As the solar industry scales, it faces several challenges, including complexity in project management, slow innovation cycles due to traditional software dev models, difficulty in integrating disparate technologies and an urgent need for efficient energy usage monitoring and optimization. As these challenges persist, industries that require flexible, scalable and rapidly deployable software are turning to emerging solutions that can enhance operational agility and responsiveness such as low-code and no-code application development.
As a relatively young industry, only fully emerging in 2008 out of the ITC, solar faces more dynamic challenges than other more mature or older sectors of the American economy. Energy companies often have complex workflows involving multiple teams and different types of workforce: engineers, project managers, installation teams, maintenance crews, finance departments and even subcontractors and third parties. The challenge lies in integrating these operations and ensuring that information flows seamlessly between teams for real-time decision-making.
One example is tracking labor and cost codes as they relate to certain job classifications or apprenticeship, and then seamlessly integrating them with HR systems or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems — or both! If you were to hire a software development team to build a custom project management application, you would be looking at a two-year development timeline and a very locked-in set of requirements and definitions surrounding the delivery of said system. In our solar industry, you would have already missed the mark. Within six months of kicking off development, the problem you were trying to solve has likely changed. Our industry is growing at a pace that demands innovation — not only in terms of technology development but also in the digital tools used to manage operations, track costs and analyze data.
Low-code application platforms (LCAPs), also called low-code development platforms (LCDPs), such as Appian, Microsoft Power Apps, Salesforce Lightning, Boomi Flow, Google Appsheet, Mendix and more, are transforming how businesses build and deploy software applications across various sectors. There are hundreds of options of low-code platforms that all facilitate the same ends of allowing users to create apps with minimal hand-coding through use of drag-and-drop tools, pre-built templates and visual interfaces. These applications can be customized with such a high level of detail that they can be made indistinguishable from software developed top to bottom by a full-stack software development team. The key difference? Delivery time is rapidly accelerated, and the solutions are developed by solar industry experts who may not know how to code but who are uniquely qualified with knowledge and understanding of our industry. Who do you want tackling your business challenges? The pricey software dev or the in-house solar veteran?
In 2016, I led the implementation of a large full-stack piece of custom software developed to track production and quality for our utility solar sites. I have since shifted away from custom software dev toward enterprise architecture, a world engulfed in these low-code tools. This unique experience in both worlds provides me perspective to accurately present the advantages of these low-code application development platforms. In hopes that I may spark or inspire some exciting new methodologies or ideas, I am sharing just a few ways that I have used these low and no-code tools firsthand with my company, SOLV Energy, as well as how I have seen other businesses effectively utilize them to help us all collectively grow this incredible industry we are all so passionate about.
Advantages of low-code platforms
I have witnessed a renewable energy startup use a low-code platform to prototype a new service offering, involving a peer-to-peer energy trading platform, without needing to engage in a lengthy development cycle. Similarly, I have seen more established players use low-code tools to enhance and pivot existing robust products to meet new client and audit demands by creating a new feature for an existing enterprise system and developing a digital solution for NERC CIP compliance purposes. I also served as a consultant to a commercial solar installation company wanting to use a low-code platform to develop a project management app that integrates various stages of the installation process, from initial site assessment to installation and ongoing monitoring.
The agility in low-code app development ensures that solar energy companies can quickly adapt to market shifts, regulatory changes and client demands. Like most companies in the renewable space, SOLV Energy has spent the last couple of years making some business changes and solutioning areas around the requirements of the Inflation Reduction Act. We used one of our low-code platforms to develop a front end, attractive user interface for members of our compliance team to manage job codes specific to prevailing wage and apprenticeship. These codes then feed, using the same low-code platform, into our field timekeeping solution and are made accessible to the workers punching in and out of duties on-site. These labor hours feed back into the low-code platform once again and are married with actual rates from our Human Resources Information System (HRIS) before being transformed into a very templated file consumed by our certified payroll system. This full solution took under a month to develop. By embracing low-code tools, renewable energy companies can stay ahead of market trends, adapt quickly to new challenges and continue to play a pivotal role in the global transition to clean energy.
A company has a critical responsibility to ensure that their supply chains are free from exploitative practices, including child labor. A core piece of SOLV Energy’s traceability program was built using a low-code platform in under a week. How? We stored a bit of code in one of our low-code platforms that continuously scrapes the government UFLPA Entity and Withhold Release Orders and Findings Lists on their websites. Once captured, we place this information in one of our hosted databases. We currently use this data to prevent business partner entry of the identified entities and the issuing of POs in our financial system. We plan on tweaking and iterating on this solution as we add automated emailing and reports based on changes to the government lists. Low-code platforms empower developers to quickly test, iterate and deploy new ideas, reducing the time it takes to bring new products or services into the fold.
Helping companies grow
Another key strength of these low-code platforms is the ability to eliminate repetitive data entry in multiple interfaces by quickly connecting disparate systems without custom software development. At SOLV Energy, our service technicians already enter their time into our CMMS platform through work orders. Utilizing one of our low-code tools, we take non-covered service work orders and feed our ERP system for owner billings. We then take the entirety of all those work orders and feed our HRIS, so those service technicians do not have to enter their time detailing which client they were doing work for, on which site and exactly which type of work, in yet another system. We even built a clean interface that helps managers approve the work order hours that get sent to the HRIS.
As the solar energy industry continues to boom, companies must make great efforts to scale alongside it. Part of that growth has spurred a desire and need to capture new data, including important information about our people. For our organization, I took on the important challenge of collecting new data surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion and wrote a PowerApp to fill that gap. Using a low-code tool, a simple user interface that captures and feeds a centralized and secure database with this information was built in less than a day. We built something similar that serves as the crux for how our business handles risk; a simple UI that feeds a database so we can then create workflows, automation and alerts.
Historically, companies love to store data like this in Excel. However, while Excel spreadsheets have long been a go-to tool for organizing and analyzing data, they are often not the best solution for housing critical business information. Spreadsheets lack scalability, can become prone to errors and do not provide the robust data management, security or collaboration features required as data grows in volume and complexity. More advanced databases offer better control, version tracking and data integrity, ensuring that business-critical information is both accurate and accessible in real-time. Low-code platforms are the vehicle to these advantages.
By enabling fast prototyping, experimentation and the removal of manual data entry, low-code platforms foster a culture of innovation that can help renewable energy companies remain competitive and efficient in an increasingly crowded market.
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