For commercial and industrial (C&I) businesses, installing solar and battery storage is only part of the energy management challenge. Factories, warehouses, hotels and logistics centres can experience significant changes in demand throughout the day as machinery, refrigeration, electric vehicle charging and production schedules vary.
Nathan Childs of Solis Europe argues that artificial intelligence (AI) could help businesses respond more effectively by moving energy management away from fixed settings towards systems that forecast conditions and adjust automatically.
Moving beyond fixed schedules
Traditional energy management systems often rely on predefined rules: charge the battery at a particular time, maintain a set backup reserve or prioritise self-consumption.
The problem is that commercial demand is rarely consistent. Electricity tariffs can change, cloud cover affects solar generation and unexpected production requirements can create sudden increases in consumption.
AI-based management can instead consider information including:
- Live and historical site consumption
- Solar generation and weather forecasts
- Electricity prices
- Battery state of charge
- Grid imports and exports
- Changing operating patterns
Solis says its Solis AI system, integrated into the SolisCloud monitoring and control platform, is designed to use this information to automate energy decisions.
Why storage increases the opportunity
The potential role of AI becomes particularly important when battery energy storage is added.
Storage gives businesses flexibility, but decisions still need to be made about when energy should be charged, retained or discharged. Poor timing can leave a site importing expensive electricity later in the day or storing energy when it is not required.
Solis illustrates this with a hypothetical manufacturing site. Across a working week, an AI-managed system could respond differently to changing circumstances:
- Store strong Monday solar generation for the afternoon peak
- Charge from lower-cost grid electricity ahead of cloudy weather
- Preserve battery capacity when an unexpected overtime shift increases demand
- Take advantage of lower overnight electricity prices
- Adjust storage behaviour when the site closes early
The objective is to make many small operational decisions without requiring facilities teams to continually change settings.
Combining storage and energy management
Solis positions its EverCore system as part of this approach. The all-in-one C&I storage system combines battery storage, inverter technology and energy management.
The company says EverCore is available in 100 kWh, 120 kWh and 261 kWh capacities. These are company-specific product specifications.
The integrated storage architecture is intended to support commercial sites that combine rooftop solar, storage, grid supply and operating loads.
Sandy Woodward, European General Manager at Solis, argues that integration can also simplify installation, management and technical support by bringing the inverter, battery, energy management system and aftersales support into one ecosystem.
Keeping people in the process
AI does not remove the need for appropriate system design, installation or technical support. Businesses may also require different degrees of automation.
Some sites may prefer timed operating plans, while others prioritise solar self-consumption or revenue opportunities. Full automation represents another option where the system learns from changing site conditions and adjusts energy flows accordingly.
The wider development is a shift from monitoring what an energy system has already done towards using data to influence what it does next.
For C&I operators, solar, storage and AI could therefore turn energy from a largely fixed operating cost into a more actively managed part of business infrastructure. The value will depend not simply on the size of the solar array or battery, but on how effectively generation, storage and consumption are coordinated.
For the complete analysis, read the full feature from Solis on AI, C&I energy storage and intelligent energy management in PES Solar: https://pes.eu.com/exclusive-articles/from-monitoring-to-intelligence-how-ai-is-changing-the-future-of-commercial-energy
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