Regular contributors to PES, Gantner Instruments Environment Solutions GmbH have had a very busy 12 months. Phenomenal growth in the UK has been at the heart of this success, but there are strategic plans in place to capitalise in the long term. We talk to Jörg Scholz.
PES: Welcome back to PES. How has the company been performing since your last appearance?
Jörg Scholz: Since our last appearance, Gantner Instruments has had a successful year. For example, we are a leading company for PV monitoring in the UK and thanks to our expert knowledge and two years of experience in the country, we have managed to gain projects with a volume of 80MW only in the first quarter of 2014. This has now made us the UK market leader in the Utility Scale Monitoring business.
This monitoring concerns six utility scale PV parks all over the United Kingdom. The projects volume contains more than 600 ground mounted junction boxes “string.CC”, data loggers “Q.reader”, field point extensions “FPE” and the Gantner Software Portal.
PES: What are Gantner’s prime areas of focus at the moment?
JS: Gantner is a full solution provider in the field of utility scale PV monitoring. We develop and produce hardware for measurement and control of all parameters which are needed in such plants. We also offer software to manage large size of PV plants. This is all supported by our worldwide OEM activities. This gives us the possibility to offer our high quality products worldwide with local service.
PES: Just how competitive is your corner of the market? Would it be fair to say that it’s an area that’s set to grow still further?
JS: Of course, in every country all over the world, the requirements for monitoring systems increase steadily.Meanwhile the requirements of the customers are not just to measure some key data, the customers need to know what happened on their plant in detail, and that means that weather monitoring, webcam, String monitoring, Inverter Monitoring and UPS Monitoring must all be used. Monitoring is also important for the bankability of new utility scale PV plants. The investors are highly interested in to save their investment and improve the profit.
