Evolution of the Pricing Strategy in the Photovoltaic Market

Authors

  • Frédéric Revaz HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Institute Entrepreneurship & Management, Switzerland
  • Jean-Marie Laurent HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Institute Entrepreneurship & Management, Switzerland
  • Francesco Maria Cimmino HES.SO Valais, Switzerland
  • Lucien Papilloud HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Institute Entrepreneurship & Management, Switzerland
  • Stéphane Genoud HES-SO Valais/Wallis, Switzerland

Keywords:

market analysis, energy transition, solar panels, pricing

Abstract

With less than 2% of new renewable energy production, Switzerland is a poor performer in international comparison. A study carried out for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy showed constraints explaining this low number. One of these is a need for companies to optimize their sales process. GROUP-IT has responded to these needs by developing an approach of grouped tendering of solar panel installations. This article looks at how solar panel installation companies are improving their pricing strategy over time, and how to measure this evolution. In this study, we worked in two steps. A first grouped tendering collected about 2,500 offers. At the end of the tendering process, each company that participated received feedback, with the aim of improving the process. A second tendering collected 637 offers. The interpolation between the CHF/kWp ratio and the total investment in CHF was then calculated for each company. Cross-sectional analysis shows that the average of R-square is closer to one in the second phase, which can be interpreted as a better consistency in the construction and in the pricing of the bids. The increase of minimum values shows that the companies furthest away from the theoretical model have made significant progress. Our study therefore shows that with proper support, the solar panel installation companies are more competitive and can help accelerate energy transition.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

References

Buresch, M. (1983), Photovoltaic Energy Systems, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.

Candelise, C., Winskel, M., Gros, R. J. K. (2013), ”The dynamics of solar PV costs and prices as a challenge for technology forecasting”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Vol. 26, pp. 96-107.

Confédération Suisse. (2016), “Loi sur l’énergie” (Energy Law), available at: https://www.admin.ch/opc/fr/classified-compilation/20121295/index.html (19 May 2020)

Genoud, S., Darbellay, K., Mastelic, J., Glassey-Previdoli, D., Papilloud, L., Cimmino, F. M. (2019), "Etude comportementale, Projet Group-it" (Comprehensive study, Project Group-it), available at: https://pubdb.bfe.admin.ch/fr/publication/download/9706 (19 May 2020)

Gong, X., Kulkarni, M. (2005), ”Design optimization of a large scale rooftop photovoltaic system”, Solar Energy, Vol. 78, No. 3, pp. 362-374.

Group-It. (2020), „Group-it, c’est quoi ?“ (Group-it, what is that ?), available at: https://www.group-it.ch/group-it/ (19 May 2020)

Kerdan, I. G., Raslan, R., Ruyssevelt, P., Gálvez, D. M. (2017), “ExRET-Opt: An automated exergy/exergoeconomic simulation framework for building energy retrofit analysis and design optimization”, Applied Energy, Vol. 192, pp. 33-58.

Swiss Federal Office of Energy (2020), “Simulation von Energiesystemen mit dem Tachion-Simulation-Framework” (Simulation of energy systems with Tachion simulation framework), available at: https://tachionframework.com/603/client/res/603/docs/Usermanual_de.pdf (19 May 2020)

Downloads

Published

2020-09-21

How to Cite

Revaz, F., Laurent, J.-M., Cimmino, F. M., Papilloud, L., & Genoud, S. (2020). Evolution of the Pricing Strategy in the Photovoltaic Market. ENTRENOVA - ENTerprise REsearch InNOVAtion, 6(1), 105–113. Retrieved from https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/entrenova/article/view/13440

Issue

Section

Microeconomics