Meet our latest features!
We’ve heard your feedback and are excited to share what we’ve built with your help.
Using OpenSolar just got even easier— manage your projects and teams more efficiently with custom Roles and Permissions, boost sales with detailed Shade Reports , speed up your proposal pricing with the Adders Library, and accurately model your energy storage solutions with enhanced custom Battery Modeling, and more.
We hope you enjoy these updates and are able to make use of them as best fits your business.
Explore what your OpenSolar account can now do for you below!
Manage your projects and workflows easily with custom roles, teams, and collaboration tools. With this new functionality, you can assign predefined or custom roles to each team member and provide separate access permissions. Six new, predefined roles have been created (e.g. Sales Manager, Contractor, Designer) which allow you to have more control over the specific permissions each role has.
Now OpenSolar is even more configurable around your workflow. You can provide different team members different abilities to view, edit or delete information.
You can also improve communication between roles by tagging others on notes and activities on your projects. Our personal favorite is the ability to create a ‘fetchable’ Design Request queue (among many others) to facilitate collaboration between Designers and Salespeople, and convert leads into proposals quickly.
Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature.
You can now generate a detailed PDF report on shading impacts to your system designs to help you sell clean deals and minimize costly change orders. This report includes useful site assessment details, as well as an easy-to-understand breakdown of shading impacts on each module panel group, with beautiful graphics and critical metrics such as Sun Access, Tilt Orientation Factor (TOF) and Total Solar Resource Fraction (TSRF).
Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature.
Simplify your proposal pricing with your own custom adders library (by cost, price, or both) that can be manually selected while designing a system or auto-applied to your system. You can set your own auto-apply conditions to the Adders that best satisfy the system or project conditions of your choosing such as system size, project sector (residential/commercial), project location, etc. - with just a click of a button.
Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature.
Capture additional savings and benefits from your battery proposals accurately. Build your own custom battery control logic so you can model exactly how the proposed battery solution you install will behave. This includes the ability to model when a battery can discharge to the grid or load, when it can charge from solar or the grid, as well as the maximum rate the battery can charge at, and the minimum state-of-charge the battery must maintain at any given time. This will be especially useful for modeling battery behavior when a customer joins a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), or if they install a device to control the battery dispatch to achieve maximum savings.
Please check our help center for a tour of this new feature.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is proposing to update their Net Energy Metering policy in 2022, commonly referred to as NEM 3.0. As such, OpenSolar will be updating our utility bill calculator to support modeling these changes in anticipation of the final ruling. You will be able to:
Add a new export compensation model we call “Net Billing with Credit Carryover”,
Add a new charge and credit based on installed PV capacity to model the Grid Participation Charge and the Market Transition Credit,
Set the grandfathering period of NEM 2.0 before customers are forced onto NEM 3.0. This will allow our California pros to accurately model the project financials before the sunset of NEM 2.0 mid this year
Please check our help center for an overview of NEM 3.0 (proposed) and tour of how to model NEM 3.0.
Help Save California Solar
Simple steps to get involved from our friends at CALSSA
Other Enhancements
There are a wide range of other improvements for your use, available now. See the full release notes for more information.
As always, our focus is on your success. We’re very grateful for the feedback you provide, and I hope that you can see how much we listen to your needs, and constantly evolve our software to meet them. If you ever have any questions, please contact us at support@opensolar.com.
Have a sunny day,
Dion
Product Designer, OpenSolar