Latest / Clean Power Hour / They Put Solar on the White House. Here's What Solar Design Associates Learned #354

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They Put Solar on the White House. Here's What Solar Design Associates Learned #354 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Haskell Werlin: Solar design has never exceeded 20 employees, so staying nimble and staying small has been a real asset to our company's longevity. I've seen companies that have grown quickly, gone very, very successful, very short period of time, only to fail and fall.
• 1:05
  Haskell Werlin: SunEdison being one of them that comes to mind, but there are many others. I mean, Sun Power Two was a great leader for many, many years.
• 1:15
  intro: The clean energy industry is moving fast, the deals are getting bigger, the technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to The Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar storage and microgrid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all. Each week, your host, Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of Clean Power Consulting Group, brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now, here's your host, Tim Montague.
• 1:50
  Tim Montague: 50 years ago, a young engineer named Stephen Strong started a company with a simple but radical idea that the buildings we live and work in could generate their own clean power from the sun. What followed was five decades of
• 2:05
  firsts: the White House, the Olympics, the first true community solar garden in America. This is the story of Solar Design Associates.
• 2:15
  Steven Strong: My name is Steven Strong. I'm founder and president of Solar Design Associates.
• 2:23
  Tim Montague: I want to welcome Haskell Worland, who is the Vice President of Business Development for Solar Design Associates. Welcome to the show, Haskell.
• 2:31
  Haskell Werlin: Thank you, Tim.
• 2:31
  Haskell Werlin: Well, I was fortunate enough to be in a graduate school program at the Kennedy School of Government back in 1980 and there was an internship opportunity at the Department of Energy in Washington in a new office called the Office of Conservation and Solar Policy, and it was being run by a fellow named Mike Powers, who had come out of the National Security Administration, and the National Security Agency at that time was dealing with the Iranian crisis.
• 2:58
  Haskell Werlin: They had been an oil embargo, sounds familiar, and we lost about 5% of our oil supplies, and one of President Carter's strategies was to have energy conservation and solar energy be a source of new energy to replace foreign imported oil, and I was very excited to go down to Washington for the summer, and it turned out there was a hiring freeze that summer, so I stayed for the entire year, got to meet some of the pioneers, the real pioneers in photovoltaics, in thermal, in all sorts of energy efficiency, which was called conservation.
• 3:35
  Haskell Werlin: Remember Carter and the sweater.
• 3:35
  Haskell Werlin: I don't know how many people remember this. I remember it. I was a
• 3:41
  Tim Montague: kid, but I remember it, and I remember Carter putting PV on the roof of the White House in 1979 Jimmy Carter made a bold statement to the world, America could power itself differently. Solar Design Associates was there on the roof of the White House to help make that point. And when George W.
• 4:01
  Tim Montague: Bush wanted solar on the pool and cabana in 2006 they called SDA again. How did you, how did you get involved with the White House solar project, to begin with,
• 4:14
  Steven Strong: you know, that was, that was just, I guess, a fate.
• 4:21
  Tim Montague: How did, how did Jimmy Carter know about SDA, though?
• 4:24
  Steven Strong: Think through the energy office somewhere, because we had, we had been doing a fair amount of sort of expeditionary work into the scalable solar commercial and even utility,
• 4:44
  Tim Montague: but the White House was just the beginning of a very long list. Solar at the Olympics, the first solar scoreboard in professional sports, a privately powered Caribbean island, and in a quiet town in Massachusetts, the first community solar garden in the country, where 100 households own a piece of a 542 kilowatt ground mount across the street from SDA's own offices. Haskell Wurlin, SDA's Vice President of Business Development, has been there much of the time. There was the first true community solar
• 5:21
  Haskell Werlin: garden right here in Harvard, across the street from our offices, where it's truly owned by the membership, about 100 members, five kilowatts each, own a 542 kilowatt ground mount array. The hardest part was getting the local tax assessor to look at it as residential systems combined and aggregated, as opposed to a single commercial solar array.
• 5:45
  Haskell Werlin: They want to tax it as a solar, as a commercial solar farm, and we said, no, these are 500 houses. 100 households at 500 kilowatts, and they finally had to adopt a statewide home rule petition to make it possible for solar gardens, community solar gardens to be able to be treated tax exempt for property tax. Was
• 6:06
  Tim Montague: that community solar project
• 6:08
  Haskell Werlin: 2013 We actually purchased the modules from Suneva in 2010 because of the treasury, so there was a three years of storage, and by the time we actually used them, the price that we saved on the from the treasury bill was non-existent, because the price had come down so much on the modules, right? But yeah, that project is still ongoing, and we still maintain it across the street. We even have honey bees.
• 6:34
  Haskell Werlin: We have hives there, and we, we make Harvard Solar Garden honey.
• 6:39
  Steven Strong: We, we were called by a very wealthy individual to completely power their Caribbean island, which was fun, and there's plenty of sun down there, as you can imagine, and they had three diesel generators running because they had it wasn't just a little cabin, and they've got, they have a second island, which is where the airstrip is, so we had to have some solar over there for the lights when the plane comes in, it's pretty interesting. Oh, yes, yes, we had, we had wind on that island as well. You mentioned wind comes in, yeah, when you're out in the ocean, the wind is pretty good resource. So it was a solar and wind project, and the dollars were not an issue. This fellow happened to be on the right side of the equation in terms of environmental, certainly could afford it, and I think it probably was was worthwhile in terms of, you know, how do you get that diesel fuel out there, that's that's that's that's not a low-cost delivery,
• 7:53
  Tim Montague: and when I, when I think of the Caribbean, I think of hurricanes. So, what was, was designing two hurricane force winds part of the equation?
• 8:03
  Steven Strong: The solar, yes, we are not wind turbine engineers, but as you pointed out, they, that, that came up, and I'm assuming that the wind turbines were beefed up, if you will. I don't know if they stopped them from being overdriven. That we subcontracted all of the wind, because we're not sure, no, but I'm
• 8:35
  Tim Montague: thinking of the solar, the solar panels and racking system like that also is a risk factor in when you have 200 mile an hour wind,
• 8:47
  Steven Strong: yeah, that you're right, you've covered the globe, we had a project in Belize that got struck by whatever you call it, not a hurricane or tough
• 8:58
  Tim Montague: tornado
• 8:59
  Steven Strong: or something.
• 8:59
  Steven Strong: Haskell saying it was both the water in the room.
• 9:03
  Tim Montague: Wow,
• 9:04
  Steven Strong: yeah, that that site was was was decimated. It didn't have a significant elevation over sea level, we all do. We also did one in Hawaii for a very wealthy individual that had a, I don't know, it's a private island, but a hunk of an island that was private, and they had wind and solar, and both thermal and electric wanting to be as self-reliant as possible.
• 9:38
  Haskell Werlin: Well, if you look at the picture just above my head, right there, that is the Bullet Center in Seattle, Washington. Well, that is designed by Miller Hall Alkertex. They were trying to get a living building challenge award, and in order to receive a living building challenge award, you had to certify the data after one year of operation. So not only did the design have to be net zero, but it had to prove that it was net zero after a year's activity, and so we had a design initially for the building load that they were designing, and it was about two city blocks wide. The array would cover two city blocks, and then we had them refine the energy model, get rid of the elevator, or the elevator is available only with a special card pass to use, and they have the irresistible stairway up six stories. This is considered by the New York Times Architectural Review, is the most sustainable commercial building in America.
• 10:33
  Haskell Werlin: When it was first built, and this is now we were able to get the array to not only cover the rooftop but a significant portion of the sidewalk below, and that was able to power 100% of the building energy load. So we've come a long way. And Seattle is not particularly a sunny city, as you know.
• 10:55
  Tim Montague: Yeah, well, you have two things with high rise.
• 10:59
  Tim Montague: Generally, the footprint of the roof is not large enough to substantially offset the load of the building, so that was something that you were wrestling with, clearly, with the initial footprint being a couple city blocks, which would not be practical from a mechanical engineering perspective, right. And then you have what appears to me to be flat solar panels. Is that the case that the solar panels on that array are completely level to ground, or are they at 10 degrees?
• 11:31
  Haskell Werlin: No, they are pretty much flat. It is enough to drain the fluid. There are there are holes in the array for the drainage, and then they capture that water and use it as gray water for the building.
• 11:42
  Haskell Werlin: There's no waste in this building, but the modules were sun power modules, and everything was produced in within a short distance of the actual building that was one of the criteria for LBC.
• 11:58
  Tim Montague: So, how do the senior executives who are sitting on the top floor feel about walking six floors up?
• 12:05
  Haskell Werlin: Dennis Hayes was one of them, and Dennis Hayes was the director of the Bullet Center. I don't know how many people remember Earth Day, 1971 I think I was about 15 years old when I went to my first Earth Day event, and Dennis Hayes was the leader of the Earth Day movement, and he eventually, when I went to Washington, was the director of the Solar Energy Research Institute, SERI, in Golden, Colorado, under President Carter, and so he was directing the boat center and hired Steven Strong and SDA to come up with this design,
• 12:36
  Tim Montague: from $16 a watt for satellites in the 1970s to$3 for residential and $1 for ground mounts today. The cost curve has been relentless, and now a second curve is following the first one down, batteries, which changes everything about what's possible.
• 12:56
  Haskell Werlin: Well, when we got started, when Steve Strong started the firm, solar was at$16 a watt. It was more or less used for space satellites, and the first terrestrial youth conference was at Bell Labs in 1974 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Steve was able to attend that and start the company. Most of the clients on the early years were not concerned about cost. One of the favorite clients he had was Robin Williams in Napa Valley, and did a dual access tracker called the Sun Sunflowers, and there have been a number of projects that we did back then that were clearly just hood ornaments, as Steve would call them. They were not necessarily powering the entire building. In fact, they were basically put there for show. We did the IBEW Local 103 Electricians Hall, and we had solar PV actually powering the wind turbine when the wind wasn't blowing, just so it would show the wind turbine moving, so I think that by early 2000s solar began to become cost-effective in certain markets. The Germans, particularly, were able to subsidize through a feed-in tariff the industry, and then the Chinese copied that same model and scaled it up with production that made solar more and more affordable, and you know, sort of cut the cost annually. So, when we were getting started in the 2010 era, there was probably around $5 a watt for residential, $3 a watt for ground mounts, and now we're at $3 for residential and $1 for ground mounts. So prices come down, and now we're starting to see the battery industry follow the module industry, so we're seeing battery prices come down, and you're seeing I would argue that Texas, maybe more so than Hawaii, is leading the country in solar and battery installations, and it has changed the grid in air caught from being precariously dependent upon fossil fuels to now having solid firm base load power between solar and batteries and wind.
• 15:53
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's really great that the cost of batteries has come down so much, and and we're now in this in this ski slope style decline in the cost of batteries, and that unlocks the possibility of true resilience for consumers. You could have a relatively small solar project, you know, say seven kw and a large battery, a 40 kilowatt hour battery, and achieve complete off-grid operation in many geographies in the UN, in the United States, ultimately, the data center folks want to have a grid connection, so they can sleep at night, but they may start with solar, wind, and batteries to get the project up and running, and and then wait the three to five years that they need to get an interconnection. Yes,
• 16:43
  Haskell Werlin: that's the bridge approach, and you might have a diesel gen or natural gas generator to grid form for the micro grid, but the idea of doing micro grids now has become commonplace. So, and it's not just data centers, it's campuses, it's hospital centers.
• 16:58
  Haskell Werlin: Anyone who needs resilience, a microgrid makes more sense.
• 17:07
  Tim Montague: Absolutely, my listeners will be familiar with the Earn Safe Protect of Batteries, Protect being the resiliency piece. Let's talk more about batteries. I do think we are entering, or have entered a new phase of the clean energy transition with the advent of affordable or cheap batteries, and you know today only a very small fraction of consumers or business owners have a battery in their building, less than 1% but in 10 years that is going to change dramatically. We're going to see battery alone installations. We see companies like Base Power running around and installing 40 kilowatt hour batteries as a service. They started in Texas, they're coming to Illinois, so they're coming to markets where there are good battery incentives, which makes sense, but this is good for consumers, no money out of pocket, or virtually no money out of pocket, and then you have resiliency as a service. Yeah, so the VPP markets, I think of Vermont, California, Texas, Illinois has a burgeoning market, it's all the rules aren't spelled out yet, but that's going to happen principally next year and moving forward. But what is happening in Massachusetts relative, and New York State has a VPP program, I believe.
• 18:37
  Haskell Werlin: Yeah, we're looking to the utilities to work on a program together with the DER community, and we're hoping that we can get both Eversource National Grid on board to take this very seriously, because the distributed energy resources in aggregate can make a huge difference. We don't need to increase transmission upgrades or even the distribution grid upgrades to take virtual power plants another level.
• 19:02
  Tim Montague: Yeah, this is a very important point, and I think it's, it's vital that we energy professionals understand this, that we can reduce the investment that we're making in transmission and distribution by building micro grids. A battery is is a Swiss Army knife, and it can do so many things, it can absorb energy instantaneously, it can be a generator, it can provide grid services like frequency regulation, you can attack parts of your power bill that you just can't attack with solar, like demand charges or capacity charges, because, because of the intermittency of solar, it makes it very hard to target a specific window in a guaranteed fashion, whereas a battery, if you load it, if you charge it up in the morning, and you know you have a capacity window coming in the afternoon, you're guaranteed to have that service, but when a constituent, when it, when a customer comes to you and says, hey, let's say I'm a, I'm a hospital campus.
• 20:03
  Tim Montague: We'd love to go solar and battery. Do you guys do all of the design work to help that customer understand what's possible? Because it's a pretty sophisticated juggling act that you have to do to figure out what you, what's practical and what's economical,
• 20:25
  Haskell Werlin: so we have a lot of partners in the industry, and I think of our industry more and more as a collaborative industry than a competitive industry. So, we have partners at Sea Power, for example, that know how to monetize that battery usage. So, we'll do a megawatt rooftop for the New Balance Tracks and Field Center, and that has a 250 kilowatt sungrown battery, and so we can talk to C Power about how do you monetize that, how can you maximize the value of that battery, and we can shave the peaks, we can reduce their demand charges, which are pretty high, and by shaving peaks, we can save the whole grid a lot of money, because it's that five or 10% of the year that you're hitting those high electric prices, I think too long, too many people thought a kilowatt hour is kilowatt hours are all the same, and they're not. I mean, you don't go to the grocery store and buy your food by the pound, and you shouldn't be buying your electricity as one price fits all. And I think now we're starting to look at time of use pricing and try to value when electricity is cheap, and when we can store it in the battery, and when it's expensive, we can discharge it, and we can capitalize on that.
• 21:31
  Tim Montague: Absolutely. So, do you work with Cindy by any chance?
• 21:37
  Haskell Werlin: I haven't, but I know there are other people here in the office that may have been working. Him,
• 21:44
  Tim Montague: yeah, they're one of the the most sophisticated micro grid design tools that I've run into and had on the show, Zendi X E N D E, but
• 22:00
  Haskell Werlin: taking notes
• 22:01
  Tim Montague: on the, you know, technologically like pretty much anything you want to do is is possible if you have enough space and money. Getting things permitted, on the other hand, is a challenge, and we've, we've touched on this a little bit.
• 22:18
  Tim Montague: One of the drums that I've been beating on the channel here is community scale micro grids, where you have multiple off-takers, you know, 1000s of residences or hundreds of businesses on a single micro grid, and that becomes prohibited by the utilities in most jurisdictions across the US, they, they have a, they have a no fence rule
• 22:51
  Haskell Werlin: franchise.
• 22:52
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and so, but this kind of touches on the policy work that you do, Haskell. How do you, how do you explain this to legislators and other government stakeholders who like are regulating the utilities, and the utilities were created to serve humanity, to serve the citizens of the jurisdictions they, they cover, so to speak, and yet they've turned the tables on us and control the rules in a lot of places in ways that are holding us back. You know what
• 23:28
  Haskell Werlin: they say: sunlight does not have to pass through the straits or hormones.
• 23:34
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• 23:49
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• 24:26
  Tim Montague: Solar has never had a straight road in Massachusetts alone. It took a landmark law to unlock the market nationwide. The stop and go of federal incentives has shaped and sometimes reshaped entire business models. We asked Haskell to put the current moment in context, let's talk about what's going on in policy in the United States. I think the Trump administration just wanted to create turmoil and chaos. They've succeeded. There is now a lot of friction.
• 24:57
  Tim Montague: There's a lot of money going to attorneys and accountants that just make solar more expensive, but they're fighting a lost battle, right? The sun shines every day in most places on earth, and now with cheap batteries we are just unstoppable, but obviously the residential ITC going away at the end of last year has been a hit, right. We're now in the, in the, in the phase of third-party ownership being the bee's knees, so to speak, for residential.
• 25:35
  Tim Montague: And then that's going to go away at the end of 28 you know, at at the latest, at the end of 2028 I think, could go away sooner, depending on the nuances in your project, but how do you see this, and do you, are you in the camp of, well, the ITC is probably going to come back, or we should live without the ITC?
• 26:00
  Haskell Werlin: Well, I have to say, Tim, my blood type is B positive, and that's been my philosophy my whole life. I think that there's opportunities where electricity prices are high and the sun shines, so certain areas, Southern California, for example, you've got very high electric prices, you've got a lot of sunshine, probably don't need an ITC in those situations. Other areas we can put batteries, which goes through the 2030s and batteries still get the ITC, and if we can try to work with longer term lending and getting the, again, this is all you know, depending on location and price of electricity, you may still see solar penciling out at a reasonable payback without the ITC. It's one of the things about the ITC is that you know your tax equity takes a big chunk of money out of the project, so when you just don't have that involved, you have a less complicated project. And the real question has been, can you get interconnection, and can you get it in a timely fashion?
• 26:56
  Haskell Werlin: So some people, particularly the data center people, are saying, you know what, screw the interconnection, screw the ITC.
• 27:02
  Haskell Werlin: Let's just build out behind the meter solar and batteries, and go directly behind the meter without even doing an interconnection. So that's a whole new field that we haven't even seen that's starting up.
• 27:16
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I think that's that's very true. And grid defection is now within reach for many types of operations in an industry that has chewed up and spit out some very big names, Solar Design Associates has never exceeded 20 employees. That's not an accident.
• 27:37
  Haskell Werlin: So, staying nimble and staying small has been a real asset to our company's longevity. I've seen companies that have grown quickly, gone very, very successful, very short period of time, only to fail and fall.
• 27:51
  Haskell Werlin: SunEdison, being one of them, that comes to mind, but there are many others. I mean, SunPower, too, was a great leader for many, many years. I think that by staying small, we were able to be nimble enough to take on very different types of projects, and another thing that we've done here is hiring interns right out of college and training them in the way the SDA way, which is a very thorough way. We have plan sets that are this thick, maybe they're too specific and too precise, but as opposed to just taking a single line dying and trying to build off it, which a lot of people do. We try to be very precise and specific in our plans, and we like people coming right out of college because they don't have mistakes to unlearn.
• 28:31
  Haskell Werlin: They're learning it at the kind of speed of the technology is changing so fast, the software is changing so fast. I mean, there were no helioscopes or Aurora when I started, and now you know we have drones doing thermal imaging. We used to spend a week doing curve tracing, and now we do it in an afternoon with a drone. So, getting young people who are already versed in the software and the technology has been a real asset to the gray hairs around us.
• 28:56
  Tim Montague: With that, I'll say, check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com Please tell a friend about the show, that's the best thing you can do to help others find this content, and Steven and Haskell, what is your website? So we can get that in the show notes.
• 29:09
  Tim Montague: Solardesign.com solardesign.com With that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. Thank you so much, gentlemen. Thank you.
• 29:18
  Tim Montague: Thanks so much.