Marcelo Taborda talks about the storage market in Brazil

The sales director of BYD, a manufacturer of modules and batteries in the solar sector, Marcelo Taborda, was the guest for this week's chat on Papo Solar, a podcast presented by journalist Ericka Araujo. 

Highlighting the market's innovation in solar storage and especially how the manufacturer finds itself in this environment, Taborda also highlighted several stories that impacted his career in this environment and the importance of financial lines in the country that promote this niche market.

Marcelo, tell us about your entry into the solar market and the company’s current position?

I entered this market in 2017 at the reopening of the BYD factory. I came from the electronics industry for almost 20 years working in the area, and brought a lot of what I learned in other companies to BYD. 

That year was the beginning of everything for BYD in Brazil, working with centralized plants, everyone there was learning and disseminating knowledge together. 

For me, solar added much more, it brought me a challenge of something new and dynamism, it made me revive the market in terms of knowledge, the electronics industry is more mature and segmented, solar in Brazil was in its infancy at the time, and everyone came in with a great desire to learn.

Today, BYD basically brings sustainable energy as a solution and not an isolated product.

BYD is not just a module and battery company, it is a solutions company. Today we are the company on the market that offers an integrated solution with panels, batteries and electric mobility. 

BYD is a company also focused on energy storage, what is the potential from the manufacturer's point of view in Brazil? What movements have been carried out?

This storage market is very important for BYD, we are reaching an average of 100 GW/h of production, in front of batteries, much of it is related to energy production, lithium battery technology is the most efficient and safe in the world, in Brazil we have been doing this since 2018, and we were elected by Germany as the most mature in this sense. 

And we have several systems, from off grid systems with islands, to hybrid systems for peak and backup, and we consider the storage system to be the pillar of energy efficiency, there is solar and wind, but they are intermittent sources where you will need a battery for stabilization, storing during the day with use at night.

As BYD is present in agribusiness, it is a sector that is increasingly transitioning to solar, in order to cover demands and further increase expansion in Brazil.

The Agro market is essential for BYD, it demands all of our solutions, the market looks differently at national companies for trust and guarantee. 

On the other hand, BYD sees a strong growth trend in agriculture, currently agriculture uses a lot of diesel generators. We cannot consider diesel as something criminal, there are already safe, sustainable and sufficient options, and it can now be used as a backup, you don't need to throw away the generator but use the lithium battery too, lithium has arrived to make hybrid projects viable offgrid, before you had batteries that produce toxic gases with a useful life of 4 years, lithium batteries now have a longer useful life and equally proportional safety for the user and the environment, and this has become something sought after by the agricultural market. 

The BYD website is open to financing lines, and which was mentioned here as well, which are in partnership?

Since 2017, BYD understood that the BNDES resource, mainly the harvest plan and Finame, are very important for the agro market, because it provides the end customer with a specific line of financing aimed at enhancing and even developing, prioritizing national manufacturers.

This line of the harvest plan also greatly promotes the solar market, you have up to 3 years to start paying, with a financing line with low rates compared to the market. 

We hear a lot that “I start making money long before I start paying” the bill closes much easier for these customers who are involved in solar, and with low rates compared to the market and incentives, it's good for everyone.

As we are a national manufacturer, it is essential that we are aware of these issues and can explore them to the fullest, facilitating access to the end customer, making the harvest plan fundamental.

The company went through a commercial restructuring process here in Brazil, I wanted you to comment on what this moment was like for BYD.

In order for us to better understand the reasons behind this, we have to go back a little to the moment we started in this market.

Initially we started with centralized plants, which have a completely different footprint than DG (distributed generation), which is a more dynamic, thriving market, things change very quickly, and in 2017 we started looking at this segment. There were already big players on the market and mainly big distributors who were already selling over 40 MG per month, so we started showing the market director, Nelson, what GD was.

Introducing the market to him, we made a sale at the end of that same year of a double glass module to a large distributor in the market at the time, but when the batches arrived to the integrators we had a divergence, as it was a different product, made For large industries, many didn't know how to install it, and at the time I was director of product engineering, I started an analysis about it and we went to visit all the integrators in Brazil and taught them how to assemble it. And with that, we grew within this market, establishing a partnership with a large distributor that became more intense, gaining notoriety, capillarity and then we launched the simple glass model in 2018. 

Growing in the market, something started to bother us, which was the fact that we only sell modules and we are a solution company and not isolated products, we started looking to attack the solution. Even at that time we sold many imported modules and national products with the support of BNDS were seasonal periods, so in the months of January until May sales were weak and the second half of the year was already very strong, as it is a factory, it needs a constancy of production, thinking about overcoming the situation in 2020, the year of the pandemic, we installed a second production shift and unfortunately, perhaps due to a lack of strategy, we were manufacturing far beyond what we could sell based on the market potential as well, and we arrived at the commercial change, We put forward an idea and pursued the challenge of developing new partnerships in 2020. 

We presented the modules and fortunately we were able to keep the second shift active through 2021 and now in 2022 we will start the third production shift at the factory. 

Returning to storage, how is BYD present in these projects and do you, as a professional in the area, see the potential in the market?

The storage market today is experiencing what the solar market experienced there, a technology that is not as well known by the market, and for some projects the bill still doesn't close, but for the majority it does. 

So when we talk about batteries and storage, many people already associate it with that thing isolated on the off-grid, and we forget to say that, when we talk about a storage system, you open up the range of applications, leaving only the off-grid and starting to work with energy efficiency. All types of commerce and industries, even renewable plants fit the storage system, it is capable of bringing efficiency, significant gains in terms of stability, utilization of generated energy.

There are already storage systems that work together with solar plants, together with inverters, eliminating redundancy, taking advantage of that peak power and storing it without losing anything. 

The big mistake of those who use solar energy is to think that if the grid power goes down, they will continue to have energy, and this is not the case because the system is connected to the electrical grid, the user still depends on the grid, to become different. You have to consider one of the pillars of energy efficiency, which is storage.

To follow the full chat, watch our video on youtube or listen to spotify.