Solar development projects can be both environmentally and financially rewarding for investors but getting one off the ground can be arduous and complicated. Analyzing the variables—from the irradiance and elevation of a site, to the choice of panels, to the local financial incentives —is time-consuming, prone to errors, and can lead to challenges in accurately predicting economic forecasts. 

What if there were a digital solution to streamline the process and leverage predictive simulations to result in more accurate financial forecasts? Not only would it help improve investment returns, but it could also save time in the project life cycle.

Borrego, who has built an exceedingly successful development business executing the laborious process manually and on spreadsheets, saw an opportunity to bring modern technology to augment their expertise. They selected Presence as a partner to create a series of digital tools that systematize and automate the planning, forecasting, and effectuating of new solar projects.

Dale Knauss, Technical Director at Presence, remarked “We’re thrilled to partner with Borrego and help them achieve their mission. Digital products are crucial to reshaping the sustainability landscape and the collaboration between our organizations puts technology at the forefront of their initiative.”

Work began with SEB (or “solar easy button”), a single operational platform that aggregates data from external sources and develops financial models digitally. SEB digitally calculates the extremely complex variables that—until that point—had been calculated manually in spreadsheets. With SEB, solar planning stages are automated and fully integrated with the tools needed for success, including AutoCAD, to plan the physical layout of a project, PVsyst to study and simulate production forecasts, and a CRM to manage customers and synchronize with other financial tools.

SEB quickly proved successful in Borrego’s internal development process, but there remained an opportunity to use the technology to improve customers’ returns and to speed up their projects. By bringing this technology to customers, Borrego also was solving some market problems and greatly scaling its mission. Our next project with Borrego reimagined SEB’s functionality to give developers, system owners, and EPC companies the opportunity to use SEB for themselves. The new platform and Borrego business, called Anza, enables customers to rapidly see a long list of vetted solar module and energy storage equipment available to purchase ranked by the net present value of their 20-year cash flows rather than on price alone. Anza significantly reduces friction in the procurement process, essentially using software to lower the cost of developing and deploying solar and energy storage projects.

We were responsible for all stages of the creation of these products, from strategy and definition, to design, development and onto continued maintenance. Even after the original development business for whom we created SEB spun off into a new company, New Leaf Energy, we continue to support the products we’ve built. Our partnership with Borrego is ongoing. Upcoming initiatives include machine learning to help Anza create even more efficient models. 

“Presence didn’t just help us create a more efficient internal process utilizing technology. They helped us launch a new business by being a product accelerator, drastically reducing our speed to market. Through our partnership, we launched Anza’s online marketplace without having to hire a large number of internal staff." -Malini Balakrishnan, Anza CTO. 

To learn more about Anza, please visit Anza’s website at anzarenewables.com. To learn how Presence can help your organization, email us at contact@presencepg.com or call 415-970-5770.