Power Up: Technology Agnosticism
Strictly speaking, to say that you are agnostic suggests neutrality that verges on indifference. At Candela, we do say all the time that we are technology agnostic. But the truth is, there’s nothing about our agnosticism rooted in indifference. Our neutrality, in fact, comes from a passionate set of beliefs about what’s best for solar power, and a lot of experience that informs what we believe.
This is the first in a series of posts that will explore our views and approach to technology. Before we dig into some of the more, well, technical considerations on the topic, we wanted to articulate what our operating principles were, since they stem from a set of capabilities we have as an independent platform - capabilities others might lack.
As is the case for many businesses, Candela puts our clients at the absolute center of everything we do. When it comes to developing solar and storage projects that means we deploy the best technology for that client, for that opportunity. We don’t have a specific product we are selling or a technology we are pushing: we look at all the available technology to meet the customer’s operational or financial goals. We look beyond low installed cost and make sure we’re focused on the total value we can provide to the customer.
Thanks to the fast-evolving technologies, paired with equally rapid shifts in manufacturing and supply chains, making these choices (and, making sure they’re the right choices) is a complex problem to address.
In June of this year, for example, global technology giant NEC - which has annual revenues of over $28 billion, and over 100,000 employees worldwide - announced to its customers that it would wind down their Energy Solutions division, which has helped deliver 986 MW of storage capacity since 2014.
The implications for developers, in our view, are clear: if you are commercially tied to a particular supplier or set of suppliers, you are making several bets at once, and they all need to pay off. Specifically, you are not only betting on a technology and a platform, you are betting on a supplier and their supply chain as well.
The solar landscape is constantly shifting. If you’re going to truly serve your clients, our view is that you need to be both a steward and student of the available underlying technologies, understand how they work, and have a clear opinion on their durability and value. You also need to be flexible enough to react to changes - sometimes, tectonic ones - when it comes to who is going to deliver and service those technologies into projects that are intended to have productive lives measured in decades.
We do have strong opinions about technology, and suppliers, but in order to best serve our customers those opinions cannot be - and are not - dogmas. We are constantly testing our own convictions, in our ongoing efforts to make sure that at any given point in time Candela’s clients are getting the best the marketplace has to offer.
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