Name: How to Design Solar + Storage in Under 15 Minutes
Uploaded: 2025-10-02T19:01:10.204Z
Duration: 44 min
Description: How to Design Solar + Storage in Under 15 Minutes

Transcript for "How to Design Solar + Storage in Under 15 Minutes": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, designing a solar and storage system in under fifteen minutes. Another reminder that this webinar is being recorded and will be shared with you afterwards via email if you want to view it again or share with your colleagues. My name is Stephen Gerken, and I'm a senior product marketing manager at Aurora Solar Solar. Been here for over six years now and seen the industry evolve quite a bit here over the last few years with storage becoming a much bigger piece of the picture each year. So I'm excited to share my learnings with you today and give some best practices that will hopefully help to elevate your design process. In today's presentation, I'm gonna start by going over some recent trends that we've been seeing in the solar and storage space to better understand why this is such an increasingly important topic. Next, I'll actually jump into Aurora Solar and give you a full demo of how you can go from just an address to a fully designed solar and storage system. And then I'll wrap it up with a summary with some key takeaways and additional resources and save some time at the end to answer any questions. So with that, let's dive into some market trends. I'm sure it's not surprising to anyone here that homeowners and businesses are increasingly demanding solar systems paired with battery storage. So according to our solar snapshot report from earlier this year, 78 of installers reported increased demand for solar and storage. And of those, 42% reported a large increase. But it's not just installers either. So homeowners are seeing the benefits of storage as well. With our recent homeowner surveys, only 1% of respondents had no interest in battery storage, and 69% of homeowners recognized that battery storage can help lower their energy bills. However, we do know that batteries are still relatively expensive, although they have been decreasing year by year, with 72% of homeowners expressing concerns around battery lifespan and replacement costs. So while the battery conversation years ago was predominantly focused around energy resiliency and backup, the use cases have expanded, And now more and more homeowners are recognizing it as a worthwhile investment that can also help to reduce their bills. And this trend is expected to continue each year. So OMA Analytics is forecasting a 57% attach rate in The US by 2030, up from 26% in 2024 and thirty eight percent this year. And in markets like California and Puerto Rico, it's expected to reach almost a 100%. So what's driving this? For one, policy and incentives play a critical role in improving the economics behind adding battery storage. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, batteries are eligible for the 30% federal tax credit when either paired with store with solar or stand alone in addition to potential adders on top of that. But, unfortunately, this incentive will no longer be available starting next year for customer owned systems under 25, so that applies to systems financed via cash or loan. However, it will still be available under 48 e for systems financed through third party ownership. In addition to that, there are a number of state and utility rebate incentive programs that can further reduce the cost, and virtual power plant programs offer homeowners a way to earn revenue from their batteries through providing grid services and demand response, and all of these can help to reduce the payback period and make battery storage a more financially viable investment. Advancements in battery storage technology are also making residential solar and storage systems more efficient, reliable, and cost effective, And new battery technologies have helped to improve the energy density, reduce costs, and increase the stability and lifespan of batteries. So this technology is really crucial for optimizing the storage of solar energy, allowing for more efficient use and distribution of solar power. Changes to net metering policies have also helped make self consumption more desirable. For example, under NEM three in California, storing energy and then using it during high time of use rates or even selling it back to the grid during high export rate times can significantly improve savings. And this is increasingly true in many other markets as well. And growing resiliency concerns, power outages have been trending upwards in The US due to extreme weather events and aging grid infrastructure, and more homeowners are concerned about the grid reliability and protection against outages. Plus, with the financial incentives and and advancements in technology I talked about earlier, this is becoming a more accessible option for a broader range of homeowners who may not have been able to afford it five to ten years ago. Now before I jump into the demo, let's take a look at some of the primary use cases for residential storage. So first is backup only, which reserves all of the battery power in case of power outages or emergency scenarios. This helps give homeowners peace of mind that they'll still be able to light their home and power critical appliances in case of blackouts or emergencies. Self consumption, which aims to limit grid use by storing excess solar energy and using that battery power later rather than pulling from the grid. So effectively, maximizing the use of their own generated solar power and reducing overall reliance on the grid. Energy arbitrage, which aims to maximize bill savings by storing when export rates are low and then either using that power or even selling it back to the grid when when rates are high. And there's also partial backup, in which case a certain percentage of the battery power is reserved in case of an outage, and the rest can either be used for self consumption or energy arbitrage. And you're also able to show these use cases when designing a solar plus storage system or retrofit when designing with an existing PV system, both of which you can model in Aurora Solar today. There are a few other use cases such as virtual power plants, peak demand shaving, and even off grid systems. And these are still less common, although BPPs are starting to grow, But we'll focus mostly on these four since they are by far the most common today. And I will note too that this also really depends on the market that you're in and the homeowner's goal to determine the best use case here. So now let's get into it and start designing a system. Alright. So now I'm gonna walk you through how to design a solar and storage system in Aurora Solar. So first step would be to create a new project. Enter in the address. Make sure that the PIN is centered on the correct home. Select the property type and the organization and team if applicable. And this is just letting me know I've already created a project with this address, but I will create a new one anyway. And now I'll be brought to the project overview page where I can see a summary of all of the details of my project. And before I can start designing the system, you'll need to enter in the customer's energy usage information so that you can size the system correctly. The pre and post solar utility rate will be automatically populated based on the location of the project, but you can always override this if needed. And there's a number of ways that you can input energy usage information depending on what you have available. So I can do a monthly average if I just know how much they pay or use on average each month, a monthly estimate where I can input however many months of usage data that I have available, monthly estimate with an existing system if this is for a retrofit, annual energy estimate, or the most accurate way to input this would be to either copy and paste their interval interval data if you have that available or pull that in via utility API. But for this example, let's just say I know that they paid $200 in the month of March. Enter that in here, and Aurora is going to extrapolate that out for the rest of the year. And the more bills that you can input, the more accurate this estimate will be. So before I create a new design, just wanna call out here that we do have an expert design service available where you can request a three d model from our team of expert designers. And I'll talk more about this and show you an example of it later, but you can click here to make a request and submit the request and then get notified when the model is complete. And at that point, you can immediately just jump in and start creating the system design. But for this demo, I'm gonna start from scratch and actually just create a new design in design mode. So here I can see a top down view of my site, and the imagery looks pretty good here and from 2025, so fairly recent. But if that's not the case, as a best practice, I just recommend toggling through a few different imagery options to make sure that you have the most clear image. Now before I can start designing the PV system, I'll first have to create a three d site model, and this is a critical step to make sure that the panels can properly fit on the roof and that we can accurately take shading into account. So if you have Aurora AI enabled, you'll see the option available here, And I'll just run this really quickly to show you what it looks like, but this allows you to create the three d model in under fifteen seconds using AI and machine learning to help automate that design process. But for this example, I'm just going to delete the model and actually create it from scratch using SmartRoof. So we also have roof faces here to draw if you want to draw out individual roof faces, but I would recommend using SmartRoof whenever you can. So using smart roof, you'll just trace out the outline of the roof. And then delete roof faces as needed. Make any adjustments until the model looks good. And there's also many different ways to do this depending on what works best for you. So I'll actually delete this and just show you another route that you can land at the same thing. So I have the main structure here, and then you can just go in and add any dormers or folds as needed. And there we go. And once your roof structure looks good, the next step that I'd recommend would be to use lidar to make sure that the roof faces are to the correct height and pitch. And for those of you that aren't familiar with lidar, this is essentially where a scanner, so typically on a plane, will fly over an area and beam lasers down to the ground. And based on the time that it takes for that light to bounce back, we can get an accurate assessment of everything on the surface. So if I turn on point cloud, I can see each one of those individual points. But before even fitting everything to lidar, I would first look at the lidar sources that we have available to find the highest quality data source. So in many cases, Google three d will be the most recent data, but Aurora will often be the the highest density. So I'll turn that on, and I can see that the density of this data is, in fact, much higher. So I'll use this for my design. I'll click on the roof, click fit to lidar, and that's going to snap everything to the correct height and pitch. I can also come in, look at click on each individual roof base, change the height or the pitch as needed here until everything matches up perfectly. Okay. So next, we'll wanna draw out the roof obstructions. So I'll come over to obstructions, and I'll select the type of obstruction. So I'll start out with this chimney, and then I can use the LIDAR data to make sure this is the correct height. I'll add in another obstruction here. And because this looks like a skylight, I'll go ahead and make this flush to the roof. And now that you get the general gist, I'm just going to use AI obstructions for the rest to speed this up a little bit. Also, you'll notice that I have these step backs here in yellow along the edges, and these will be automatically applied based on what your account admin has configured in your settings. So if I come up to the settings here, I have a default of point five feet, but you can also configure setbacks on a country level, a state level, or even a local level, and those will override the defaults based on the location of the project. And you do have the ability to come in and override these as well. Alright. So now that we have our roof model complete, let's take a look at the shading. So in addition to the roof obstructions, looks like we have also a lot of trees that might impact how much sunlight hits this roof. So the most automated way to take this into account would be to use lidar shading, which is typically turned on by default. So I'll run irradiance. And so this is going to calculate the irradiance on this roof using the lidar data to account for the surrounding trees and buildings. However, if you want more control over this, you can also turn off lidar shading and draw out trees manually. So, for example, if you notice that a tree has been cut down or maybe the homeowner wants to cut down a tree so the roof gets more sunlight, you can come into disable lidar shading and then drive the trees manually here. So let's say that the homeowner wants to cut down this tree, so I'll just model this one out and then rerun the irradiance. And this is going to recalculate the irradiance on this roof just looking at the trees that you've modeled out manually. There we go. But for this example, I'm just going to revert back to LIDAR shading. And then the last step before I can start designing the system would be to add in fire pathways. So I can draw these in draw these in manually, or I can click auto place fire pathways. And with our AHJ database, we'll automatically place those for you based on the code requirements for this AHJ. Now at this point, I have my full three d model. With my shading analysis, I can see the best roof faces to put solar, and I can see where on that roof I can actually place modules avoiding the obstructions, setbacks, and fire pathways. So now I can start designing the system. And designing the system can be as manual or automated as you want it to be. So you can place modules or ground mounts manually. So I can either fill a roof face or manually place these and select an inverter. And then even manually string the system. Or if you've manually placed the panels, you can also run auto stringer to automatically string the system for you. But the most automated way to do this would be to use our auto designer feature. So I'll click on auto designer. So I can either max fit the route to see how many panels will fit, or I can target an energy offset. So this is the estimated annual consumption that I put in earlier, and I've set my default in my settings to be a 110%, but I can adjust this as needed. So let's just put it at 100%. And this means that it's going to design the optimal system to reach at least 100% energy offset, and I could select different up to five different panel types here. The orientation, a number of different advanced configurations. You can select up to five string inverters, micro inverters, and DC optimizers. And the reason that you can select multiple here is that Auto Designer will look at all of the components that you've selected and design the optimal system using the best combination of components. You can also specify a minimum SAP or TSRF. So let's say I would only ever want to place modules where the TSRF is greater than 70%. So I want to avoid some of these more heavily shaded areas. I can set a minimum TSRF of 70% and then run auto designer. And this will run some complex algorithms that are essentially trying to find the best layout and combination of panels and components that reach your target energy offset while also avoiding obstructions, setbacks, and any roof areas below 70% TSRF. It also takes aesthetics into account, so we'll try to group them together as much as possible without scattering panels around a bunch of different roof bases. And you can also set the minimum number of panels per row. So once this is complete, I will simulate the system, and this is going to run a production simulation for the system taking into account the shading, local weather, the homeowner's energy consumption, and a number of other factors. And here I'll be able to see the annual production, the energy offset, the monthly consumption versus production, and even drill down into the individual system losses. I can look at the bill savings month by month. And now one big thing to notice here is that although the energy offset is over 100%, the bill savings here is only 53 percent with solar. And that's because with NEM three in California, the time of use rates mean that during the peak hours of four to 9PM, the price of electricity is much higher. And because solar is not producing as much during that time, you'll still need to end up paying a lot for electricity, especially during the summer months. And so this is where battery storage can come in. Now I'll go to storage. So first thing I'll do here is to select my battery model from my list of enabled components. So I'll go ahead and select the Powerwall two. And then I can decide on how I want the battery to be set up depending on what the homeowner is looking for. So selecting whether or not they want backup in case of an outage, the backup reserve percentage, so how much of their battery power they'd want to reserve in case of an outage. And if you set this to 100%, this will be a backup only system, so reserving all of the battery power in case of outages. And this doesn't provide them with any bill savings, but it's best for homeowners who are really prioritizing resiliency resiliency and reliability. And this backup potential down here will show you how long they'd be able to power their entire home, just the appliances or just the essentials with that backup power. So let's say that they'd like some backup power for short outages, but are really looking to also save on their bills. So I'll set this reserve percentage to 10%, and the backup potential down here is showing that they could still power their whole home and appliances for about an hour and their essentials for five hours. Then I can select the backup coverage, so whether they'd want to use that backup to power their whole home or just partial. And from there, I can select the consumption schedule, which is how the rest of their battery power will be consumed. So self consumption is where the battery stores excess solar and discharges when home demand exceeds production. So the goal of self consumption is really to maximize on-site solar use to reduce reliance on the grid. And this may not fully optimize against time of use rates, but it is a strong fit for markets without export incentives. And here I can see that with solar only, their average monthly bill will be around a $130 per month, and their average monthly bill with a battery would be around $53 per month. And if I click on grid usage, I can see how that battery power is being used throughout each hour of the day for an average day within the month that's selected here. So charging the battery with excess solar during the day, exporting to the grid when the battery is fully charged, and then discharging the battery in the evenings rather than pulling from the grid. And if I look at a later month here, so let's do November, I can see that there are still times when I'm pulling from the grid. So about 14% of my consumption is being pulled from the grid here, within November. And because I have my backup reserve percentage to 10%, I can also see that the state of charge never drops below 10% and will start pulling from the grid when they reach that, specified reserve percentage. But let's say that the homeowner doesn't care about backup. So I'll toggle this off and rerun the simulation. And remember that the solar plus battery monthly bill before was around $53. So this gives them a little more savings. And if I go back into November here, that's because the battery now discharges to 0% and can power their home for a bit longer before pulling from the grid. I can even look at the entire year here, which will show the average monthly grid use before and after adding battery, average monthly surplus, and the self sufficiency percentage, which is the total consumption that comes from your solar and storage system. And I can even see how this is broken out by each month. And the other consumption schedule option here is energy arbitrage, which is optimizing for bill savings based on the homeowner utility rates. So energy arbitrage will charge during low cost solar hours and discharge during high cost peak hours. And under time abuse rates like PG&E's and EMF three, this can significantly boost savings. So remember that my monthly bill for self consumption without backup was around $51. So this reduces this down to, on average, about $43 per month. And that's because when we look at months like August and September here, the battery is actually holding on to that charge and then using some of that charge to power the home during peak hours or during peak demand times when rates are highest and exporting to the grid because export rates are high, whereas self consumption would use that power as long as it can before pulling from the grid. Energy arbitrage factors in the utility rates to actually maximize the bill savings. So here, Aurora makes it really simple to configure, simulate, and even compare difference different storage options and to tailor the design and the conversation to the customer's goals. So whether that be resilience, independence from the grid, bill savings, or a mix of all of them. And we're also continuing to improve upon this experience and would love your feedback on how to do so. But, yeah, that's the gist of it. So I just walked through how to design a three d model, how to design a PB system, and how to design a battery storage system. And how long this takes really depends on how complex the site model is and your level of expertise with designing in Aurora. And this one is a relatively simple home to model out. And if I used Aurora, I could model this out for me in under fifteen seconds. But before I finish up, I just wanna show an example of a more complex model done through our expert design service. So I've already requested this design ahead of time. And once it's been completed, you can come in here to review and accept the model. Okay. And accept this. So this is a big old mansion, in Texas, which would probably take me quite a while to model this out correctly. But our team is able to crank this out in less than three hours, so allowing you to focus your time elsewhere. And this does come at an additional cost, but it can be used as frequently or infrequently as you want. A lot of our customers will use this service for just their more complex projects like this one that would take their internal team longer to create. Some use EDS during the busy season to help reduce bottlenecks if there's a lot of designs that need to be done, and some use it for just every project. So it really depends on what makes the most sense for your business. So, yeah, there's a lot of other features and functionality that you can play around with as you become more of an expert. But this was just a high level walk through of how to design a solar and storage system in Aurora Solar. Alright. So with that, just want to share a few tips for designing in Aurora Solar. And first is that it's always best to try and align with the homeowner on what their goals are so you can make sure that you're designing the best system to meet their needs, whether you can get that information during a qualification call or even if you're designing live with them and can ask them along the way. And this is especially important when bringing storage into the conversation to determine whether energy resilience is important to them, if they're really just hoping to maximize bill savings, or even if it's a mix of both. And next, and this is really more geared towards account admins, but it's to spend some time to make sure that all of your design settings and defaults are configured the way that you want them to be. And this can include pre selecting the components that you want your team to use, design settings like default spacing between modules, target energy offset, and TSRF minimum, and setting up your default setbacks and jurisdiction setbacks. And once you have these configured, this can help to speed up the design process for the rest of your team and make sure that everything is consistent across your projects. And the last point I'll make here is really just to leverage automations wherever possible to help move your designs along faster. So during the demo, I did a lot of designing manually, but just wanted to point out here that a lot of this can be automated, and you could feasibly go from an image to a completed site and system design in less than a minute with just a few clicks. So looking at the system design here, you can do this manually by drawing out the roof with SmartRoof, drawing the obstructions, drawing trees, and drawing in your setbacks or and the fire pathways. Or once you've drawn out the roof with SmartRoof, you could also use AI obstructions, lidar shading, auto place fire pathways, and your default set setbacks to speed that up. Or even the fastest way would be to use Aurora AI or our expert design service, which can do all of that for you. And then for the system design, you have the ability to manually place modules, inverters, and string the system. Or once you've placed your modules, you could use auto stringer to do the string for you, or the fastest way to do this would be using auto designer to do all of that in a matter of seconds and just make adjustments from there. And for now, storage really relies on manually selecting and adjusting the system just because as we talked about a lot today, that can be a lot more nuanced depending on what the homeowner wants. But the key point that I wanna make here is just that the site and system design can be as manual or as automated as you want it to be, and it really depends on what works best for you and your business. Some of our customers even take this a step further by leveraging our APIs. So as soon as a project is created in their CRM, it automatically runs AI or requests an expert design, which automatically triggers a radiance to run, auto designer, performance simulation. So once someone opens the project, all of this has already been done. And a few takeaways on the storage front. So solar and storage is continuing to grow and will continue to grow. We're seeing attachment rates climb year over year as there are more financial incentives, as the technology evolves, net metering policies change, and as grid reliability becomes a growing concern for homeowners. To the same end, the use cases for storage are also evolving. So while energy resiliency and backup was the primary driver a few years ago, changes to net metering and shifts to time of use rates means that storage can actually deliver a return on their investment when using it for self consumption or energy arbitrage. But, again, it's all about designing and customizing a tailored solution for each customer, educating them along the way, and boosting their confidence in why this is a worthwhile investment for them. Because in a lot of cases now, you really do need storage to help make the case to go solar. And before I turn it over for any questions, just wanted to mention a few other products and features that you might want to take a look at if you're not using them already. So sales mode is our customizable proposal tool that gives sales reps access to our three d designs in a tablet friendly format. So a lot of what I walk through today can also be done within sales mode, but with some extra guardrails in place so reps can adjust and input the energy usage information, add battery storage, then also calculate pricing and financing. And when it comes to designing the system, you can still pan around the three d model, turn on lidar or radiance, and even run auto designer, and then toggle panels on and off to make edits. But you're not actually able to edit the site model or move around individual modules, which helps to ensure that the design stays accurate. We also have a number of financing integrations with some of the leading TPO and loan providers to streamline preapprovals. In our enterprise plans, you can also leverage our APIs to sync data back and forth with your tech stack to create more automated workflows. And we also have advanced roles for larger teams that want to further reduce risk and customize more granular user permissions. So with that, I will turn it over for any questions that have come in. Alright. So a lot of great questions coming in. I'm gonna try to get to as many as I can in the last few minutes that I have here. Let's see. One of the first questions here is that we sell Savant Power Storage. Do you have profiles to make proposals simple, or do I need to add them manually? So we do maintain a, fairly comprehensive database of batteries that you can enable and model in your proposal. So every battery that's added is using the details from the manufacturer's spec sheets. So all you need to do is go into the database and enable them, and then your team can model them within your proposal. I will note too that if we don't have one in there modeled out that you are selling, you can also request a component, from the database, and our team will, model that up for you and make that available, within typically about one to two weeks. Another somewhat related question here just around batteries is, are you factoring in, solar to home direct consumption, efficiency rate of hybrid inverter, solar to battery to home round trip efficiency, charge and discharge rate? So, yeah, like I said, a lot of our or all of the, batteries are modeled out based on the, spec sheets provided by the manufacturer. So just pulling in a few, or I just pulled up, like, an example from one of our batteries in our database, and we do include, data points in there around round trip efficiency, whether it has an integrated inverter, capacity, usable capacity, lot of, electrical configurations like minimum discharge voltage, max charge voltage, a lot of, like, operational constraints and other electrical components to it as well. So, yeah, everything that's included within the manufacturer specs sheet, we are using to model that within our software. And then once you enable that component, then it's, yeah, able to be, modeled out within Roar. Alright. A few more questions here kind of around, the system modeling. So when modeling do you give more importance to aligning your model LIDAR based on the structure or the image based structure, I e, would you adjust the structure to match structure placement on LIDAR or to keep the images location? Yeah. That's a great question. So for the structure of the roof, I would place more importance on the imagery just to make sure that the measurements are as accurate as possible. So the LIDAR data should match as closely as possible, but there are some cases where the LIDAR doesn't match perfectly. You can adjust the offset of the LIDAR data to make sure that it matches, as closely as possible to the imagery. And if it doesn't align perfectly, I would use at least for roof obstructions, I would use the lidar motion just for, height and pitch verification, but not as the, kind of source of truth for, at least the outline of, like, the different obstructions. And I will note too that for LIDAR shading, so when you, when it's using LIDAR to calculate the shading analysis and the irradiance on the roof, that is mostly being used to take into account, surrounding trees and buildings, but that doesn't necessarily take into account the roof obstructions. So on the roof model itself, we're actually using any obstructions that you've modeled out, on the roof for those calculations. So if there is a mismatch of the, lidar for roof obstructions, we're gonna use the the obstructions that you've actually modeled out, for the irradiance analysis. So you should not be worried there if that's going to, affect production there. And, yeah, I was gonna add on to that first question that if it's based on kind of image placement, does that skew the production? But, no, that production shouldn't be skewed just because LIDAR shading is mostly for surrounding trees and buildings, but the roof obstructions you've drawn out are used for the actual obstruction shading. Alright. Few comments in here about me using the, Powerwall two to model out, which, is not available anymore. And, yes, that is my bad, probably not the best example to have used in there. But, can this software be used in The Netherlands? So, yes, it can. We do have a team out in Europe today. We do have customers in The Netherlands, so you can absolutely absolutely use it there. I would just note that the app today is not yet available in Dutch. It is available in, obviously, English, in German, Spanish, and Italian. So the app itself may not be in Dutch, but you can also create customized proposals in whatever language that you prefer as well. Alright. Last question I'll take here. Looks like there's two that are somewhat related. Can Aurora do a design for a home, that's not on the maps yet? So, for example, if it's like a new build, there's blueprints available. Unfortunately, our expert design service team cannot model just based off the the blueprints at this time. We do have the ability to upload custom imagery, so you can upload the blueprints within design mode and then model on top of that. But at this point, it's not something that our expert design service team can support. But that is all the time that I have today. Just wanna thank everyone for joining us. And, yeah, hope you have a great rest of your day. And if I didn't get to your questions, I will try to follow-up via email. Have a good one.