What Huawei’s customers say

Key to Huawei’s rapid growth in the solar industry has been its ability to innovate in line with customer needs. PV Tech’s John Parnell speaks to some of its clients.

Huawei puts customers at the beginning and the end of its product development. Their requirements feed into the design of Huawei inverters and the final objective of those products is to bolster their business.

The four pillars of these products are higher yields, better reliability, improved O&M efficiencies and ultimately better investment returns.

Here, five customers explain their experiences working with Huawei and how their choice has boosted their business.

Adani

Efforts to hit Indian prime Mminister Narendra Modi’s ambitious 100GW solar goal have seen state and national tenders attract interest from giant domestic firms, like conglomerate Adani, as well as some of the largest developers in the solar industry.

“Right now there is lot of price pressure on solar so we have to look for all opportunities to reduce the cost and improve the performance and get a better output out of the same asset,” says Jayant Parimal, CEO Renewable Energy, Adani.

So we keep on exploring various kind of ideas and in the last few months we are exploring this concept of central inverters versus distributed string inverter and this is how we got in touch with Huawei [because] their string inverter…is capable of giving you better output because they have better MPPT.

“It has the advantage of requiring less civil work, you can execute the project fast. So the capex also remains in control and you can achieve better productivity plus it has got an integrated PLC power line current communication: it gives you an advantage of monitoring at the string inverter level. So this is why with that objective in mind, after lot of discussions, we zeroed in on the product.”

Adani remains a new player in a relatively young market. This means less first-hand experience with multiple vendors and less real-world data from across the Indian solar market for developers to draw upon. This can make it harder to select partners with confidence.

“Huawei is already a big name in telecoms and they have a large presence in India. For the last 10 years they are doing a lot of jobs in India so we expect that similar kind of performance will be shown by their inverter business also,” says Parimal adding that the data presented from other Huawei customers and the terms of its deal has left them confident of value proposition it has bought into.

Greencells

German headquartered firm Greencells is looking to exploit new opportunities in Europe and further afield. It is also eyeing the provision of O&M services as key part of its offering. That means selecting the right suppliers. Greencells’ Managing Director, APAC, Stefan Horn explains that the company prefers to handle the O&M for its own projects. “We are more comfortable with doing it ourselves,” he says. “When we make an offer of sale, we want to have the O&M contract, we want it for at least two years, we want to have five years and one of the reasons we are given higher performance ratio warranties or guarantees is because we work with a company like Huawei which can measure down to string-level performance.”

In addition to laying the groundwork for easier and more efficient O&M provision, investors must also be happy with procurement choice. Horn says the investment community is increasingly well-educated about the technical aspects of their solar investments and scrutinising the selections of their EPC partners closely, both in developed and developing markets.

“There are certain standards they expect from a tierone EPC company which makes it on one side really easy to deal with them because they know the rules, they ask the right questions so it’s a more professional and engineering-level discussion,” says Horn.

Solarcentury

UK-based developer Solarcentury, recently confirmed as the largest EPC in the country, is expanding its operations overseas and has also secured a residential solar deal with IKEA.

Acting CEO Neil Perry describes its current reach. “Apart from the UK we are in mainland Europe, we do projects in the Netherlands, we do projects in Germany, we’re looking at doing projects in France. And then in emerging countries we have offices in Latin America and Africa. Projects for us means development plus EPC. In the future, it also will involve serving Africa asset ownership. So we’re covering the whole project value chain,” says Perry.

With a lot at stake, the company is keen to deliver on its promised project performance and it chooses its partners accordingly. When it comes to inverters, one issue stands out.

“Reliability is a big one. Reliability and availability, but reliability first. As an EPC contractor, we’re on the hook for the performance ratios for two years after we’ve reached commercial operation and if we miss those ratios then that’s not good. So reliability, availability is the key thing for us. We have to meet those targets and frankly there were some issues with at least one of our previous suppliers on reliability and we got to know Huawei and we can say that having put the units in the field, the reliability factor is really high and for us, it’s great. It’s also good for our clients. Inverter reliability is one of the key variables in terms of producing your estimated performance ratio and it’s crucially important.”

Perry also says that the company is behind the “conceptual” switch from central inverters to string “provided the reliability is good and you have aftersales service and you’re able to do swap outs when units do go down”. “That’s obviously not an issue in the UK but you have to consider that in more remote locations too,” he adds. Another influence has been the pressures to build projects in the UK to meet tight deadlines, with support policies for solar changing.

“If you’re procuring central inverters, the lead times are much longer so that was also working to Huawei’s favour in terms of their UK market share because they had units available within a relatively short time so we were able to procure on a short lead time, we couldn’t necessarily have done with a central inverter on the long lead time that that involves,” says Perry.

Abundant Solar Energy

Canada’s Abundant Solar Energy has installed more than 200 rooftop systems and has a further 300MW of projects at various stages of development.

Richard Lu, CEO, Abundant Solar Energy, explains why inverters take such a central role in system design.

“Inverters are the critical component in a total solar system – it’s the cash register right? How accurate, how reliable it is is directly related to our return for the investors. So when we design a system, we always have three things in mind: number one is safety, number two is reliability, number three is low cost.

“So we use those three things, measure every one, factor every part into our system because we are not flippers; we do not develop and sell, we actually develop and own for 20 years. So because of this, from Huawei’s perspective, as the number one, it’s safe to work with.

“The second is the product reliability,” says Lu pointing out that Huawei’s failure rate is half that of the industry average. “So when we choose a product, we depend on the uptime of the product to collect the sun’s power, convert into electricity and generate income for our investors.”

The last factor is the cost. “Low cost is not just the cheapest. I think many Chinese vendors say ‘I’m always cheap’. No, for us, it’s the cost-benefit analysis,” says Lu.

“To me, it’s important the total solution. So if you look at [Huawei’s] Fusionsolar technology that’s communicating from a system perspective asset management, monitoring, analysis and so on. So that’s most attractive to me; I’m not just buying an inverter because I bought this inverter, there are things behind it that I can deploy. Currently we have asset management function, we use a monitor, we have an asset demonstration tool but those functions can be easily consolidated by Huawei’s total solution,” adds Lu.