How Fenecon saves time and closes more commercial BESS deals with Orkestra
FENECON's sales team invested a lot of time in detailed project analyses, but wanted an even simpler way to show customers the full economic value of a battery investment. Since adopting Orkestra, the team has significantly reduced analysis time, improved the accuracy of its financial modeling, and seen a marked increase in the likelihood of projects being implemented.
The Challenge: Complex Analyses, Limited Tools
Germany's commercial and industrial battery storage market is growing rapidly. But while solar economics are relatively simple, more modules, more generation, more savings, batteries are a different matter entirely. A battery's return is determined by how it interacts with the customer's specific load profile, tariff structure, and the revenue streams available at the site. Get the sizing wrong, and the project fails economically.
That's why detailed financial modeling has to happen before a system is even designed or proposed.
For a manufacturer like FENECON, which sells through installer partners, the challenge was finding a way to run this analysis accurately and quickly, and to present it so that their network of installers could successfully win over end customers.
Outgrowing Excel
Thomas's team had been using a self-built Excel tool for battery sizing across use cases like self-consumption optimization, peak shaving, and atypical grid usage. But as project complexity grew, this system started hitting its limits. A full economic assessment of battery systems, more efficient workflows, and more compelling result presentations called for a specialized solution, along with easier access to up-to-date tariff data for tariff optimization. With the tariff library and bill-scan tool in Orkestra Plan, that changed for Thomas's team: they now find every tariff up to date without lengthy searches, and with bill scan, the right tariff is automatically detected and entered. This removes not just the search work, but also the risk of inaccurate results from selecting the wrong tariff.
"The automatic bill scanning (bill scan) works really well and saves a lot of time." — Thomas Fuchs, Industrial Project Planner, FENECON
Too Slow and Too Costly to Outsource
For more detailed financial analyses, the team relied on external consultants. The quality was there, but the cost and turnaround time weren't sustainable, especially as request volume grew. Every outsourced report meant longer response times to installers, higher cost per project, and less control over how results were presented to end customers. It simply didn't scale.
With Orkestra, the extent of this outsourcing has dropped significantly: the platform lets the team handle most analyses faster and more cost-effectively in-house, without sacrificing quality. What used to be unscalable is now manageable.
FENECON needed a way to run fast, consultant-grade financial analyses without the high costs, delays, or dependency on external providers. A platform their own team could use to produce detailed, accurate analyses at the speed the market demands, and to present the results in a way that helped installers close deals.
Why FENECON Chose Orkestra
Thomas first came across Orkestra at ees Europe 2024 in Munich, and it immediately looked like the solution they'd been searching for. Here was a platform that combined the analytical depth of an outsourced financial model with the speed and simplicity a sales team needed to run it themselves.
What stood out was how Orkestra handled complexity without passing it on to the user.
The platform could model the full battery value stack across multiple use cases, draw on a library of more than 11,000 German energy tariffs to find the best match for the battery and site, and present the results in a format that installers and end customers could immediately understand, all without requiring special training or hours of manual input.
"Another plus was the direct, open exchange with the team from the very start, which gave me the sense of really being well looked after." — Thomas Fuchs, Industrial Project Planner, FENECON
Three features convinced Thomas that Orkestra was the right choice:
- Comprehensive battery sizing and optimization — the ability to simulate multiple use cases with detailed visualization of energy flows between solar, battery storage, and the grid, to get a complete picture of each project's economic value.
- Automatic tariff modeling — access to more than 11,000 up-to-date German grid fee tariffs, eliminating the manual research that had been slowing the team down and introducing inaccuracies.
- Clear financial presentation — ROI, payback period, net present value, and savings potential presented in a way both installers and end customers could understand and act on. Spreadsheets were replaced with professional, visual reports.
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