Fat Spaniel hopes to hook utilities on new monitoring software

San Jose, Calif.-based Fat Spaniel Technologies released today a new version of its energy-monitoring software that could help the company secure utilities and major developers as customers.

The news comes as the startup also reveals a full-service monitoring package and hints at new products to come in 2009.

Tom Tansey, senior director of business development for Fat Spaniel, told the Cleantech Group that the latest version of its software allows customers to look at performance ratios for entire portfolios of plants. While customers could previous see data for individual plants, they couldn’t see aggregated portfolio views, which could shed light on inefficiencies and help customers better manage their assets, he said.

The new level of data and analysis makes Fat Spaniel unique among its competitors, Tansey said.

“As maturing markets scale, our previous solutions were going to run out of steam because they lacked the scope and scale to handle contemporary problems, [such as] massive growth and run-up in the solar industry,” he said. “As our customers’ portfolios have grown in size, they’ve been pushing us harder and harder to match that side of the problem.”

Fat Spaniel’s customers in 22 countries already include some utilities, who have used the product to monitor pilot-scale solar power plants and small-scale systems, but Tansey said the new offering will enable the company to sell to utilities building plants of “massive scale.”

“The ability to take that top-level view is extremely important to utilities or anybody else who is scaling up, like a commercial provider with a growing portfolio,” Tansey said.

Monitoring technology has been around for a while, but adoption is poised to explode thanks to the growth of solar power-purchase agreements, as well as the requirement to monitor renewable energy projects to qualify for feed-in tariffs and incentives, said Jim Hines, a research director at Gartner.

As funding becomes increasingly more available, solar PPAs are expected to reach 3 gigawatts of installed systems in 2013 in the U.S. alone, representing $8 billion, said Al Velosa, also a research director at Gartner. Utility-scale projects are expected to comprise two-thirds of the PPA market, up from about 10 percent now, he said.

“This is the intersection point for IT and the solar industry,” Velosa said. “Real-time monitoring is going to be the difference between a successful project and one that barely breaks even.”

Velosa indicated that firms such as Fat Spaniel need to establish their market presence within the next two years in order to compete. Hines said Fat Spaniel is one of a few firms that has survived the initial shakeout in the sector and has demonstrated actual value in its service offerings, as well as signing on high-profile partners such as SATEL Spain (see Fat Spaniel targets EU solar with SATEL partnership).

Fat Spaniel’s new version offers a number of other new features, including automatic detection of new technology and components, which eliminates the need to manually track and enter data about new capacity, inverters, or other features. The software, now used at 2,500 solar PV plants, is built on the Insight Platform first released at the Solar Power 2007 conference (see Fat Spaniel, Envision make deals at solar conference).

The software is optimized for solar photovoltaics, but servicing other renewable energy projects remains a long-term goal for the company, Tansey said.

“The main market without question is photovoltaics. That’s where the investment and action is,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we’re taking anything else off the table, quite the contrary.”

Today also marks Fat Spaniel’s first step away from being a pure software play. The company launched a service in which Fat Spaniel deploys the software then monitors the data on behalf of the customer, alerting them to maintenance needs, components failures, and underperforming systems.

“We’re the furthest up the power curve because of our experience with a vast array of solar plants. Compared to anybody else our portfolio is an order of magnitude larger,” Tansey said. “The people who license our software may have a broader job scope that keeps them from fully diving down to the depth required to do proactive management.”

Because it’s a new market, adoption rates for the service package are difficult to forecast, Tansey said. Still, the company will likely have to scale up its workforce of 40 employees to meet demand, he said.

Tansey said the company has other software products in the works before the end of 2009, including products for those purchasing energy, and software that can assist with environmental accounting. But the biggest splash could come from a product that can help project developers determine whether to move forward with solar projects.

“Project developers are in tough business because they have to go through a very large number of prospects before finding a viable project. The reason is there are so many different variables that can unhook a deal: creditworthiness of partners; the particular configuration of components; location and permitting requirements; efficacy and efficiency of contractors; availability of incentives,” he said.

“What our service will do in that space will be to take in all different types of information and aggregate it in such a way so analysis can be done on behalf of project developers in a very quick fashion.”

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