Any interesting developments at SEUK?

[Energetic]

For those of us out in the sticks i thought i'd start a thread for anyone who would like to share any interesting developments from the NEC.

 

[whinmoor]

I went on Tuesday. Felt a bit sorry for those who had travelled from China to meet very few visitors. I guess stands had been booked long before recent announcements so they had to show up. Sunedison had a stand but I didn’t visit. Nice to meet up with Andy @ Sibert and put a bit of business his way.

I'd say there were decent numbers there compared to previous years. The overall mood in the hall was one of depression but defiance. I caught a couple of presentations showing how the finances might stack up but the deals didn't really look great even for commercial projects at energy-hungry clients. I can’t see how all the distributors and manufacturers can keep going if the market shrinks dramatically. One distributor told me off the record that they were planning on ditching several of their lines and concentrating on core products. The word "consolidation" cropped up several times.

The girl on the Zenex/Segen stand tried to get me to pre-order a StorEdge/Tesla battery but that looks steep at current prices (>£3,500). We've got a few SE systems running but I'm not sure how many would really benefit from one of these, especially when we've already fitted an Immersun (or similar).

I had a long chat with the technical guy from SE about various things. We recently had a failure on a Jinko module with embedded optimiser. He talked me thru resetting it to becoming a regular junction box (by swapping some jumpers inside) and adding a regular optimiser. Fortunately, the failure is easily accessible without a scaffold but it's still a faff I could do without.

Overall, it was worth going. Nice to see some familiar faces who I normally only deal with on the phone and by email. A few decent gifts came my way (best ones were a cordless drill and a Chinese silk scarf) so those goodies pretty much covered my travelling expenses and that's a birthday present for my mum sorted as well!

 

[Gavin A]

good of you to give the drill to your mum

 

[SibertSolar]

Pleasure to see you Philip, many thanks again. And congratulations to our very own Peter Randall

 

[The Solar King]

Thanks Andy. Still in shock and recovering from self inflicted liver damage.

Liked the look of the new Solaredge inverters. Half size of previous offerings with no wet capacitors. Asked as half the size would they now be half the price......

Storage offerings disappointing. As soon as you get down to the nitty gritty of cost everyone tells you they are not selling on payback, after which they can't tell you what they are selling on. Was always taught 'features and benefits' in selling, a lesson that appears to have passed them by.

One or two interesting panel offerings. JA had a double glass frameless panel on show. Panasonic had their new HIT325/330W on display along with a smaller format 240/245.

Interesting monitoring kit from Smappee.

A number of the conference sessions were interesting especially those on storage at Grid level and why this is a developing market.