Almost 30 projects with archelios Calc.
Intersolaire SAS reported on the benefits gained through this tool:
Over 50% in time-saving on a project compared to conventional manual calculations on Excel, a highly visual and complete project design as well as greater efficiency in working method.
Located in Mulhouse in Eastern France, Intersolaire is an engineering office with ten people, which develops photovoltaic projects in France. The company equips individual homes (feasibility, plant installation, administrative management of electrical connection, commissioning and maintenance), commercial buildings (building and solar installation) and investors (visit and audit of existing plants or to be built). As part of the German group DGE, pioneer in financing renewable energy projects in Germany, the company has a branch in the wind energy sector: Intervent. Since 2010, for its photovoltaic activities, Intersolaire has established partnership with system integrator and equipment supplier, SAG Technik GmbH based in Freiburg, Germany.
Within this cooperation, a license of Archelios CALC was acquired in 2011 in order to meet the requirements of the controlling body and to be guaranteed to meet the French standard in installation design: the calculations were previously done manually on excel and the team needed a tool to quickly create calculation notes on large projects of 150 to 250 kWp. The time savings with Archelios CALC for the calculations are estimated at over 50% of time spent before on excel, and even more for all new designs. Philipp Schaeper, project engineer of Intersolaire uses Archelios CALC twice a week for about 75 projects designed in one year since July 2011 and particularly for a big project of 794 kWp sized on solar calc™ in four separate project files.
The first draft of a project takes about fifteen minutes on Archelios CALC, the complete realization of a project takes 3 hours in total and allows installers to deliver a clearly structured file including all components to be used .
“The project design is very visual, we have the whole design on the screen,” says Philipp Schaeper, the user Archelios CALC.
“We can make changes quickly, we can easily duplicate the material in the facility. Since a solar power plant is often composed of identical parts, I put an inverter with all its strings and I duplicate it several times so that I have very quickly created the basic structure of the plant, thus saving a lot of time. From an ergonomic point of view, one can easily navigate between components as the single line diagram fills the screen.”
The acquisition of solar calc™ was amortized very quickly in terms of work efficiency. The fact that solar calc™ treats the complete link DC / AC simplifies the task as only one software is needed. In regards to equipment, Philipp Schaeper ensures through solar calc™ that the chosen equipment works well for the controlling office but leaves his respective suppliers make proposals for the selection of surge arresters, switches and fuses. He particularly enjoys being able to export the DWG line diagram to provide an extract of the calculation note to the controlling body: summary of the calculation note, of the trackers, the list of anomalies and the line diagram.
“I recommend Archelios CALC because it meets my requirements very well” concluded Philipp Schaeper.
