Photomate has been distributing photovoltaic equipment, including Huawei inverters, since 2008. Director of Photomate office in Ukraine, Anton Abramov provided several comments about the Company’s latest achievements and products, as well as trends in the sustainable energy market in Ukraine and in the world.
Anton, please tell us about the achievements of Photomate in the last 2-3 years.
On the wave of renewable energy market growth Photomate doubled its sales in Ukraine every year. But
in 2019 we are committed to hit 1GW, which makes x4 growth of deliveries compared to 2018. Our company has 20 employees today, and we are working on implementing new systems to improve the quality of services.
Anton Abramov, Director of Photomate office in Ukraine
What is your company’s vision of the development of sustainable energy in the next 5-10 years?
The market will continue to evolve towards smart technologies and AI solutions. Huawei is a pioneer and market leader in implementing such products, our customers consider technological effectiveness to be one of the Сompany’s key strengths. The innovative approach helps to reduce CAPEX and OPEX of the project against a backdrop of increasing PR, performance and reliability of the equipment.
Which of your products have been best sellers in 2019? Did this trend change compared to 2018?
In a product line for commercial solar power plants, there is segmentation by voltage, which is approximately 50/50. In standard 400V class, Sun2000-60M0 (66kW, 1100V_DC) is a best seller, and in high voltage class 800V / 1500V (AC / DC), Sun2000-100/105KTL-H1 has been replaced by Sun2000-185KTL-H1 for large solar projects.
In addition, Huawei is also the most popular manufacturer of inverters for private solar power stations. According to our estimates, the market share of Huawei in the segment of private solar installations up to 30 kW is over 80%. With the launch of the new Fusion Home hybrid inverter line and the adoption of the new law on private solar power stations up to 50kW, for which Huawei is launching Sun2000-50M0, we hope to maintain the brand of the people’s product. Along with that, the launch of an affordable monitoring system will help us to reach this goal.
Now the market is moving towards automation with the help of machine intelligence. In your opinion, will digitization be a useful tool for the industry or vice versa?
As I said above, „digitization” is Huawei’s advantage. From the very beginning, Huawei has developed an innovative platform that includes a customer-oriented solution package. Huawei updates its products every year; the Company has remained the global market leader in solar inverter sales for the fourth consecutive year. The fact is that half of Huawei’s 180,000 employees are involved in R&D and a significant part of its annual innovation budget ($ 15 billion only in 2019) is channeled to Fusion Solar product development.
Is a global switch to 100% renewable energy possible?
Under the necessary level of development of energy storage technologies and the current trend of growth in renewable energy facilities globally, I believe that this is a near-term perspective. From ecological perspective we have no other choice.
Can you say that Photomate is committed to making the world get 100% renewable energy?
We work hard on this, but our approach is to make this transition not only quantitative but also qualitative – with the launch of smart monitoring and data exchange systems, improving stability and reliability of the grid. Huawei, as an innovation leader, has many promising developments in the energy field that are being actively implemented in new products now.
In your opinion, how has the renewable energy market of Ukraine changed in the last two years?
Over the past few years, large market players that managed to accumulate significant portfolios of solar projects have emerged in Ukraine. Many of them are planning to set up an asset management system and are considering improving the quality of solar parks’ operation. We are glad that even at the stage of choosing equipment, our customers are taking care about making the transition from active construction to efficient operation easy. At the same time, for example, buyers of central inverter stations are only starting to get wise to the scale of their problems with inefficient equipment, expensive maintenance, low PR and reliability. There are even more problems while searching for ready-made solar stations. International investors that are interested in buying such assets, as well as banks, don’t want to deal with „non-bankable” equipment and facilities that don’t have an up-to-date management and monitoring system, which means that no reliable data can be collected for these projects. Most likely, it will be difficult to sell such solar power plants at market price, in addition, there exist additional risks for the investor. At the exhibition, we are going to talk in detail about how exactly Huawei takes care of investors’ interests.
Photomate is a partner and participant of the main event of the industry, SEF 2019 KYIV the 11th Sustainable Energy Forum and Trade Show of Central and Eastern European. The event will be held in Kyiv on October 16-18.
Interview is based on Ibcenter materials and available at: http://bit.ly/photomate-sef-19
LLC Photomate
7A Dovnar-Zapolskoho st., office 408, 04116 Kyiv, Ukraine
[email protected]
www.photomate.eu
