Of course, the most critical value-added service offered by an EPC is the efficiency with which it executes the solar plant construction.
In addition to this, some extended offerings that are provided by good EPCs include the following.
- Strategic Supply Partnerships: High quality EPCs will have access to large and cost-effective supply arrangements with leading module, inverter and racking suppliers, and other balance of system components.
- Financial assistance: Technically, it is not related to engineering, procurement and construction activities, but many renowned solar EPCs additionally assist their clients in financial closures based on their excellent relationships with banks and other financial institutions.
- Asset management services: Some EPCs can separately offer Operations and Maintenance (O&M) services, as well as extend them to include asset management services (security management for the power plant, and warranty and insurance claims management)
- Power Purchase Agreements: While signing of PPAs is in the domain of developers, high quality EPCs can utilize their knowledge of the solar sector to assist clients in signing up PPAs, especially where PPAs are signed with private companies for power off-take. Many of the renowned EPCs have experience of negotiating 100s of
MWs of PPAs and have a deep understanding of the legal, commercial and technical provisions necessary to allow a solar energy project to achieve commercial operation and financial close on a timely basis. - Niche technology:
- A rooftop solar EPC that offers aesthetic systems can be especially attractive for customers in the high end residential segment, for whom the aesthetics may also be important apart from cost. A small number of EPC are successfully installing such systems even though the price may be double the average systems!
- Some commercial and industrial establishments which may require solar-diesel hybrid power plants, may go for EPCs that have expertise in this area as it additionally requires dealing with programmable logic controllers (PLC) as the inverter needs to synchronize diesel and solar power systems
You might want to check out these questions too on Choosing EPCs
- How Do I Choose the Right Installer for a Rooftop Solar System? – Here
- How to Choose the Right EPC for Your Solar PV Power Plant – Here
- How do you know whether an EPC is credible? – Here
- What are the don’ts while choosing a solar EPC? – Here
- What metrics should you use to evaluate the past performance of an EPC? – Here
- Should you go for an EPC that provides O&M (Operations and Maintenance) services as well? – Here
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