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How performance monitoring can help to maximize return on your investment?
The ultimate goal of an investment is to increase the value of the money being invested. Shrewd investors put their money into industrial production where their capital is used to generate profits by manufacturing products or generating energy. When the price one is able to fetch for a product (revenue) is stable or under constant downward pressure, be it an inverter, a solar panel or a kWh of energy, the only way to increase one’s profit from one year to the next is to decrease the cost of production. The cost of production is largely determined by labour costs and material costs (including the cost of energy). However, with a large fraction of production labour in the Western world having been outsourced to cheaper sources in the East, and the remaining labour in Western countries under constant threat of increase due to collective bargaining and inflationary pressures, there is very little room to maneuver.
The materials we need for production come from a finite resource (just as with oil, the price of a declining resource have to increase as the supply dwindles); furthermore, the extraction and processing of these materials use energy. The cost of fuel-based energy is also, as we all know, not about to decrease in the foreseeable future.
Consequently, the only recourse for investors to ensure a consistent increase in profit is to develop technologies that increase the efficiency of the processes in which their money has been invested. These technologies are active at many levels, from the machines that mine, extract and process raw materials to the software that optimize supply chain management and in our case, the hardware and software (Green Energy Portal) that improve the uptime and efficiency of a solar PV installation. >>
