What is the financial payback for businesses that install commercial solar power?

When it comes to commercial customers, budget is a key factor. They want quality products with long warranties, good after-sales service, and staff training on energy management and monitoring. The payback from solar installation can be surprisingly quick, with even high-quality systems providing substantial savings.

Businesses often think they can't reduce their high energy costs, but financing solar installation over five, seven, or 10 years can actually be cheaper than paying the annual energy cost. Commercial customers can benefit from solar power generation during their high-consumption daytime hours, with payback periods of two to five years, and sometimes as low as two years with high-quality installation.

With a lot of our commercial customers, obviously a big factor is their budget. How much they're going to spend, what is it going to cost to spend? And what are they going to get for their money? So they really want to make sure they going to get quality, they're going to get long product warranties. Very, again, very important in regards to the service, the after sales. To make sure that they can train their staff into how to utilise and how to do shutdown procedures. How can they adjunct in regards to the systems. How to energy manage, and energy audit their own systems, and how to monitor those systems. So all that becomes, we work out the paybacks to the type of tariffs that they're on. And they're very surprised to learn how quickly the systems, even the high quality systems that we instal, has a far greater payback.

A lot of businesses come and look at solar in regards to the power generation requirements to supply. And when they realise that solar supplies behind the meter, and they got a lot of high consumption, especially during the day, we try and maximise that benefit for them. And when they look at, you know, the energy generation can be sometimes in the thousands or 10's of thousands of dollars a month. And they think initially that there's no way that they can mitigate or reduce that cost. So with regards to that cost, when we show them where they can finance this over five, seven or 10 years, and then they work out what they're currently paying, a lot of times, it's actually cheaper to finance it, debt finance it, and then they save on the annualised cost of energy. So the type of savings with our commercial rural customers, which really is all bundled into one for us, can be quite substantial.