We’re excited to onboard SMA Solar Technology as part of the Connect Solar solution by re.alto. The company has a lot of functionality to offer and, combined with re.alto’s digital expertise, SMA will be able to offer a product that can ultimately provide consumers with a better experience through energy service providers, simplify their access to energy data and save them money.  

As a leading specialist in photovoltaic system technology, SMA is setting the standard for the decentralised, digital and renewable energy supply of the future, by offering innovative solutions for every type of photovoltaic application and ultimately giving customers around the world greater independence in meeting their energy needs. Photovoltaics have the potential to be the most cost-effective energy source, but in order to fully exploit this potential, they must be integrated into the entire energy system, across various sectors. In their own words, SMA is “developing sophisticated system solutions perfectly tailored to the needs of the ‘electricity prosumers’ of tomorrow”. SMA has teamed up with re.alto to digitalise further in order to accelerate the process of realising the future of energy today.  

The energy sector has fallen behind other industries when it comes to digitalisation and standardisation, an issue which becomes increasingly evident as renewables begin to take the energy sector by storm and the demand for them rises. The growth seen in the solar industry is certainly promising for a net-zero future, and photovoltaics will play a significant role in the energy landscape of tomorrow. However, this also presents certain challenges, such as the increasing solar balancing costs for energy traders and retailers, and a lack of digital infrastructure in the industry.  Fuelled by the SMA digital back-end, the re.alto Connect Solar solution offers traders and energy retailers the possibility to monitor the output of any solar inverter remotely and control its power output when needed, without the need to install any additional hardware. A full digital consent flow mechanism is put in place that allows a completely digital and very scalable process to obtain the customer’s consent for the data connectivity. As such, the customer journey is kept as simple as possible, without compromising on the functionality of the data for the traders and retailers.   

A certain digital infrastructure is required in order to sell and service digital products directly on the market. In collaborating with re.alto, SMA has simplified their method of reaching and supplying their services to the thousands of traders and retailers active in Europe. re.alto will be handling the sales and administrative side of the transactions, while also being the first line of support in enabling the use of their digital setup for specific energy-related use cases. In the case of SMA, these use cases refer to solar balancing cost reduction for traders and auto-consumption for electricity retailers. The digital setup provided by re.alto gives traders near real-time data access to solar inverters, therefore offering more reliable forecasting information, and it enables them to connect directly to the inverters, without the need for additional hardware installation. In the auto-consumption use case, retailers are looking for solutions that can help consumers save money, by consuming at that moment when local solar production is at its highest. This, of course, requires retailers to know the times at which production is high and how high that production is. The advantage of re.alto’s Connect Solar solution is that there is no need for retailers to integrate with the many different kinds of inverters used to service their customers. A simple integration with re.alto ensures that any type of inverter used by their customers is facilitated by us!   

This is an interesting solution for large scale solar plant operators and traders wanting to reduce their balancing costs, as well as for households wanting to maximise their self-consumption.  

If you’d like to find out more about Connect and what it can offer, please go here.