Providing confidence for your clean energy projects in an evolving energy landscape

As the energy transition accelerates, renewable power projects are becoming bigger, more expensive, and more complex. The opportunities for renewables project development have never been greater, as our customers are looking to secure financing for their projects and invest and develop successful renewables and energy infrastructure projects. DNV’s technical due diligence services can provide your company with the in-depth analysis you need to make sound design, development, and investment decisions.

Last year, DNV provided advisory services including technical due diligence for more than 800 GW of battery energy storage, solar, power grid, and wind projects in the U.S. and Canada. Read our latest due diligence case study to learn how DNV helped a solar developer secure nearly USD 100 million in financing.

We also provide owner’s engineering support and inspections that are tailored for wind, solar, and battery storage projects—across feasibility, development, procurement, pre-construction, and construction. We have the expertise and experience to guide you every step of the way.

DNV's Owner's Engineering services help your projects achieve a smoother financing process with fewer haircuts, decrease LCOE, and optimize availability and reliability. From greenfield stages through decommissioning, our value comes from our subject matter experts leveraging their expertise from terawatts of Independent Engineering experience. This expertise is directly applied to your project to optimize all your financials.

Our technical support and advisory services add another layer of reliability to your project. Having our Owner’s Engineers involved early provides a certain technical assurance, as we proactively advise you through challenges and opportunities.

DNV’s Energy Storage team is active across a wide range of energy storage technologies and applications. Providing technical due diligence services to investors and developers, as well as BESS technology reviews and storage safety analysis, DNV is your source for industry insights to create value and manage risk.

DNV’s 2024 Battery Scorecard presents findings from tests conducted on dozens of battery cells, offering insights into new technologies, degradation, useful life, and safety. The Battery Scorecard provides answers to questions such as:

• How do batteries perform in real-life applications?
• How do actual use cases compare to data on a manufacturer’s specification sheet?
• Which usage and environmental factors cause batteries to degrade?
• What are the latest market trends and new technologies?

DNV provides independent advisory, analysis, engineering, testing, certification, monitoring, control, and asset management services. We work with investors, project developers, system owners, utilities, and equipment manufacturers to help manage risk throughout the entire project life cycle and to ensure the performance and safety of systems from residential rooftops to multi-megawatt power plants.

Our team includes experts in PV system design, solar power plant operation, PV module manufacturing, PV module and inverter testing, equipment performance, and structural elements such as rooftop mounting systems and trackers.

Learn how our experience can help you improve your business performance in every stage of your solar project.

Additional related materials:

• Solar Energy Assessment Validation
• Video: Are solar availability assumptions too optimistic?
• Addendum to the 2021 solar energy assessment validation for utility scale projects

Offshore wind energy development relies on many global uncertainties, making the industry dynamic from year to year; and 2024 is already looking to be an historic year in North America. As we progress into the second quarter of 2024, our DNV sees the North America’s offshore wind industry sustaining a positive outlook and traction. This positivity is coming from the major milestones met by projects and future lease auction areas in the United States (U.S.) and Canada is getting closer to an offshore wind industry on the east coast.

Learn how we can help you support the safe development of offshore wind.

Meanwhile, both onshore and offshore wind developers are now laser focused on managing risk related to blade reliability and durability. Small issues with wind turbine blades can quickly become a big problem. DNV is ready to help mitigate this risk through blade design reviews, manufacturing facility evaluations, and pre-installation inspections. Our whitepaper—The challenges of wind turbine blade durability—paper analyzes factors driving this shift across the blade lifecycle, drawing from DNV’s extensive experience in supporting owners, operators, and turbine manufacturers.

Last and not least, foundations are the silent support that all renewable assets rely on for consistent operation. DNV Civil Engineering provides a wide range of foundation assessment services. We ensure new construction projects as well as repowered and life extension projects are safe and bankable. We support customers through the operational life to repowering or life extension process to success of project completion (design review, remediation, retrofit implementation, etc.). We also support sellers/buyers to a successful transaction.

Additonal related materials:

• The challenges of wind turbine blade durability
• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for wind projects
• Inspections and Root Cause Analysis
• Foundations and Structural Performance
• Foundation Repowering: Technical Considerations and Risk Management
• DNV expertise in wind project development

DNV has expertise in all aspects of reliability and economic planning for generation, transmission & distribution. Our Power Systems Advisory team provides advisory solutions to our clients across all RTOs/ISOs in generation development and investment, transmission, distribution, and commercial and industrial.

Our strength lies in our robust Independent Engineering offerings, enhanced by experts specializing in HVDC technology and transmission design. This unique combination empowers us to deliver unparalleled support in the energy sector, paving the way for innovative solutions and sustainable progress.

We are committed to driving success in energy infrastructure through our dedicated support in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) programs. Our expertise has been instrumental in aiding clients to secure crucial positions, including anchor tenants for transmission line projects through the Transmission Facilitation Program (TFP). Furthermore, we have successfully guided several clients into advanced negotiations with the DOE loan program office.

Explore how DNV can elevate your projects by navigating complex challenges and unlocking new opportunities in the energy landscape.

According to DNV’s annual Industry Insights survey, about 75 percent of energy professionals expect their organization to invest in low-carbon hydrogen/ammonia in 2024. This reflects an important truth - hydrogen will play a bigger role in accelerating the transition to a low-carbon future. For hydrogen projects to be built at the pace we need, developers must navigate political uncertainty, rising costs, workforce development, supply chain disruptions, and NIMBY-ism. The first step in managing the complex risk profile of hydrogen projects is to find a common definition of what good hydrogen looks like. We are already hard at work on this: for example, we hosted a webinar on feasibility studies for hydrogen projects in North America and recently announced our role in assessing hydrogen blending for FortisBC’s and Enbridge’s existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure in British Columbia.

Learn about our hydrogen service offerings.

At the end of the day, renewable energy projects have the potential to impact people’s inalienable rights. The choice facing developers and investors is whether that impact is positive or negative. Why is this important? A national survey of developers has shown that community opposition is slowing the pace of renewable energy projects. Additionally, developers who have not identified and mitigated human rights risks will likely find themselves facing hefty fines, long and costly legal action, the loss of brand equity, or even embargoes and destruction of their products.

Turnkey solutions like DNV’s ADAPTIVE for Equity (A4E) provide proven approaches, strategies, and actions. In fact, the Americans for a Clean Energy Grid is today implementing the A4E framework to secure stakeholder understanding, support, and collective decision making around siting and permitting of transmission lines in the U.S.

Renewable energy projects that successfully transition from development to profitable operations have the buy-in and support from local communities. That means developers and investors must ensure strong social due diligence and equity are included in project planning and design to fully manage risks around the intersection of human rights, capital, and renewable energy.

View our ESG services to see how we can help bring your ESG to life.

Additional related materials:

• Think Risk: The intersection of human rights, capital, and renewable energy
• A new term of reference: Managing risk through corporate responsibility
• Begin at the end: the cost of decommissioning renewable energy projects
• Unfounded concerns about photovoltaic module toxicity and waste are slowing decarbonization | Nature Physics
• Survey: Human Rights in the Energy Value Chain

Hundreds of new cyber threats are emerging every day as hackers become faster and more creative. DNV combines specialist knowledge of your industry with deep engineering expertise and security best practice to secure your projects and operations.

• Know your risks: Discover your vulnerabilities before hackers do. DNV assesses your critical infrastructure from every angle, identifying the vulnerabilities and non-conformities you must address to stay confidently cyber secure.
• Build a powerful force of defense: Put the right people, processes, and technologies in place to build an effective defense against threats. We offer practical, unbiased advice on solutions to defend your business and, if an attack occurs, we help you to recover efficiently.
• Win stakeholder support: Build the trust and support you need to meet your cyber security goals. DNV provides cyber security solutions for the real world, helping everyone in your organization to play a role in fighting cyber criminals.

Additional related materials:

• Cyber Security for the Renewables Industry
• DNV Cyber Security Services
• OT Security Awareness E-Training

Solar Resource Compass

Sourcing site-specific solar data for your solar projects is challenging—there are many sources for solar irradiance data, but only a few exist for soiling loss estimates, snow loss estimates, and ground albedo. For each of these, developers and investors have had to source this data on their own and figure out how to compare the multiple sources for each.

That problem is now solved with Solar Resource Compass (SRC). DNV's online solar data service is an aggregator and calculation engine to provide users with an easy-to-use, on-demand solar data service.

SCR saves you time, but, more importantly, ensures that you’re not leaving money on the table or overpaying for an asset.

SolarFarmer

DNV's SolarFarmer software is built for efficiency and scalability, enabling you to design solar PV farms with more confidence than ever before. Our cutting-edge software and world-leading modelling capabilities offer bankable yield results and predictions.

A paradigm shift in the solar industry's yield calculation standards. Our cutting-edge, state-of-the-art software raises the bar. Delivering yield accuracy within 0.1% of site measurements, and reducing uncertainty across sites by 30%. Redefine success with SolarFarmer's validated methodology, setting a new standard for precision and innovation in solar yield calculation.

GreenPower Monitor Services

As a leading provider of renewable energy solutions, we're eager to present our latest innovations at the ACP CLEANPOWER Conference. Attendees can expect to learn about our cutting-edge solutions designed to optimize the performance and efficiency of renewable energy assets. From advanced monitoring and analytics to predictive maintenance and asset management, GreenPowerMonitor (GPM) offers a comprehensive suite of tools to optimize the potential of your renewable asset investments. Our flagship product, GPM Horizon, utilizes AI to offer real-time insights and actionable data for wind, solar, and storage assets.

In North America, solar asset managers are increasingly concerned about forecasting and mitigating hail damage. GPM Horizon's Horizon Gemini module excels at predictive diagnostics, identifying potential issues months in advance to ensure optimal performance and reliability. Our North American team will be present to offer demonstrations and share insights into effective renewable energy management practices. We look forward to connecting with fellow industry professionals.

Read more about our solutions to manage, monitor, and control renewable assets.

Additional related materials:

• GPM Horizon Wind Capabilities
• GPM Horizon Solar Capabilities

HST Technologies

Last year, DNV embarked upon a strategic partnership with clean energy platform provider HST Technologies (HST) to facilitate grid-scale decarbonization. To date, HST has supported over 2100 GWs of clean energy project modeling in 100 countries. Through its View® platform, HST offers data-driven insights on the economics of clean energy development decisions and connects developers with the energy buyers, risk management advisors, landowners, and others that they need to execute the project.

Learn more about how DNV’s technical expertise and long track record of working on solar projects will further help solar developers using the View® platform to manage their risk more effectively.

Forecaster

Forecaster offers unparalleled accuracy and dependability in energy data, supported by our team of global experts and nearly two decades of experience in power forecasting. Tailored to meet your specific requirements, Forecaster ensures you have the precise information needed for optimal operational decision-making. Our commitment to excellence extends beyond data accuracy; we provide exceptional customer support, adapting to your unique needs at every turn.

With Forecaster, you gain more than just data—you access a wealth of knowledge and a partnership dedicated to enhancing your energy management strategies. Learn more.

Hybrid Energy Resource Optimizer

Built on unparalleled battery engineering, contract, regulatory expertise, and advanced optimization modelling DNV’s Hybrid Energy Resource Optimizer provides reliable, realistic, and transparent valuation of your storage or hybrid project. This tool enables OEMs, integrators, investors, developers, and asset operators with
a broad range of benefits: reduced project risk, diverse strategy modelling, and detailed integration modelling. 

Learn about how this tool can help you plan for financial success.

Battery AI

DNV has developed the software tool Battery AI to help both battery manufacturers and battery system end users meet these demands. Battery AI is an artificial intelligence driven battery analytics platform. Battery AI acts as a repository for Battery Scorecard testing data and forecasts lifetime of batteries under custom duty cycles. For those wishing to utilize energy storage technologies, Battery AI offers a platform to compare different technologies, and evaluate the expected lifetimes that pertain to their specific application. For energy storage technology producers, this service line provides third party validated test results and a direct portal to new markets and customers.