Obton to double technological group, bring O&M as well as EPC proficiency in-house

• Danish sustainable property monitoring team Obton is to increase the dimension of its technical group this year in a bid to enhance the maintenance of its solar portfolio.

Obton, which takes care of some 800 PV projects around the world with a general ability of 982MWp, is among Europe's largest solar operators. Last January, the firm's joint endeavor with Irish team Shannon Energy established sights on creating 500MW of solar in Ireland by 2025. Obton's chief executive Anders Marcus stated last August he hoped to hit the 1GW landmark by the end of the year.

Technical director Robin Hirschl, who had formerly spent the last years running his very own O&M as well as center administration business, signed up with Obton as the business's technological director in 2019, overseeing a group of 15 people. He told PV Tech the company will increase its technical labor force throughout 2021 in order to improve the procedures and also maintenance of its renewables portfolio.

Currently, one new technical supervisor began functioning from another location in Poland on 1 January 2021, while one more participant of the team in Hungary is due to begin at the start of next month.

The firm has made a decision to bring even more technical knowledge in-house as revenue margins are progressively squeezed by dropping feed-in tariff rates.

" Back in the days when we had feed-in tariffs of EUR30-EUR40 it was a great deal easier to pa cash to O&M service providers", he stated, however alerted that as more, less costly tidy power comes onto the grid, "property owners require to think extremely carefully what is actually called for. Exactly how do we manage what our professionals are actually doing? How do we organise the user interface to our lenders, which is likewise something that has actually been completely neglected recently as well as why we as a proprietor requirement to ramp up our group."

While Obton still uses regional specialists for preventative upkeep and also daily asset administration, the newly-bolstered team will certainly work to combine the data from programmers on its 800 plants right into one system which will supply a more automated technique to increasing the portfolio's performance. Hirschl said optimal prospects would certainly be working in "one-person groups" to collaborate straight with technical distributors, as well as is trying to find designers with a history in EPC, technical service or at a technological possession administration company.

" We are trying to find one overarching intelligent system that assists us identify which systems are running well and which are not ... is this because of reasons we can't affect like grid issues or due to non-performing regional service providers? That's one of our primary issues currently."

The employment drives come with a time when the O&M market has ended up being significantly competitive as a result of falling power costs. Canadian financier Clairvest which introduced the subsidiary NovaSource Power Services after acquiring the totality of designer Sunpower's O&M division, as well as bought FirstSolar's O&M organization last August.