How Soly provides the ultimate home energy solution

Soly redefines the traditional energy business

Soly is currently one of the fastest growing and expanding solar companies in Europe. The solar scale-up's success story is based on a unique business model: customers can order their rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems quickly and easily in a purely digital planning process. The entire customer journey runs via the company's proprietary tech platform, from the initial inquiry to the entire planning process; merely the installation is naturally carried out physically at the respective location. Thanks to this approach, Soly installs and commissions rooftop PV systems and other distributed energy resources (DERs), such as battery systems and electric vehicle (EV) chargers, for customers in just two to eight weeks after signing – thereby shrinking installation times by at least two- or three-fold at a minimum. To expand its service offering, which included the installation of DERs and dynamic energy contracts, and provide customers with an all-round carefree package from a single source, Soly wanted to add a smart energy management solution. The company realized that doing this themselves was not viable – the effort of developing their own smart energy management system and building up the expertise in-house would not have been compatible with the company's growth strategy due to a lack of cost-efficiency and speed. Hence, Soly consciously decided to create synergies with a suitable expert. The energy management solution needed to be agile and scalable in order to promote rapid internationalization and ensure that Soly continues to play a leading role in the new energy services sector in Europe.

Countless use cases thanks to instant control

In gridX, Soly has found a partner that can scale just as quickly as the solar installer. gridX brings with it the IoT platform XENON, a smart energy management solution that has already made a name for itself in smart home energy management. The modular setup makes it possible to bring a future-proof energy management system to market in the shortest possible time. Soly currently uses the Energy Optimizer, Tariff Timer, Diagnostics and API modules. The latter makes it possible for Soly's entire planning and execution process to run via the company's own app, which is connected to XENON. Through the local installation of the IoT gateway gridBox, which is called SolyBrain in this case, Soly achieves local control of the energy systems on site in each household and thus enables customers to manage energy assets in real time, without any obstructive latency. The split-second control enables various future use cases, such as flexibility trading. The modular structure also allows for country-specific requirements to be integrated into the solution, new modules to be added and thus the best possible response to the respective individual market requirements. This is particularly important in the partnership due to rapid internationalization. And gridX creates even more flexibility with XENON: while Soly has to date mainly focused on PV systems, batteries and household EV chargers, the portfolio can be expanded to include other energy systems, such as heat pumps. This smooth integration into the energy management system is possible because gridX pays particular attention to the manufacturer independence of its technology – a large number of energy resources from more than 50 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are currently compatible with XENON, and more to come soon. 

Providing households with unprecedented flexibility in energy use 

Collaborating with gridX brings numerous noticeable benefits not only for Soly, but also for the solar installer's customers: by integrating gridX’s smart energy management system, all DERs in tens of thousands of households in various markets will be digitally accessible, connected and controllable in future. In this way, households gain a new sense of freedom in the use of energy in their own homes: all energy flows can be managed in a smart way, minimizing costs and maximizing self-consumption of locally produced clean electricity. Dynamic tariffs can also be ideally utilized: the energy management system can synchronize solar production, consumption and electricity prices in real time and then optimally coordinate them. Furthermore, Soly can also leverage the potential of flexibility from household systems with gridX. The flexibility of a household’s DERs can be offered on flexibility markets, for example. The Netherlands is currently working hard to turn this concept of an imbalance market into reality. In other markets, this will also become increasingly important in the future. If flexibility is provided to the grid, households will receive financial compensation in return. It is conceivable that households could generate up to a four-digit amount per year. Calculated against the investment costs for DERs, an investment in a home energy setup could quickly pay for itself at a household level.

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