Latest / Clean Power Hour / Scattered Solar Monitoring Is Costing You Thousands #338

Transcript

Scattered Solar Monitoring Is Costing You Thousands #338 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Hervé Billiet: When a ticket comes in, what I had to deal with is, for the first 10 minutes, you need to look for the data. What this customer has a question first, is it even our customer? Because you realize that some people ask you to do maintenance on project, they think you install it, and you realize you're not the main installer. So then, then you you search for the like. Did we install some SMA or call one there, or, like, some solids, like, what did we install over the years? And so what I build is when tickets come in, the tickets can be created by your employees or by your customers.
• 1:24
  Hervé Billiet: When a ticket comes in, you pull all the data from 10 different sources or more. You just put it on one screen so you have the data, so now you can start troubleshooting.
• 1:36
  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 micro grid 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.
• 2:06
  intro: Here's your host, Tim Montague,
• 2:11
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, the future of the solar industry in the United States. It's a very dynamic industry we work in, and that's one of the things that I love about the solar industry. It can be a little dizzying though, at times, and we're going through a pretty major transition right now in 2026 My guest today is Urban billier. He is the CEO of Sunvoy and the co host of what solar installers need to know.
• 2:41
  Tim Montague: Great show. Check it out.
• 2:41
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the show. Erve, thank you, Tim, thank you for inviting me. I love this topic. We all we, all we. Being energy professionals need to know more about where the puck is going.
• 2:54
  Tim Montague: You have to skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is, as the saying goes. And it's not always easy. I was talking to some folks in San Diego last week who said, Yeah, you know, last year with the O triple B, we just kind of put things on hold for six months to see where things were going to land. And I say, lean into batteries. That is a trend that is not really changing. It's only going to get stronger and lean into the transition to C&I, commercial, industrial. If you're a resi installer, get your C&I chops. If you're doing some C&I, great. If you want to do large C&I, reach out to me. I can help you with tools and technologies. But erve Give us a little background on yourself.
• 3:47
  Tim Montague: Why did you get into the solar industry, and what exactly is sunvoy. And our listeners can also reference an interview with your colleague, Joe marhammati, which is also a great backgrounder on Sunvoy. But tell us your story.
• 4:04
  Hervé Billiet: Herbay team, I started in the solar industry by building the first Belgium solar car. You hear an accent. I'm originally from Belgium. I'm an engineer by trade, so I designed the chassis of the car, the rims of a car, and part of suspension, and it was a phenomenal engineering challenge. But that really the solar car, obviously had a battery, and that was kind of novel at the time. I'm talking about good 20 plus years ago now, and then I saw a beautiful girl, not my wife. She's American, so she won the argument about where to live, which side of the Atlantic Ocean, and living in the US. I started first solar company in Alabama. She's originally from Alabama. So I looked at a solar radiation map. I saw that solar panels in Alabama would produce 40% more than in Belgium. I thought starting a solar company was going to be easy. I should have looked at a political map.
• 5:03
  Tim Montague: What a great lesson
• 5:06
  Hervé Billiet: follow the customer. That's the lesson. And so basically, start another solar company. After working at the Department of Energy on the federal level for a while and some other jobs in DC, I really wanted to run a solar company, and so started again. Now, white place, white time company took off in Virginia. Went for finding new initial customers.
• 5:30
  Hervé Billiet: I've started our several businesses, and the way I usually do these now is, like, your cash flow positive before you even start the business, before you even have a name of the business. So did the same company was called IPs and solar fund customers, they start writing the checks. And then I said, like, who should I write a check for? Like, just. Leave it blank. I don't have a name yet.
• 5:50
  Hervé Billiet: And so then you open a bank account, start a company, and you you put the checks in the bank account to kind of get started so you sell and find the need before you do the legal work of starting a business. And I did the same while running a solar company. I did the same again, finding paying customers for software. The problem I was facing is that once your solar company grows and grows and grows, you start having problems with scale. You install. You don't know what you install anymore. Customers start calling you a few years later, like, Hey, can you check out my system is like, what the heck is that?
• 6:28
  Hervé Billiet: Even our customer? So you have a lot of data that's siloed, and to do monitoring of all your different inverters and platforms and your different serums you have over the years, all that data needs to be coming together in one place. So build it for myself. Start selling it to other solar companies and and then, you know, then the things start so, what happens is, first, you build it for yourself, you have a clear need.
• 6:53
  Hervé Billiet: You're not even a visionary.
• 6:56
  Hervé Billiet: You're just somebody with a pain point. And then once the company grows, you know, sunvoice is growing, and so now I am playing that visionary. I need to, as you mentioned, go where the perk is. I like your analogy. Since the US just won the game against Canada, although central we have customers all over the world, we have also good Canadian friends as clients.
• 7:16
  Tim Montague: So let's back up for just a sec. I love the the reference to a solar car, because a solar car is a micro grid on wheels, right? You've got solar you've got batteries, you've got a motor that's running this thing. It could be a car with wheels. It could be a building, right? So that's a that's an excellent foundation for solar, especially modern day solar, where batteries are becoming more important because of their value stack. And we're all if you're not knee deep in batteries yet, you really have to get knee deep in batteries, and it is somewhat rocket science at the C&I scale, at the resi scale, it's pretty plug and play. We're getting, you know, it is getting more mature. We're I was talking with a colleague this morning. We're in the third wave of energy storage now in the US, and things are getting much more refined, but, but so you created Ipsen, a solar installation company, and then you recognized a problem, which is that information is getting siloed. But you guys solves multiple problems. So if, if, if I'm an installer and I don't have sunvoy, and then I'm an installer and I have sunvoy, what is the value that I've onboarded by onboarding Sunvoy,
• 8:45
  Hervé Billiet: well, we have residential installers, C&I installers, and we usually split that answer in two parts. One is it increases your revenue, and the second party reduces your cost. To reduce your cost. Lot of solar companies have all types of software. You have a DocuSign license, and maybe, if you don't care, you also have, like, three other documents signing licenses. So you combine that into one, which is sunvoy, when you sign a document, when you client sign documents, they all go into your portal. So it becomes like a document repository system. Then we also have the entire increase your revenue piece. And increase revenue basically comes down to referrals, which is more important for residential installers. But so you have a lot of automation. You have a lot of different ways, and we have two main buckets. Is like, one is like the referral piece, like a customer care long term keep track of your customers, and then the communication basically to your your customers, but fully automated.
• 9:47
  Hervé Billiet: And then the other piece is a solar fleet monitoring platform.
• 9:51
  Hervé Billiet: Too many installers have some CPS and some locus, some old locus monitoring, and then noise power tracker, and then you add up, like, maybe some SMA and some solar edge and, like, it's all over the place. And so wouldn't be nice to have programmatically, without any truck roll, without any boots on the ground, to just see everything that happens in everything you've installed, you can then chop your portfolio up in different pieces. Some investors want to see this.
• 10:19
  Hervé Billiet: Others investor can see that.
• 10:19
  Hervé Billiet: And so you you have, like, a more flexibility to look at your own fleet and your own guarantees that you promise some some of your investors,
• 10:30
  Tim Montague: and if I'm a solar installer, what do I learn by being able to see what's going on with my fleet?
• 10:40
  Hervé Billiet: That's a good question. The first thing when I was still CEO and I saw my dashboard of like, everything we've installed, is like, why are we installing over there?
• 10:49
  Hervé Billiet: Because that is a very tough market. Why? To keep doing this so you see a map of all your systems and knowing your markets, like, why are you always still there? Another thing, main thing is your maintenance. Not enough installers also do O and M, and it's because you don't even see the problem. You may have a person and you or a team and they do O and M, but once you see how many problems they are continuously you realize you're probably underfunding that department, and you don't do well enough to your customers that you made promises to and so now as a CEO, is like, oh my gosh, I need to fund this department more, put more resources into this and professionalize it, instead of hoping some people gonna take care of it. It's like you start seeing what the problems are. So now you can act upon it, because before you can really see it,
• 12:31
  Tim Montague: a lot of my clients talk about O and M, wanting to grow into O M, and this is a great opportunity now, because there are enough installations in many, many markets where there's a need and there's a there's a constant, you know, players falling out of the market, going bankrupt or getting merged and acquired, and and companies are losing track of their customers, and so they're stranded customers. But what are the what are the fundamentals in your mind of a good O and M operation?
• 13:10
  Hervé Billiet: I've always had a preference of doing the work yourself. Don't outsource things to other people. If you do it in house, you learn. You take some risk, I guess too, but you learn and you can professionalize, keep your price down and grow.
• 13:25
  Hervé Billiet: If you give all the work to other people, you're not going to learn. And it's a black box too, and it will stay a black box. So open that black box and get in it. So what I wanted is to have a centralized place that all tickets come in. When a ticket comes in, what I had to deal with is for the first 10 minutes, you need to look for the data. What this customer has a question first, is it even our customer? Because you realize that some people ask you to do maintenance on project, they think you install it, and you realize you're not the main installer. So then, then you, you search for the like, did we install some SMA or core one there? Or, like some solids, like, what did we install over the years? And so what I build is when tickets come in, the tickets can be created by your employees or by your customers.
• 14:11
  Hervé Billiet: When a ticket comes in, you pull all the data from 10 different sources or more. You just put it on one screen so you have the data. So now you can start troubleshooting, because it's very different, and you need to prioritize some tickets, right?
• 14:26
  Hervé Billiet: So it's very different to have a ticket for like a five kilowatt or 500 kilowatt coming through the is it a recent install? Is did we just turn it on last month? Or is like, a five year old system, so having all the data at the right away is a key differentiator, and basically this allows you to still outsource. Once you have the data, you can still ask other to do, go do the work, sure, but at least it gives you visibility in your own assets.
• 14:58
  Tim Montague: I mean, one of the signals we see in the industry is that solar assets are underperforming for a variety of reasons. The panels are failing.
• 15:05
  Tim Montague: The the installation was shoddy.
• 15:13
  Tim Montague: You know, there is a race to the bottom that happens in our industry. If you use cheap products or cheap labor, you're going to end up with a subpar installation. So anything else about O and M you'd like to put a pin in before we move on and talk about where the puck is going in the United States?
• 15:37
  Hervé Billiet: Yeah, I built a technical platform. What do you explain is human behavior.
• 15:40
  Hervé Billiet: People want to pay little and get the same return as if you pay for quality. So that's a human behavior that I can change, but, but it is true that we see, in general, solar assets producing less than than expected. And I'll blame myself first, when I was still selling solar, I sold the first system saying, like, there is no maintenance. Then you do it for long enough that you realize, like, wait a second, there is maintenance. And so then I made sure to train my salespeople that time to say there is low maintenance. Don't ever say there is no maintenance. So it was an evolution. So I was part of the problem. Hopefully I'm also part of solution now, but so you sell more accurately.
• 16:24
  Hervé Billiet: Like, you know, there is a chance of maintenance. You budget for maintenance. We have more tools to track maintenance.
• 16:30
  Hervé Billiet: And so I think it's our industry learning, and we just grow. But there's also differences in countries. I know residential, for example, cable management is quite important. So when I when I visit installers in Europe, they look at me like, What is cable management? They just connect it. They leave it on the roof. It's not a thing over there. Still don't know why, but it so there are also some pieces that are very sensitive to us as an industry. Is like, is that really the most important part of so much resources you spend on fixing some aspects of O and M compared to others. So I think there is still, there's still lot of work, a lot of things to learn, a lot of innovation.
• 17:13
  Hervé Billiet: Transformers, for example, full transformers. Do they have enough monitoring of transformers? We monitor a lot of different aspects of a solar site. But I still don't know about monitoring on transformers, for example. So there is still a lot to be discovered.
• 17:29
  Tim Montague: I don't quite follow I mean inverters, for sure, but transformers what I mean there's the solar installers generally not installing the transformer. The utility operator is installing the transformer. Do you think transformers are a problem?
• 17:47
  Hervé Billiet: I think they probably fail more than expected. They feel more than than was budgeted for. Just like I see so much of the solar also failing more than what we expected. So you're right.
• 17:57
  Hervé Billiet: Transformers is not really part of the solar installations responsibility, but it is part of producing for solar facility, producing the power that was promised. So there's a lot of components that can fail. And so I think for us as an industry, we want to make sure that the electricity is being produced correctly and as expected. And so the more monitoring we can have, even more automation, more tracking, the more data we have, the better we can adapt to it.
• 18:29
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS, 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility, ESS and Balance of System Requirements, go to Chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more, how advanced is The monitoring? You know, one of the, I think, of machine learning, for example, in our ability to see very muted signals that could be Telltales for something that's wrong or going to get worse in the near future, and so that we could be more proactive with our O and M.
• 19:44
  Tim Montague: But talk to me a little bit about that. What level of granularity are we getting with the sunvoy platform?
• 19:57
  Hervé Billiet: Let me lift up the veil a little bit. Not sure I'm proud of to talk about this, but I do see a big difference between C&I and residential. C&I people expect want granularity and a lot of capabilities in residential. I see that a lot of companies have too much on them work, so you provide them like predictive models and so on.
• 20:19
  Hervé Billiet: They it's too much. They already have inverters that are down, and they should be taking care of that first. Like the most obvious piece, there's the elephant in the room, and as long as the elephant in the room is still there, it's pointless to come up with more advanced pieces. We are approached all the time by VCs and other people, and the VC always when they see we have a monitoring platform. So like, Well, do you have predictive AI models? Like, not yet. It's pointless if I, if I have all of that, like, I'm going to draw on my clients anyway. So I want them to focus on the most important piece, and then when the industry can handle that, we can go to the next level.
• 21:02
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So, as we discussed at the outset, we're going through a pretty significant transition now, residential is declining, the importance of batteries is increasing, so the attachment rate is going up. And you, you, you know a what was a $20,000 solar project can now be a$50,000 solar and battery project, and you get much more out of that kind of a project, but it also may limit which consumers have access to that.
• 21:40
  Tim Montague: That capital expenditure. And then we have markets where VPPs are becoming a thing. We see the battery only market really starting to catch fire. And you know, it's it's well on its way in Texas. It's starting in Illinois. Now. I was having coffee with a new employee of base power, a company that I've talked about a few times on the show they're installing a battery as a service. It's a 40 kilowatt hour battery, and that market is now being unlocked in Illinois, and I don't know, you know, it won't be long before there's five states that they're going after, and then 10, and in five years, you know, I would predict that we'll have good VPPs in in probably 30 states.
• 22:28
  Tim Montague: So, batteries, batteries, bueno, I love batteries. And that's just, that's just the small scale. And then we're getting also front of the meter batteries. Texas has this phenomenon. Some of the Northeast states, New York, Massachusetts, I think there's a five megawatt hour market in the in Illinois for front of the meter batteries now. So a lot of changes happening. The the major shift, I guess, is resi to C&I more C&I, the C&I market has historically been neglected, under appreciated. It's a great opportunity. You know, big companies will solarize their facilities in any market, whether or not there are good incentives, because they have a mandate at the at the corporate level. And then, of course, there's markets where there are incentives. And then the payback period is so short. You know, here in Illinois we have a four or five year payback for solar, a three year payback for solar and batteries at the C&I scale, and that just really, it is, it is an accelerant when you have an incentives. But how do you see the market? And what do you say to installers? You know, I like to say that residential installers really don't know what they don't know when it comes to large C&I, the equipment is different. The modules are different, the inverters are different. The racking is different. The software you use to generate proposals is different. The design tools you use is different. That your your audience is now a group of stakeholders, right? The executive team, oftentimes the CEO, the CFO, the CEO, the facilities manager. It's a more complex sale. But what do you like to put a pin in when, with regards to where the puck is going in the US market?
• 24:41
  Hervé Billiet: I like your when you compare the resident and commercial, about all the differences. And you can keep going like, one is B to b1, is B to C, the legal aspect is different, the so much is different, and yet we still got a solar project. So I think for any residential numbers to get into commercial, they need to understand that it is a different business. There's a reason why some businesses have a different website, name, branding. It's under one umbrella, one business, but very different branding. And they go to the market in different reasons. What I've done at Epsom is that we grew ourselves out of the residential and start doing more commercial very early on.
• 25:17
  Hervé Billiet: The advantage when you do residential is you do them all the time. We did like 2030 a month. And so you you can hire somebody, and after a month, they that one person. Now it's across multiple crews and so on, but has installed multiple projects from start to finish.
• 25:36
  Hervé Billiet: So if they make a mistake day one, day two, they have a chance to not make that same mistake again. Day three, again and again. So if you want to be organized and have a process in place, you will learn and set up process in place a lot faster than when you do a few projects a month on commercial. So the speed at which you learn is so much faster residential and commercial. So towards the end of the before I sold Ipsen, I started selling like more in batches. Is like some developers we I saw like 1015, projects at a time. And I start seeing the same trend that once you do enough commercial you set process in place, you have people dedicated to it. You have you put people in authority.
• 26:22
  Hervé Billiet: They have the authority to make decisions, and you delegate. So as much as you have a process oriented industry for residential, you can set up the same thing for commercial. So if your question was, what do you advise those residential install is like, don't just stay focused. On residential, explore commercial, but be careful, because it is a very different piece. Number one, your cash flow super important. But it's very, very different on C&I, the margins are so very different.
• 26:52
  Hervé Billiet: So, so explore it. You can do it. You can take on a few few projects at a time. But there is a gray zone I would call maybe the dead zone where, if you don't go full into commercial, they will the commercial projects will derail your residential installation. So if you go into commercial, you need to get out of that dead zone to have dedicated teams doing just commercial. You would have dedicated salespeople going after that and legal like everything needs to be separated as much as possible. As long as you have people doing both you are in. I would call it that zone where it's dangerous because it's not optimized for commercial. It needs to become its own. Pipeline of sales, pipeline of operational projects, warehousing is different and so on so on.
• 27:46
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's definitely a different animal.
• 27:48
  Tim Montague: C&I, I do see some companies successfully navigating, doing both under one brand with one team. But in general, I recommend specializing if you can having dedicated commercial sales people, having dedicated commercial installers. The equipment you need for commercial is so different.
• 28:13
  Tim Montague: Ladders just aren't a thing really, right? You're you're using lifts, you're using staircases, you're using pallet jacks. It's It's just different.
• 28:22
  Tim Montague: And the quantities and the magnitude of everything is is quite a bit more in large C&I, the you mentioned this cash flow thing and, and I'm a big fan of growing organically and growing growing gradually, but at some point you kind of got to get in the deep end and swim right and and there are various ways that you can get to that point. You can self develop. You can work with developers. A lot of residential installers are self developing and not so familiar with this phenomenon of working with developers, and they're skeptical, but it is a great business for many EPCs. And that expression EPC, resi installers call themselves installers, commercial installers call themselves EPCs, and which stands for engineering, procurement and construction.
• 29:20
  Tim Montague: And then there's flavors of EPCs. Some EPCs really don't have the C or the E and and so you can become whatever you really want. My biggest thing is finding partners, finding aspirational peers. Build yourself a network of other companies and company executives who've been there, done that.
• 29:43
  Tim Montague: And I think that's one of the great things about our industry.
• 29:46
  Tim Montague: Survey, is people are willing to share. It helps if you're in a non competing market. But even in in markets, people recognize that there's enough work to go around. We all want a better industry, more qualified, more successful companies. There's a lot of fly by night in the solar industry, people that don't really know what it takes to grow a good company that has resiliency. And so there's a lot of rapid growth and then tripping over yourself and making a mess of things. What are your thoughts about that?
• 30:25
  Tim Montague: Like growing this industry in a quality fashion,
• 30:32
  Hervé Billiet: I have a lot of thoughts about that. I am more risk averse. I prefer to grow organically. Keep several months of pay on on the bank account.
• 30:40
  Hervé Billiet: Just out of caution, I see that as a way to sleep better at night. I think it's a good investment for me. So that can we can make long term decisions.
• 30:54
  Hervé Billiet: You could argue that keeping more money on the bank account is not growing the business. So you can go both ways there, but the way I've seen some companies grow is they grow and then they break it just too much. If your demand for capital is continuously, like used right away, and you become also, you don't see how much you spent, that you cost is just too high, and you could do things more efficiently. So there is a level at that growth that is just not healthy. I've seen it several times, but it's also true that it's an industry where we help each other, even even competitors, not not maybe not every competitor. But when you talk to your competitors, you get a. You a quick sense of like, can you talk business and help each other out? Or is it very difficult to speak about any even sensitive information?
• 31:48
  Hervé Billiet: You'll have all types of competitors out there. So talk to your competitors and see if you can work together. You mentioned developers. This is true. So if you are developer, you need some installers. I mean, connection with a lot of installers around the US the world, actually. And on the flip side, if you are an installer, need some developers happy to make introductions too. And my point about like the EPC is, like, if you are a manager or CEO, you may have a preference.
• 32:17
  Hervé Billiet: Are you more sales driven and you don't really know or care about, like the installation part, or you more like boots on the ground. You're with you guys in the field more, and you've done that, and you don't want to do the sales as much so. So start, if you want to go from ready to commercial, start with what you prefer. Because in a commercial space, you can outsource any piece. You could just do the labor and partner with somebody that does all the sales for you, developers and so on. They just give you work. You just show up. And even though the labor is also split, you can just bid on the mechanical part, or just the electrical part, or vice versa. You more sales focused, sell and develop some projects. And then you can outsource entire installation piece, which on the residential space. Is still not really the case. It's very hard to start outsourcing that NF quality still. So I think that the C&I space is definitely quite different than residential.
• 33:16
  Tim Montague: I think C&I is more of a team effort, and you will inevitably partner with other installers of various flavors once you get into ground mount. Then there are specialists on the mechanical side, the pile driving the racking, that have that stuff dialed in a way that you may never get and it may be more cost effective for you to sub that out to specialists, but it's up to you. You can choose to tackle the full scope or part of the scope, and slice and dice it. Keep a very close eye on the quality of the work that's getting done, because it will cause you a lot of headaches and cost your reputation, your reputation tremendously. If even one project becomes a problem, it'll, it'll, it'll ripple in negative ways. So be careful.
• 34:16
  Tim Montague: But it pays to be ambitious. It pays to to really focus on going larger, going into adjacent markets, if, if your particular geography is held back for whatever reason, look at adjacent geographies. It's a big country, and you may find a really sweet market just next door, and that could be a game changer for you. And I've, you know, I've learned over the years that you you can't just think home market in solar period. So in our last minute together, erve, what should our listeners know about you and sunvoy that they don't know, and probably should
• 35:06
  Hervé Billiet: my partner's project as a sole installer, we installed in Washington, DC on the US Constitution building.
• 35:11
  Hervé Billiet: It's a huge building really close to the US Capitol building. It happens to be called the US Constitution building. Not sure where, why the Treasury was housed there, and they were with guns next to us when we were installing solar panels. It was one of my most riskiest projects ever. Turns out, it was also my, one of my most profitable projects ever.
• 35:34
  Hervé Billiet: So when you take some risks, sometimes it rewards you. So that was a one of my most interesting projects. Happened in the middle of covid, we could not use the elevators in a building. We wanted to use screens, but the queens were not allowed for whatever reason, and so on. So we had to use everything through elevators.
• 35:50
  Hervé Billiet: The truck solved at midnight. In the middle of covid, everything was dead. There was nobody, but we only could use the elevator starting at midnight. So a lot of very interesting cases and about sun. Voice, like, just, just check it out. If you need, like, one dashboard to see all your solar assets in one place.
• 36:09
  Hervé Billiet: And, yeah, reach out to us. If you need introductions to developers or installers, happy to do that too.
• 36:18
  Tim Montague: Yeah, our value as networkers and nodes in the network is super valuable. So reach out to Herve where can our listeners find you?
• 36:26
  Hervé Billiet: Everybody, Sunvoy, S, U, N, V, O, y.com, and my name is Hervey. That's spelled H, E, R, V, E, so email address is herve@sunvoy.com
• 36:36
  Tim Montague: and what? What conferences? You know we're already, we're already almost in Q. Two here. But what conferences will you be at this year? In 2026
• 36:47
  Hervé Billiet: we try to limit it to two main conferences, inter solar and re plus, we do this every year. And then International. We also had inter solar Germany.
• 36:57
  Tim Montague: So re plus, this year is in December or November.
• 37:00
  Tim Montague: That was November. I think it's November in Vegas, the big one.
• 37:05
  Tim Montague: So it's moved. So that's a big gap. I would encourage our listeners to go to more conferences. That has been so rewarding for me. There's so many good regional events. I'm going to Atlanta to re plus southeast. I'm going to NABCEP in Milwaukee. I'm going to the three conferences we have here in Illinois. We have an inner solar we have an RE plus, and we have the Renewable Energy Conference, which is now owned and operated by ICA. So come meet me. I want to meet 100 listeners this year, and I'm well on my way. I've already been to two conferences, and I'm just moving. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large C&I solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects.
• 38:09
  Tim Montague: I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you just go to cleanpowerhour.com click on strategy and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much. So with that, I want to say thank you so much, everybody. Billier with sunvoy for coming on the show.
• 38:43
  Tim Montague: We didn't get to talk about your pod. But check out what solar installers need to know. You guys are off to the races, and I highly recommend that show.
• 38:56
  Tim Montague: Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. And with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague, thank you so much. Herve, thank you, Tim. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS, 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chintpowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more.