or not? That's pretty obvious. I'd also say heat. Is there a lot of heat being generated when you're walking through the switch room, or even just other parts of the building that shouldn’t have?

Huon Hoogesteger: Thermal scans would reveal some of that.

Aaron Grant: Maybe. Yeah. But but I mean, it's even simpler than that. It's just when the maintenance guys are walking around doing their weekly check, like, is it is it excessively hot in the switch room when it really shouldn't be? And probably number four as well, well definitely number four is high energy bills. A lot of times that gets missed as a symptom because we just think it's the cost of electricity.

Aaron Grant: It's like, yeah, but how much is that being wasted in thermal losses?

Huon Hoogesteger: How much do you think on average in any building would be thermal losses due to poor quality?

Aaron Grant: Look, historically I've seen when we get involved to putting in filtering like harmonic filtering to, to fix harmonics, you know, you're seeing a reduction in the energy often by between 6 and 20% or so. So I'd say on average, if you average that, I would say about 15%.

Huon Hoogesteger: What is the sort of break even that we can expect to see from fixing poor power quality?

Aaron Grant: Within two years. Oftentimes it's less than that. It's a compound effect. So you're saving energy. Absolutely. So it's not wasting energy and heat and whatnot. And it's also helping things to run more efficiently. And so you're reducing your downtime as well. Downtime is a huge thing obviously in manufacturing more than anything else. So when you add those areas up you can easily be less than a year.

Aaron Grant: But I would say between 1 and 2 years is a good number for that. For example, I had one customer where the return on investment was just over a year and it was an expensive solution, but the losses were so much greater that once we reduced those or eliminated them, the return on that investment was within a year.

Aaron Grant: So very, very fast. But it's also a matter of trying not to get to that point where your site is so degraded that you need it. It's like having a triple bypass. You might be able to, your heart works now, but you don't really want to get there. So that's where you really want to try and make sure we have those platforms in place to indicate where we are before we get to that point.

Aaron Grant: There's technology out there, there is advanced energy monitoring platforms that are no longer the very basic interval data, and you can't really work out anything. Now there's amazing tech and we have it where you can see a lot more information for a very cost effective, usually a SaaS model. So it's a monthly subscription and the hardware on site, and you can make some very good strategic decisions.

Aaron Grant: And that will enable the customers to then understand what's actually happening on their site and whether or not they need to go down the sustainability journey, putting in solar and also how their power quality is looking.

Huon Hoogesteger: I mean, this plays into our strength, which is always like paying attention to a lot of data. So we start off with monitoring, collecting a lot of data about that site and then designing the solution to fit, rather than saying, here's a box that works, go and buy it, which is the way that Power Factor and other other things have been.

Huon Hoogesteger: Solar indeed has been sold as a product off the shelf.

Aaron Grant: Yeah.

Huon Hoogesteger: It's not. It's a system that delivers something over time.

Aaron Grant: Yes.

Huon Hoogesteger: We're looking forward to integrating this advanced monitoring platform with Qub to Smart Commercial Energy. Because we're able to do that with you, we get your second set of eyes looking over our system, also watching what's happening on the on site energy behaviour and usage and quality.

Aaron Grant: Yeah.

Huon Hoogesteger: It gives me great confidence. We've seen the effect of poor power quality on the performance of solar.

Aaron Grant: Yeah.

Huon Hoogesteger: So what you're allowing us to do and what we're bringing to the market is a five year generation guarantee. That is, we will guarantee the output of that solar system based on another layer of protection.

Aaron Grant: Yes.

Huon Hoogesteger: Because, you know, we've had a lot of projects where we've installed solar with all the best intentions.

Huon Hoogesteger: The numbers look right. And then on site power quality issues mean that we're losing 10%, 20% of our yield. Because solar systems are designed to work with the site as as it behaves.

Aaron Grant: That’s right.

Huon Hoogesteger: And if the site's behaving badly, we can only behave as well as.

Aaron Grant: That's right. Yeah.

Huon Hoogesteger: So it's an exciting thing. What does it do for Qub as well?

Huon Hoogesteger: I mean, it's great for Smart. It's great for our client. What does it do for Qub?

Aaron Grant: What it gives, what it provides for Qub as well is the ability to actually support obviously Smart Commercial and the customers to actually be more proactive on decarbonisation and strategy with reducing energy and also maintaining a great path. And that great path might mean that with Qub, for example, we're able to identify within the platform that there is other energy savings that that customer may be able to untap.

Aaron Grant: So they've already got the solar in there and that's fantastic. Now we're actually going, we want to make sure that we utilise as much of that solar during the middle of the day, and then perhaps and then even maybe store up some energy for the battery at night, and then make sure that we can help that customer to use that available energy source effectively.

Aaron Grant: So overall, they're going to reduce their energy. So it gives us ability to support our customers with that. It also means that if there are any power quality issues, we are fully available and able to support them with that so we can help them on the energy, which is more the overall day to day, and then get really into that power quality side of things.

Aaron Grant: And ultimately, because we have a strong automation background, will oftentimes be able to help those customers if they are manufacturing or even commercial buildings. On making strategic decisions that fit their overall model for reducing their energy profile in a sustainable and continuous way.

Huon Hoogesteger: I think it's really interesting. I mean, what's the famous saying? You can't control what you can't see or you can't control what you can't measure. So we're really starting a measurement.

Huon Hoogesteger: Yeah.

Huon Hoogesteger: To control to other outcomes after your see it. It's impossible to find the other outcomes without that first bit.

Aaron Grant: Any commercial and industrial facility, that includes manufacturing as well. Energy is is driving the bottom line. I would say that everybody should be looking into this. Every customer, every site, every type of facility can benefit from this.

Huon Hoogesteger: I've got some customers who are like, that's a foreign language. This is way too complex. You're talking about kVA. You're talking about harmonics, total harmonic distortion. Do you solve that problem or do you make are you creating a new headache for us all?

Aaron Grant: We are able to take that data and make it into actionable information for sure. We're not in there just to make noise for people. We're in there to actually conduct the symphony.