Candidate 4, Intellisol: Perfectly planned for Mercedes in Belgium

Intellisol has recently connected a solar PV installation at a newly built Mercedes car dealership in Belgium. Herman Daniels explained at Intersolar Europe how Intellisol won the rights to develop a solar PV rooftop system for the group IAM, winning out against four other firms eager for the business. IAM had been looking to create a new Mercedes car dealership in Belgium, but to do so in a smarter, more energy efficient way. Enter Intellisol.

“They asked us to design a PV installation for this dealership, but nobody knew how much energy this building was going to use, so that was the big difficulty,” said Daniels. As a completely new building, unused for one-third of the time, and with a low and decreasing feed-in tariff (FIT) for solar applications, the challenges were vast. “Revenues on the installation were poor, and so we had to stress as much as possible the importance of self-consumption, with storage not yet an option due to safety regulations.” IAM, nevertheless, wanted to cover the entire roof with PV, and wanted 10% discounted cash flow guarantee. To win the trust of the owner, as Daniels puts it, Intellisol made an in-depth energy profile analysis on IAM’s other showrooms, looking at how they used energy generally. The company then made a quarterly hour consumption analysis and projected this on to the new showroom, allied to NASA meteorological data to assess the types of conditions it would be subjected to.

Intellisol also designed an energy usage calculation tool to enable them to strike the perfect balance between energy production, consumption, storage and feed-in. This tool displayed to IAM how a typical dealership uses its electricity, when its peaks are during the day, every quarter hour, and over the course of the year. This intelligent approach to assessing energy usage patterns – and displaying it simply – meant that Intellisol was able to assess that the rooftop PV array needed to only be 81.4 kWp and not cover the entire roof. This system was sized to meet 32% of the plant’s energy needs (using 296 Hanwha Q Cells modules) – taking into account the various peaks and troughs of a typical dealership’s energy use patterns. Only 35.6% of the energy produced was sent back to the grid, which meant a payback time on paper of 9-9.5 years for IAM – with a discounted cash flow (DCF) of 10.2 – 11.4 %.

If Intellisol had covered the entire roof with a PV array (requiring 761 modules), DCF would have been just 6.5 – 7.6%, with a payback time of up to 15 years. This is where Intellisol won the project.

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(Once you are confident you can correctly answer one of the four questions posed)
Candidate 1, maxx-Solar:
What does the school earn with the rented PV installation if the self consumtion rate is 90%?
(400, 800 or 1200 Euro)
the answer you can find here
Candidate 2, BIG:
How many containers are required to build an urban rigger?
(3, 6 or 9)
the answer you can find here
Candidate 3, Solartechnik Mitteldeutschland:
How much do the inhabitants of the 16 houses save thanks to the almost-autonomous mini smart grid?
(5% energy costs, 10% energy costs or 15% energy costs)
the answer you can find here
Candidate 4, Intellisol:
What percentage of the dealership’s energy use is covered by the Intellisol PV installation?
(70%, 85% or 100%)
the answer you can find here

Click to watch the pitch

here.

Voting is open until Friday evening, July 8.