Enviros: providing energy audits of photovoltaic power plants

The Company

Enviros is a small company based in Prague, with 20 years experience in energy consulting, about 25 employees and an annual turnover of approximately €3,5 million. Enviros specialises in areas such as energy efficiency, renewable energy and waste-to-energy projects, waste water treatment, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and others.

The Challenge

Enviros has benefitted from favourable renewable energy policies, which guaranteed feed-in tariffs for producers of solar energy and thus boosts the investment in photovoltaic plants, to develop its activities in this business.

Since 2010, an important part of the company‘s project portfolio in the renewable energy sector are the Energy Audits for photovoltaic plants. As a core document, an energy audit of the PV plant is required by banks for co-financing investments in the installations. The energy audit assesses the anticipated energy yields and financial returns.

The Satellite Solution

Enviros uses satellite information from free sources in carrying out the audits, in order to assess the best location for the plants according to land plot ownership, appropriate shading, and information on historic levels of solar radiation, daylight times and temperatures in the area.

In addition to commonly used tools such as Google Earth and the satnav collection of geo-referenced data, some of the free information sources used by ENVIROS are the Photovoltaic Geographical Information System (PVGIS) and Satel-Light – The European database for daylight and solar radiation. The two databases are updated monthly and hourly, respectively.

The Result

With minimal investment, Enviros was able to draw substantial benefits for their business, while offering a quality service. It is now possible to evaluate the site ‘from the desk’, from a combination of different data sources, reducing travel time and costs. Enviros no longer needs to purchase meteorological data from stations on the ground, since satellite information is free and readily available online, which also reduces total project times. Finally, Energy Audits can be delivered to high standards of quality and accuracy, for any location, including those with no meteorological stations in the vicinity.

In view of these benefits, today, the use of satellite information has become a standard for the PV plant energy yield calculation for Enviros. Since 2010, satellite information has been used by Enviros to deliver about 150 Energy Audits with a total installed power of about 200MWp (megawatt peak, a measuring unit for the maximum output of a power plant), and has enabled the company to hold a leading position on the PV consulting market in Central Europe and extend its business on other geographical areas as well (namelly Africa and Australia).

“Satellite information has helped Enviros significantly increase its competitiveness in the field of renewable energy consultancy, by reducing cost, saving time and increasing accuracy.” Jan Pavlík, ENVIROS, s.r.o.