Solare B2B May 2014 Page 43 – Interview of Vassilis Papaeconomou, Founder and Managing Director of Alectris
English translation of the interview:
Alectris: “What O&M is for us”
Operation & Maintenance should became a source of profit and not only a cost,” says Vassilis Papaeconomou, founder and CEO of Alectris Italy, that provides also Asset Management services, with impressive and quick pay back track record, as demonstrated by their turnaround on a cluster of plants in Puglia.
What ‘s the Alectris role in the global PV market?
Analyzing the European PV market, we immediately understood that there was a great need of an integrated and end to end approach to O&M services, focused on the continuous improvement of the PV plant performances. From the very beginning our main target has always been creating long term relationships with our customers, or better, with our partners, to grow with them. We want to create win/win relationship and trough our approach, methodology and professional services, help our customers to change perspective toward O&M services: Operation and Maintenance should become a source of profit and not only an operating cost. Market is today ready to evolve towards new way of thinking, as investors, banks and plant owners have learned from past mistakes and matured the right experience and competencies necessary to understand the real value and tangible upsides achievable with high level and quality O&M services.
What do you propose to your customers?
Alectris provides top level and 360° O&M and Asset Management Services, and this is our main focus to which we are 100% devoted. We developed and own a complete PV management platform, ACTIS that only partially is an advanced monitoring system. Our customers are investors that need a total control of their assets and cannot accept performance below optimum. They want total transparency from their servicers, and want to talk with them the same language, made by target, milestone and results.
What is ACTIS?
ACTIS, Asset Control Telemetry Information System, is a 360° management platform that fully covers all the needs of a PV Plant in terms of Asset Management and O&M. ACTIS gathers all possible data from the operating plants and from every single installed device, allowing us to monitor constantly the performance of the plants and to predict or manage eventual fault dramatically reducing the relevant resolution time, while granting our customers total transparency and detailed reporting.
Alectris works also assists investors on the secondary market?
Yes of course. We have a significant track record of Plant Turnaround, both on fixed plants than on Biaxial Trackers. We have recently fixed a cluster of PV Plants in Puglia that showed heavy mistakes in engineering and construction, together with dramatic maintenance deficiencies. The payback period for the investor after our interventions has been few months with significant economic results. All of the details about this success case are downloadable from our web site. Clearly we propose this kind of service also for all the Investors moving on the secondary market, to help them having full visibility on the deficiencies and issues of the plant target of the acquisitions, and on all the potential upsides achievable with our engineering and intervention. We believe that they should better rely, during such deals, more on experienced O&M servicer that could inspect in details the operating plants, performing in depth checks and measurements on the whole plants while understanding all the downside and upside according to their “on-field” experience, than on traditional technical advisors.
