Solar Analytics: The Best of 2021

2021 was quite a year, huh? But even during this weird pandemic year, the team at Solar Analytics managed to deliver some revolutionary new products and services which took an extraordinary amount of hard work, and in many cases were the culmination of years of research and preparation. Our Head of Business Development, Nigel Morris, took the time to review some of what we delivered on the Solar Insiders podcast, plus we've summed it all up below too.

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Plan Optimiser

Ensuring solar owners get their solar savings is fundamental, and this year we released the game-changing ability for solar owners to save an additional $400 on average each year, at no extra cost, and with a single click. After extensive market testing and fabulous feedback from our customers, Plan Optimiser now offers:

• Energy plan comparison available from Day 1, giving savings straight away and answering solar owners’ most common question: which electricity plan is best for me?
• Sophisticated management tools to ensure that the thousands of tariffs available in the market are automatically kept up to date
• All-new simulator, enabling savings estimates from each energy plan to be calculated even without consumption meter data

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Smarter alerts

The core of what we do is help solar owners (and retailers) get more from their solar with our True Performance alerts and management system. This year we:

• Released an entirely new Alerts page, making fleet management easier for solar retailers
• Developed new weather filters to allow our algorithms to handle extreme events
• Overhauled our messaging to ensure event importance was easier to understand
• Significantly reduced the frequency of emails sent to solar owners and retailers, to ensure they see the ones that really matter
• Expanded the number of inverters we’re integrated with

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Expanded inverter integration

On the Integrated product front, we released a suite of updates and enhancements. This year we:

• Released new software subscription plans - with a free 30-day trial and a wider range of subscription choices
• Enabled the ability to remotely connect with existing inverter sites, including Relevant Agent in South Australia for both Sungrow and Fronius inverters
• Included Relevant Agent service in our standard subscriptions at no extra cost
• Made commissioning simpler and faster for retailers
• Made our Integrated solution available for Fronius inverters
• Started testing a GoodWe inverter integration, ready for a 2022 launch

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More Flexibility and Adaptability

Following great feedback from our customers, this year we:

• Released an Install Check by-pass for retailers in order to simplify commissioning of our Classic solution
• Launched an Export Limit tool to capture export limit settings and allow for more accurate True Performance Monitoring
• Overhauled the Solar Dashboard so owners can see the key information at a glance (including how much they’re saving)
• Added an all-new My Electricity bill page with a sophisticated energy tariff manager

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Behind the Scenes

Efficiently dealing with terabytes of data and tens of thousands of users also requires ever-smarter backend systems. This year we:

• Overhauled and launched new brand styles and messaging
• Launched a gorgeous, easy-to-navigate consumer website
• Updated to an all-new API-linked CRM and integrated support system
• Added an internal business management system to track key metrics
• Completed three grant projects that are delivering benefits to the wider solar community, including sharing anonymised high granularity energy data with energy regulators to improve our grid’s stability and reliability
• Maintained our focus on customer support, consistently improving call response times and issue resolution

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Product Roadmap

In the next year, we will continue to deliver even more modular, flexible tools that help solar owners get more from their solar at every step of their solar journey. We are planning more tools for new solar buyers to learn about solar, find a solar retailer, and select their first solar energy plan.

Solar owners will also get a suite of enhancements to our energy notifications, giving them even more personalised and actionable insights to save even more money. This includes:

• Battery calculator enhancements and recommendations
• Battery control and optimisation
• Dashboard and notification updates, to make the user experience ever simpler
• Hot water insights and recommendations

Once installed, solar retailers will be able to ever more quickly create Solar Analytics sites by instantly transporting design data from other services, saving time and money.

They’ll be able to customise alert profiles, adjust site data for more accuracy, register a wider variety of hardware even quicker and see the results or problems faster and with even more accuracy.

Our solar retailers will get access to more background data and reports, leveraging the power of their own data. Their choices for how to integrate with Solar Analytics will continue to expand, making managing their fleet ever simpler.

As Head of Product Lisa Beeren said, “It's been a huge year for the team, but we’re really excited to keep building on the value we’ve created with Plan Optimiser and the integrated product in the new year, ensuring we maintain our role as a leading force in solar management.”

On behalf of every one of us here at Solar Analytics thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for helping us get here.

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Published: 14th January 2022