Practical Advice for Adding Energy Storage to Your Solar Business

The transition from solar-only to solar plus storage doesn’t require a complete business overhaul, but it does require sound strategy.

HeatSpring instructor Wes Kennedy shares actionable advice for solar companies ready to integrate more energy storage: how to identify markets where storage pencils out, why building relationships with manufacturers is key, and how end-to-end software platforms are making it easier to model, dispatch, and manage systems with minimal friction.

Wes’s advice is simple and straightforward. Find what works, standardize it, and deploy at scale.

This clip comes from a HeatSpring PRO Circle – focused discussions where PRO members learn directly from experts working in the field. HeatSpring PRO gives you full access to Wes’s Comprehensive Solar Plus Storage course plus 15 others across energy storage, solar service, building systems, and skilled sales. Just $89/month or $890/year for top notch training that helps you grow revenue in high-demand verticals.

Transcript below.

Brian: What advice do you have for people running those companies about making the transition into energy storage and adjacent markets like that?

Wes: Yeah, well, I think that’s the ideal situation to be in. What’s hard is running a company and balancing your books and deploying installation crews and managing your procurement chain. That stuff, I think, is the tricky part. Just to integrate energy storage into your offering is not that heavy of a lift. And the actual hardware and software is becoming more and more mature, even faster than every year. It’s now every quarter.

So my specific advice would be look around in your area of focus, identify the gaps where energy storage is going to solve a problem. Then work with/reach out to the various BESS manufacturers out there and lean on their application engineering team. Build those relationships. We’re in this space and a big part of it is to educate our customers on why our stuff is good and how our stuff can help solve their problem.

Qcells, in particular, we just launched a platform called Geli Predict. So Geli was one of the early energy storage dispatch energy management systems. It was based in California, had a lot of early success when California really kicked off the real commercialization of stationary storage – commercial and up. Geli was one of the early players in that world. Qcells acquired Geli five years ago or so, and so Geli is now a Qcells brand.

But for example, we now have a software layer that does everything from model your project so you can see if the returns make sense. That’s what Geli Predict is. Another company that’s in the same space is Energy Toolbase. So you use these tools, you model your given scenarios, and find projects that pencil out well.

And then what’s really cool, and I talk about this in my course, is it’s the same logic, the same software engine that doesn’t just model it, but then it operates and dispatches your system. So Geli takes all of the tariff information, the weather data, the spot markets of pricing, takes all those things into account. It helps you maintain a certain percentage in your battery for resiliency, if that’s what you need. So there’s all these different use cases you program it in, and then Geli just dispatches your battery to earn the returns that it predicted you could earn in the analysis phase.

And then it manages the O&M. And it’s like, oh, this battery stack is not reporting. Let’s scramble a maintenance guy to see what’s going on. So it’s getting to the point where it’s like an end-to-end software layer that operates these systems essentially for you.

So connect with a good BESS manufacturer, get your system together, and then drive towards a cookie cutter approach. It’s like get a system together and then work to deploy very similar component stacks in as many projects as you can in your given area. It’s getting to the point where it can just deploy and we just need more boots on the ground to do it.