Standardization and quality secure success — what MarkeDroid offers its commercial and industrial clients
Commercial and industrial (C&I) clients are investing more and more eagerly in solar parks and battery storage to optimize energy costs and secure supply. At the same time, the market conceals a number of pitfalls, ranging from “unbeatable” battery prices to nonexistent documentation.
Sander Õispuu, C&I Project Lead at MarkeDroid, shares his experience of how functional energy solutions come to be, why a cheap battery can turn out to be scrap metal, and why batteries should be discussed by sales engineers rather than salespeople.
A standard setup ensures speed; custom solutions are handcrafted work
Sander Õispuu explains that MarkeDroid’s C&I (commercial and industrial sector) projects typically start from 200 kWh of capacity. They fall broadly into three categories: agricultural parks (solar park + battery park), simpler commercial solutions (shops, office buildings), and more complex industrial solutions, where batteries are used to optimize costs during hours of high electricity prices. A major boost also came last autumn from the security-of-supply subsidies distributed to the agricultural sector by PRIA.
According to the project lead, work proceeds fastest when the client’s or partner’s installation solutions are standard and professional.
“With existing partners, the workflow is efficient. They have plenty of experience, they install our device and submit the project documentation to MarkeDroid. On my end, I integrate the assets behind our device — meters, batteries, solar inverters — validate the data, and configure the site parameters,” Õispuu describes his usual work process.
Testing takes place in stages: first at partial power, then at medium levels, and finally at nominal operation. It also means continuous monitoring of the site, which helps confirm that the equipment is operating properly. This, in turn, helps avoid the physical tripping of fuses or a possible breach of grid contracts.
“Once the tests have been passed successfully and MarkeDroid’s machine learning has learned the initial consumption patterns and obtained location-based solar forecast data, the site moves under AI-based control. That is then followed by continuous data collection and ongoing refinement of the models,” Õispuu says.
New products and custom work bring surprises
When new partners or unfamiliar products come into play, Õispuu first conducts a thorough survey in order to manage both the partner’s and the end client’s risks and expectations. There are many different manufacturers on the market, and a battery system’s capability depends on how well the battery and inverter are integrated with each other, and how receptive the system is to control commands from other parties.
“With new sites, direct dialogue with the manufacturer is often needed, because the existing documentation isn’t accurate. Software compatibility has to be sorted out mainly through the manufacturer and the partner, and as a last resort through the client,” Õispuu notes.
The complex cases are the custom solutions, which make up about 5% of MarkeDroid’s C&I projects. These require detailed discussions, analysis of communication and single-line diagrams, and a project-specific approach. In larger industrial facilities, load consumption is highly variable, which means tuning the system can sometimes be quite specific. For example, in a situation where the power demand shifts by 100 kW within a second or two, the system may need repeated fine-tuning on the control side, since the battery’s response may not always keep up at the same speed.
“Our planning and control software performs best when the core components — load, solar, battery, and grid connection — are fully readable. If we don’t know exactly what the solar is doing, it affects the load. If the data is incomplete or partial, then understandably our result isn’t as accurate either,” the project lead explains.
More complex sites require handcrafted work. “If a custom solution comes with a clear project where the information is correct and no additional questions arise, everything gets validated and tested quickly. But if there’s a lot of uncertainty during the creation of the project, it can take two weeks or sometimes even a whole month,” he admits.
As an example, Õispuu points to a site where two different battery solutions had been installed at one location. “You never know exactly how two batteries from different manufacturers will work together when they’re given the same control command. It’s possible both respond correctly, but it’s equally possible that a discrepancy arises,” Õispuu points out.
As a second example, he mentions a site where the capacity is large and the safety of substations and fuses comes into play. “We have to take into account that if you have several consumers, producers, and storage devices behind one connection point, the main fuse must not trip due to load. Complex solutions are occasionally quite a challenge, but since the investment has already been made by the client, we at MarkeDroid also do everything to make it pay off.”
The Baltic market’s sore spot: cheap batteries can turn into scrap metal
Õispuu notes that the market is new, and both installers and clients are in fact still in a learning phase. “In this field, sales engineers should be involved rather than salespeople. A lack of competence at the sales stage slows us and the installers down and leaves clients dissatisfied. We’re not against custom solutions, but when a system is standard, everything gets up and running many times faster.”
Larger-scale projects are handcrafted work for the MarkeDroid team, but Õispuu draws attention to a serious problem in the current Baltic market — the choice of batteries. Since companies are trying to cut costs and maximize returns, close attention is paid to the payback period (ROI).
“When a CFO has the choice on the table of buying a battery for 30,000 or 50,000 euros, they often pick the cheaper one. But the question is: will that device still be running in five years, or will it be scrap metal by then,” Õispuu warns.
The project lead recommends assessing four key points when choosing a battery:
- Lifespan and return over the longer term: Will the device outlast its warranty period?
- Technical support: Does the battery manufacturer have real support available to the user or installer when problems arise?
- Reliability: Practice shows that the cheaper the battery, the faster problems develop. And unfortunately, there are many of them. Since a battery should in principle last around 10 years, one also has to take into account various features such as heating and cooling systems and weather resistance.
- Internal capability and protection mechanisms: Cheap batteries often have poor internal management. If a battery keeps shutting itself down for various reasons, the end client is stressed, because the battery sits idle and cost arises instead of revenue.
“Unfortunately, the situation is such that if you don’t sell a cheap battery, someone else on the market will. The result is that in three or four years, we’ll have hundreds of batteries on the market that don’t work, because no one knows how to fix them and there’s no support,” Õispuu notes.
For MarkeDroid, this means an overload of customer support. Due to the sector’s rapid growth, labor moves around a great deal, and good, experienced installers are hard to find.
“Practice shows that a quality battery is many times more reliable — in that case, over a year you might have a problem with maybe one battery in thirty. When we’re talking about cheaper batteries, a problem arises with at least every third battery within the first six months, and repeatedly. And all batteries essentially roll out of the same factory hubs — the difference lies in the build quality, the software, and how the internal protections are designed,” Õispuu explains.
Diagnostics and an energy management system bring clarity
Although battery and solar solutions could manage the basic essentials — such as keeping the battery charged — without a central energy management system (EMS), MarkeDroid offers business clients diagnostics and monitoring at an entirely new level.
“Our platform offers partners an informative and diagnostic view. Regardless of the manufacturer or device, we display data quite accurately. This gives the partner the tools to get to the core of a problem. We display battery data that the partner otherwise wouldn’t even see on the manufacturer’s own platform,” Õispuu says.
In the future, MarkeDroid plans to develop the monitoring even further, introducing alarms coming directly from the devices and more thorough analytics.
“The goal is to offer the partner a central project management platform where all the solutions and answers are together. For example, if a battery’s temperature is too low or the connection is down, the system helps identify whether it’s a power outage, a tripped fuse, or a communication failure. Then either the end client or the installer can respond accordingly.”
Speaking of the division of responsibility, Õispuu says MarkeDroid’s position is that control-related matters are ours to answer and resolve. But if a battery suddenly stops responding after months of operation, it’s worth starting with the battery itself — whether the battery has some active fault, whether anything has burned out on the hardware side, whether maintenance has been carried out on the equipment.
“Unfortunately, clients often come to us with these questions too, even though we didn’t select or install the solutions in question, which means the matter has to be discussed with the installation partner.”
In closing, Sander Õispuu urges installers to take this to heart:
“Our message is: keep the installation solutions you offer standard, and explain to clients why quality ultimately saves more nerves and money. To those commissioning installations, I’d recommend that when choosing a partner, always look at what they’ve done before, which manufacturers’ solutions they use, and how long they’ve been active on the market. The risk is that if a partner changes its line of business or ceases operations altogether, the client is left alone with their problem. And finally, if anyone needs additional information or advice, it’s always worth reaching out to us — we can advise on what to prefer from a smart-control perspective and what the possibilities are with the various options.”
