Global solar capacity has reached a record 2 terawatts (TW) of capacity, with more added in the last two years than the previous 68 combined, exclusive data from the Global Solar Council shared with Reuters showed. After the 2 TW milestone was breached this quarter, global solar capacity has become enough to power around 92 million American households, the council said.
The challenge for the industry now is to achieve 8 TW of installed solar power in total by 2030, which the data Global Solar Council suggests is possible and would amount to more than half of the 11 TW of renewable capacity needed to achieve a UN goal set at climate talks in Dubai in 2023.
As November 2024 saw the arrival of the above-mentioned good news for the renewable energy sector, the month also saw Glint Solar, a Norwegian software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-up grabbing USD 8 Million worth of funding to help accelerate Europe’s solar energy adoption.
The venture has built a platform helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time required to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables. In today’s episode of the “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will discuss about the venture in detail.
What Glint Solar Is All About?
The start-up acts like a single hub to triple its client’s greenfield project pipeline growth with unmatched ease. Its operational model is tailor-made for utility-scale solar developers, as the venture gives such industry players access to early sector insights, thereby helping them to indulge in quick decision-making.
While 73% of development hours often get wasted on stalled projects, Glint Solar redefines initial project stages to ensure that its business partners achieve up to 30% project conversion rate. The company, established in 2020, immediately identified the urgent need to speed up site origination and ensure better insight from a solar project’s inception.
Through effective use of technologies like advanced data science and research collaboration, the start-up is delivering high-precision insight into user-friendly software for the development team of the industry players, thereby empowering the latter to build solar PV at record speed to mitigate climate change.
Glint’s software collects data from multiple sources to help speed up solar project assessments. The platform features adaptable layout designs, yield estimates, country-specific geographic information system (GIS) data and topographic analysis to make it easier for solar developers to evaluate potential project sites. Cloud-based collaboration features allow teams to access essential project data. The platform can also be used as a project presentation aid by serving up 3D-rendered project layouts in quick time.
As per the start-up’s CEO and co-founder Harald Olderheim, Glint Solar’s main customers are from France, Germany, the Nordics, and the United Kingdom. With the successful completion of the latest funding round, the venture will now be expanding its sales teams to target customers in the rest of Europe, including Italy and Spain. In 2024, the start-up made one operational tweak, by narrowing the service proposition to support the planning of land-based solar installations, dropping an earlier dual product focus that had included floating-solar installations as well.
While the software can still be used for planning floating solar projects (solar panels that float on waterbodies), Olderheim said that there is more demand for ground-based installations. While some of the customers are using the software to help plan solar arrays on “big rooftops” as well, Olderheim reiterated that his company is going after the largest demand chunk.
“If you look at the market, about 60% of the market is utility, large scale. And then about 20% is big rooftops, and 20% is residential. So, we are going for the biggest market. If you want to make a big impact in the world … we can do it through the utility-scale, because that’s much faster if you’re going to build increase the [solar] energy in the world,” he told TechCrunch.
“If you think about the impact we are making by one solar plant, a big one — like 10 megawatt, maybe with 7,000 or 15,000 solar panels — it’s a very efficient way of growing the energy production fast,” he added further.
How Does The Venture Operate?
Using Glint Solar’s service to identify sites for solar projects offers clients several advantages. It eliminates the need to spend hours gathering site data, as the company can easily integrate data from its extensive layers library or allow clients to upload their own for enhanced site evaluation. Glint Solar provides an intuitive tool that enables partners to access parcel data, allowing them to visualise solar parks in 3D and select sites independently. The user-friendly interface and quick data access facilitate the rapid generation and evaluation of leads, which is essential for kick-starting projects efficiently. This approach helps clients quickly discard unsuitable projects, enabling them to focus on high-potential sites from the very beginning.
The site evaluation process takes just minutes, as Glint Solar helps industry players step away from conventional methods, where negotiation times with landowners and municipalities get longer. At the same point in time, companies can also access all their project data instantly without sifting through datasets or waiting on others. This helps them to increase control and reduce errors, as the data comes in the form of a pre-loaded multi-country manner, curated specifically for solar development.
Under the “Design and Analyse” stage, Glint Solar helps its clients swiftly create layouts, visualise concepts, and assess energy yield. They can pre-design and analyse sites with engineering-approved settings, apart from being able to make design changes, generate layouts 20 times faster, and assess multiple project scenarios. No more complex tools, just lightning-fast designs ready in minutes even if any solar industry player lacks the technical skills necessary to give its project the final shape.
Through the above-mentioned approach, Glint Solar helps to reduce risks, and increase quality projects. Clients obtain accurate buildable areas from the start, ensuring smoother progress and higher quality late-stage projects. They get to scale their projects three times faster while effectively curbing development costs, by instantly accessing analysis reports, park layouts, and 3D visualisations.
During the pre-design and evaluation phase, Glint Solar’s 3D-powered design layouts help its clients break down complex designing functions into simple actions like drawing polygons, roads, exclusions, grid connections, merging polygons, and identifying exclusion zones. They visualise layouts in 3D with elevation profiling to build trust with landowners, communities, and municipalities.
Even if a solar industry player lacks enough tech-savvy engineering teams, Glint Solar helps such entities out by empowering business development with accurate configurations and a profound understanding of energy output over time through detailed calculation, assessing energy production based on 30-minute intervals over the past 15 years. Finally, when it comes to accelerating project progression with automatic reports, the start-up helps its clients with time-to-time supply of details like capacity, yield, specific yield, project maps, 3D renderings, monthly production curves, and more for easy project management.
Collaborating with the start-up results in its clients moving away from scattered project overviews, as Glint Solar’s transparent listings enable clear visibility into project ownership and progress, apart from streamlining operations and bolstering efficiency with a unified and organised project repository. Apart from filtering projects for enhanced efficiency and clarity, businesses quickly migrate project layouts from existing workflows as Glint Solar’s project upload functionality saves valuable time and resources by simply uploading their clients’ existing project files.
Road Ahead Post Fresh Funding
Post the Series A funding, Glint Solar will now be expanding its platform to help customers plan where to site batteries that can be used to optimise renewable investments by storing energy.
As per CEO Harald Olderheim, the expansion efforts (on the software front) will take into consideration factors like grid capacity, protected areas, and sound (as batteries produce some noise once it starts operating), while continuing to ensure that customers will be provided support, in terms of making a battery compatible with the proposed solar array and “helping them share the information with landowners as they work to obtain the necessary permits.”
As per Olderheim, over the last decade, solar installations have become 90% less costly. However, projects are still not realising as fast as they should have, due to the time-consuming paperwork.
The start-up will keep operating under this particular principle: maximising accessibility to help remove friction from solar project approvals.
“We are making it very user-friendly so everyone in a team can use one software together and work on this problem to make [project delivery] much faster. And you can share everything — with the land owner, with the grid, with the municipality — so they can easily make decisions much faster with the lower risk,” Olderheim continued.
Customers are now reporting about Glint’s SaaS helping solar developers to triple their project pipeline on average, apart from helping them to evaluate potential sites 10x faster than traditional methods. However, Olderheim wants equal attention to be paid to areas like infrastructure investments and regulatory reforms, as these are key to further accelerating solar rollouts.