Clean Energy Storage Device Management Software and Battery intelligence
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As of 2017, photovoltaic technology became the cheapest form of energy generation in the world, but that was just one part of the equation in developing a clean energy future. The largest barrier in clean energy technology like photovoltaic and wind is that these types of sources are intermittent and difficult to predict. We know this from our our work with Island Pulse, and visualizing how solar and wind can ramp up and down in Hawai‘i’s energy grid.
Blue Planet Energy is solving this problem of intermittent energy generation by providing a suite of storage solutions, ranging from residential to utility grade Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. Sudokrew was tasked with building a software suite to manage sales, deploy devices, monitor energy usage, and provide a unified infrastructure to connect every user and vertical of the business.
The customer is always the highest prioritized user, which means giving careful consideration to the path in becoming a customer. We worked backwards; defining what the end-user needs, then determining the applications and infrastructure necessary to deliver those needs. Our end-user’s needs were pretty broad—
These objectives lend itself to a healthy amount of data visualization, but more importantly we needed a way to receive that data. Blue Planet Energy, as a battery manufacturer had the forethought to allow data from their inverter to be transmitted, but it was still missing an endpoint to receive and store all of that data as well as consumption data from facilities and individual devices.
This meant building endpoints that connected energy hardware to software, along with the infrastructure necessary to manage a never-ending flow of data that could be archived, recalled, and indexed to users, dealers, and administrators.
We were fortunate to collaborate with eGauge Systems; a manufacturer of utility-grade energy monitoring systems that can receive production data of photovoltaic systems as well as the energy consumption data of devices like refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and other large consumers of energy. eGauge was fantastic to work with in being responsive to requests and integrating their devices into the Blue Planet Energy application.
In order to get this data to the customer, a number of business functions needed to take place that Blue Planet Energy requested the software to track:
Commissioning batteries and eGauge monitors from a Certified Dealer to a Customer Registering devices from Blue Planet Energy’s inventory to a Certified Dealer Receiving and distributing Customer inquiries to the Blue Planet Energy Certified Dealer network Providing Customers with the ability to create tenants in sub-accounts, who would be billed for energy derived from a main battery. These requirements necessitated a suite of unified applications with hand-offs from one user class to the next, while maintaining that the data is passed on with integrity from Admins to Dealers to Customers to Tenants.