The O&M sector has been under pressure throughout the last years. The continued O&M tariff reductions require more services to help contain the operational costs. A standardization of these tools is fundamental for all stakeholders who want to perform a significant change of strategy in their business in order to meet the market needs.
As a member of SolarPower Europe’s O&M Task Force, 3E has been actively involved in the development of the three pillars of the latest version of the guidelines:
1. The Solar Best Practices Guidelines are a suite of handbooks providing detailed advice on different solar services, with the objective to enhance service quality and standardisation in the industry.
2. The Solar Best Practices Checklists are interactive tools to help service providers and clients to evaluate service quality in a fully transparent manner. Checklists are currently available for O&M, monitoring tool and aerial thermography services.
3. The Solar Best Practices Mark is a suite of self-certification-based labels based on the guidelines and checklists. Its purpose is to create more transparency in solar services and incentivise excellence by providing visibility to complying companies.
Martina Pianta, 3E Product Manager and pivotal actor in the development of the guidelines, underlines the importance of transparency and interoperability : “The most important thing to understand when taking decisions for the digitalization of a business, is to make sure that the solution we are choosing, even if limited to a small segment of functionalities, is open to interoperate with other digital systems. One can choose a solution that already includes all the aspects mentioned in the checklist, and this is of course easier, however we should keep in mind that other functionalities might be needed in the future and so the integration with a specific external solution should always be possible.”
To download the Best Practice Guidelines and for more information on how to obtain the Best Practices Mark: www.solarbestpractices.com
