Latest / Clean Power Hour / Why Battery Storage is the Next Big Thing for Solar

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Why Battery Storage is the Next Big Thing for Solar · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Pete Sarelas: By pairing solar and battery storage like you were saying, you know, only 50 to 75% of your bill is going to get reduced with PV only, and that's assuming that you're at that 100% offset. If you're able to get 100% of your kilowatt hour energy on that roof, the other 25 to 50% is coming from these capacity and transmission charges, and even if you don't have enough room on that roof for 100% of an offset of PV, you know, it might only be a 40 or 50% by adding battery storage, this can give you a huge multiple by getting your comed built in the negatives, and really eliminate it completely on both comed and the Ameren side.
• 1:32
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:42
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition.
• 1:58
  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 gigawatt 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. Hey, guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI 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, I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you.
• 3:17
  Tim Montague: 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 today on the Clean Power Hour, solar and batteries, truly, we are entering the age of batteries in the United States.
• 3:48
  Tim Montague: Other places have gone there faster, but hey, this is your opportunity. Solar professionals, business owners, residents. I'm Tim Montague.
• 3:56
  Tim Montague: Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Follow us on YouTube, tell a friend about the show and reach out to me on LinkedIn. My guest today is Pete sorelis. He is the founder and CEO of source solar in Chicago.
• 4:19
  Tim Montague: Pete and I go way back. Welcome to the show, Pete, thanks for having me. Tim. You must have been just a punk kid when we met in what 2017 or 2018
• 4:30
  Pete Sarelas: Yeah, it was 2017 surprisingly, I was already in the solar industry for three years. Started off with Solar City back in Orange County in 2013
• 4:41
  Tim Montague: Orange County, California. Yeah, are you from California?
• 4:45
  Pete Sarelas: No, I'm from Chicago. Okay, great. I was going to school at the University of Iowa go Hawkeyes, and bumped into the manager of the Orange County door knocking division for for Solar City at a bar that I worked at, and we really kicked it off. Started talking. He gave me an interview. A few days later, a couple weeks passed, and he said, Hey, are you still interested in coming out to California to knock doors and sell solar. And I said, you know, it's sounded iffy to me. I wasn't sure how, how realistic it was. What could go wrong? He goes, let me fly out. So he flew me out to Silicon Valley, sweet and I met Peter rye, which was, it's his Elon Musk's cousin, who started Solar City. I met the founder of the company, and a week later, I packed up my 2002 Prius and drove out to California, and that's how I got in the solar
• 5:41
  Tim Montague: industry. I love it. How'd that go for you? Door knocking.
• 5:45
  Pete Sarelas: Door knocking is tough. It's a real tough market.
• 5:49
  Pete Sarelas: Orange County is one. One of the toughest markets, because they've been door knocking there for solar since 2008 when most solar companies jumped into the game. Yeah, that's when, you know, the Sun runs. Solar cities, Vivint, everyone was hitting that market, but it built tough skin, and I'm glad that I did it, because I saw how that door knocking solar bro side is ran and how wrong it is in the solar industry. Yeah, because we're we were even being told things from our higher ups that were so completely untrue.
• 6:23
  Pete Sarelas: And you know, a lot of people say that a solar company lied to them, or their their salesmen lied to them. And what it opened my eyes to is the majority of time these people aren't lying because they want to be malicious. It's because they don't know what the truth is.
• 6:43
  Pete Sarelas: And what that, you know, taught me what to do in my career is I want to be the master of the industry. I don't want to own a company and only know the sales side, or only know the install side, or only know the operation side, and that's why, when I started source solar in 2020 in 2021, I got my roofing license, both residential and commercial.
• 7:04
  Pete Sarelas: Last year, I got my electrical license, and then also my ICC master electrician certificate.
• 7:13
  Pete Sarelas: So I'm the one who holds all the licenses for the company.
• 7:17
  Pete Sarelas: Because I want to know what the right answer is, yeah. I don't want to have to rely on somebody else.
• 7:23
  Tim Montague: I love it. You are a true blue entrepreneur and solar OG now, you know, we've been riding the solar coaster here in Illinois, it really took off in 20 Well, 2017 was the first take off I had. I was attending, I see a meetings Illinois solar and storage Association back as early as 2005 and I hosted a meeting. I remember at the notarbart nature Museum, where I was doing corporate relations the notable nature Museum. They had a new facility, and they had a solar array. It was broken. It was not working at all. When we hosted that meeting there in that was 2008 and then the financial crisis happened. I got laid off, and I got into higher ed fundraising. So anyway, and then I thought I'd work in wind Pete, because we had big tranches of wind coming into Illinois because of the RPS that started in Oh, eight. So the renewable energy industry goes further back, and I see has been around for, gosh, I think 40 years, something like that, but it was mostly solar thermal back in the day. So fast forward. Okay. Here we are in 2025 as we were saying in the pre show, Illinois is the top five DG state because of Seija the climate inequitable JOBS Act, which just puts a small fee on your power bill for all residents and business owners in IOU territory, Ameren comed and Mid American territory, and that is a huge pulse of cash resources that go back to system owners. It makes the payback three to five years for DG solar, and that's complete game changer, as you know, Pete. But today I want to talk about batteries. Solar is cool, but it's very monomodal.
• 10:10
  Tim Montague: Okay? To use a geeky expression.
• 10:10
  Tim Montague: It only works when the sun shines, and it does reduce your Power Belt by up to 50 to 75% don't believe anybody who says you can offset your bill 100% that's a bunch of hogwash, but with a battery, you could three or 4x that ROI, because the battery works when the sun doesn't shine. And you can attack high capacity charges or demand charges. Here in Illinois, we mostly attack capacity charges and provide resiliency in the case of an outage, if you have the proper hardware. Solar doesn't work when there is a grid outage, if it if there's no battery. So resilience is also a big play.
• 10:51
  Tim Montague: But why have you dialed in on solar and batteries? Pete,
• 10:58
  Pete Sarelas: so by pairing solar and battery storage like you were saying, you know only 50 to 75% of your bill is going to get reduced with PV only, and that's assuming that you're at that 100% offset. If you're able to get 100% of your kilowatt hour energy on that roof. The other 25 to 50% is coming from these capacity and transmission charges, even if you don't have enough room on that roof for 100% of an offset of PV, you know, it might only be a 40 or 50% by adding battery storage, this can give you a huge multiple by getting your comed built in the negatives, and really eliminate it completely on both comed and the Amarin side. You.
• 11:43
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And the downside of batteries is that the capex is significantly higher. A you know, a residential battery might be$15,000 you'll get that money back. And in Illinois, we do have a battery incentive on a kWh, $250 per kWh. And there's legis. Legislation that is in the works to grow that incentive and grow the DG market in Illinois. Period it hasn't passed yet, but hopefully this year crossing fingers
• 12:21
  Pete Sarelas: and you know, onto that point of that's the big downside of it is a huge capex, you know, on some of these commercial projects, it could be two to $3 million per battery, yeah. But luckily, that's where our company comes into play. So source solar is our contracting division, and then I also have SOCAP, which is our financing division, okay for solar capital, and we'll help finance those batteries for businesses, because they might not have the cash upfront. You know, we offer zero down PPAs. We offer a prepaid PPA. We'll obviously always do a cash deal. And there's a lot of people who say, hey, you know, I want to invest the half a million or million dollars for my business to get solar, but I don't have that other 3 million for the battery.
• 13:07
  Pete Sarelas: Yeah. And we can chop the system up either way. You know, we can come in there. We can say, hey, we'll sell you the PV system.
• 13:14
  Pete Sarelas: We'll finance the battery portion. And for people who have already gone solar, you know, if you've already gone solar and your business, you're one of those 500 businesses or so that have solar in Illinois, feel free to reach out to us and we can see what a battery can really do for you. We're working with a local church right now who had 100 kilowatt system installed, oh, three years ago or so, and their comment bill, which used to be 2020 $500 a month, is now anywhere between 12 114 100 a month. And I said, Hey, I know that you guys have your solar already installed.
• 13:51
  Pete Sarelas: This is what a battery can do for you. And they're really excited with those numbers, being able to see that Bill drop to the double digit range
• 14:02
  Tim Montague: Exactly. So what you're talking about is what I would call an energy services contract. Energy as a service.
• 14:10
  Tim Montague: It's a thing, and it's a thing with with solar only. It's called a PPA power purchase agreement in most places. And the nuances of how you achieve this legally vary tremendously by jurisdiction. In Illinois, we just call it a PPA. In Indiana, a power purchase agreement isn't allowed, but there are workarounds. So tell us a little more though. Pete, let's talk small commercial like this church project. Yeah, you're going to own the battery, and what is the business model for you to generate revenue from the battery?
• 14:51
  Pete Sarelas: Correct? So with us, a lot of our businesses that we work with, like I said, don't have the capex to invest in this battery. The investors that we're currently working with have a very huge tax liability.
• 15:01
  Pete Sarelas: So we're making our money off of the incentives. It's off of the battery storage credits. It's off of the DG rebate, it's off of the tax incentives. So that's really where we're making our money,
• 15:16
  Tim Montague: the ITC, right?
• 15:16
  Tim Montague: The ITC, which is in jeopardy, the ITC is going away for solar, for resi solar in 2025 and then for commercial 2027 but batteries is extended to 2033 I think now,
• 15:33
  Pete Sarelas: yep, 2033
• 15:36
  Tim Montague: and so that's a that's a generous incentive,
• 15:39
  Pete Sarelas: yeah, and this is A way for us to keep our company afloat and in the marketplace.
• 15:43
  Pete Sarelas: Because you know, when this ITC goes away for solar this year, there's going to be a huge drop off in solar companies. In 2027 there's going to be another huge drop off in solar companies. And this is a way for us to diverse where our installs are happening, to make sure that source solar stays around for the long haul.
• 16:07
  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. Yeah, and if you're listening to this and you're a solar installer, this is exactly the play you have to get into batteries and maybe other infrastructure, like heat pumps, maybe electric vehicle charging.
• 17:02
  Tim Montague: There are other legs to stand on. O M, this market in Illinois now, right? We've had a lot of solar going into the Illinois market since 2017 that's eight years, right? We're going into nine years. That's a long time.
• 17:15
  Tim Montague: There's a lot of installed solar now across the US that needs O and M. It's not set it and forget it. It needs to be cleaned, it needs to be checked, the inverters need to be upgraded, maybe with software.
• 17:31
  Tim Montague: You know, a lot of people just don't realize, if they don't have an O and M contract, whether the system is working or not, power prices are going up and going, Oh yeah, I'm paying more for my electricity. I'm not thinking, but get a battery. You can reduce your bill. And this is a lot of work for installers.
• 17:52
  Tim Montague: It's a good for it's good for society Pete, it's good for consumers and business owners to reduce their power bill. They can do other things with that money. If you're a manufacturer, you can do R D with that money, or expand your facility or higher. And you know the savings are in the millions of dollars for large industrial solar and batteries. So what else should our listeners know about this world of solar and batteries?
• 18:21
  Tim Montague: Because it is deeper water than just solar alone. Let's face it,
• 18:25
  Pete Sarelas: yeah, and if you already have solar, you know, like I said, we will come out and finance the battery for you.
• 18:31
  Pete Sarelas: And I didn't really harp on this point, but we don't charge you for having the battery on your property. You know, you're able to reap the benefits of saving on your capacity and your transmission charges, what we benefit from is the comed and utility incentives of frequency payments and on our incentives.
• 18:50
  Pete Sarelas: So the ITC, the battery rebates, that's where we make our money.
• 18:55
  Pete Sarelas: So what you're able to do is reduce your bill to theoretically zero and sometimes even in the negatives. And where we make our nut is from our incentives.
• 19:05
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the the way that intelligent generation frames this, which I love, shout out to IG, they're a Chicago company software as a service that controls the battery, makes the battery talk to the grid, and it does three things, earn, save, protect you, earn money by providing grid services. You mentioned frequency regulation.
• 19:26
  Tim Montague: The grid operates at, I think it's 60 Hertz in the US, and the battery can condition the electricity on the grid. That's a service that the grid operator will then pay you for. It is a cash machine. So earn and then save. You attack capacity charges or demand charges. In California, you attack demand charges. In Illinois, you attack capacity charges. They're cousins of one another. Think of a very hot summer day at 2pm the grid is humming at full capacity. Guess what? You're going to experience capacity charges that could be 30% of your bill. And so you charge that battery and then discharge it over a two hour period, right and knock down those capacity charges with the battery, saving money, reducing your power bill, so earn, save and protect in the event of an outage, or you can have either full micro grid operation for a few hours. If you're a homeowner with a 30 kWh battery, you could have complete off grid operation 24/7, that's a big battery. Got to have a big solar array, big battery. But for commercial industrial facilities, the key is like ride through, right? Being able to do an uncontrolled, I mean, a controlled shutdown, if you're a injection molder, for example, where it's very expensive to have an uncontrolled shutdown.
• 20:51
  Tim Montague: So the battery is an asset.
• 20:51
  Tim Montague: Think of it as a mini power plant, right? That saves the day when there's a flicker in the grid, of brownout, or worse, a blackout.
• 21:04
  Pete Sarelas: Yeah, and, you know, comments helping incentivize this. So we're putting up these little VPPs, these virtual power plants all over the state, and that's our goal. You generate your power from your roof. You have your battery that acts as a shock absorber to the grid, and that battery is also acting almost as a commodities broker, but knowing that power is going to be higher between those hours of two and 6pm and then throughout the day, that battery is going to charge up, and then it's going to discharge in those later hours where it's more expensive. And that's what intelligent generation does best with their controller, is they.
• 21:42
  Pete Sarelas: Predict when these high rates are going to be when your battery discharges. Yep. And that's how you trick the grid into having your bill be in the negatives.
• 21:51
  Tim Montague: It's all about time of use rates, which if have, if those haven't come to your district yet, your utility district, they soon will. Time Of Use is really where it's at.
• 22:02
  Tim Montague: That is how the modern grid operators operate. You need to be on a time of use tariff, and that allows you to charge the battery when electricity is cheap and discharge the battery when electricity is expensive.
• 22:14
  Tim Montague: It's not rocket science, it's just simple math, and it really works electricity. The price of electricity goes up and down over the course of the day and over the course of the year, and it's supply and demand, right?
• 22:31
  Tim Montague: When there's a lot of demand, the price goes up. And so that's how you make money, by turning on that battery at those high cost moments. So I love this that your financing batteries.
• 22:46
  Tim Montague: Pete, it sounds almost too good to be true, though. So what else do business owners really want to know about this? How does it work? Let's say they already have solar. How long does it take to get a battery system. If you're installing a 250 to 500 kWh battery, tell us a little bit about the process. Yeah.
• 23:10
  Pete Sarelas: So we're actually usually going a little bit bigger. We're typically around that megawatt range for a four hour battery. So somewhere around four to 5000 megawatt hours, we're going as big as we can get pretty much anything over that half a megawatt size DC system that they already have that's on their roof. So in the process, these batteries are made to order. It's not like we can go to our local supply house and just pick one up tomorrow.
• 23:36
  Pete Sarelas: So first we're going to go through our ordering and interconnection process. The interconnection process can take anywhere between six months to a year, similar to how your solar process took when you guys decided to go solar. If your business already has solar combat is typically in that 90 to 180 day range. For larger systems. If it's smaller, you know, you can have an approval within 30 days or so, but these larger systems could take up to a half year or so. Once we have that, we're going to go through our ordering process. It does take anywhere between four to seven months to get these batteries ordered. We'll come out, we'll pour the concrete where this battery will sit.
• 24:21
  Pete Sarelas: They are all prefab skids. So it's about the size of a, I like to say a parking, parking space.
• 24:27
  Pete Sarelas: So they're about 20 by 10, a big box, 20 by 10, by 10, like a big shipping container. Will pour out our our pad. We'll drop that on the pad once it comes in.
• 24:41
  Pete Sarelas: Installation itself is not that difficult. You know, it only takes about a week. I'd give it two weeks tops to do the full installation and commissioning, unless we had something else that we had to upgrade, like a switch gear or increase the service amperage. Somehow, once we have all that done, we have our inspection, and then we're safe to turn back on when we submit for that PTO.
• 25:05
  Tim Montague: Another thing that we didn't talk about yet is that when you're designing a solar system from the ground up and on a let's say it's an industrial facility, but that's closed on Sunday, and so they don't have a big load on Sunday, that solar array is going to back feed onto the grid, and the grid infrastructure may or may not like that, right? There may not be capacity on the grid. You can also use the battery as a buffer to prevent injection onto or reduce the amount of electricity that injects onto the grid. So this can facilitate permitting and reducing the cost upfront of your solar interconnection to begin with, there are a variety of ways to control for injection. Check out Schweitzer relays. Schweitzer is a company that provides these little boxes that are very smart, and they can also prevent injection onto the grid. So there are variety of ways to skin this cat, or you, you know, worst case, you might have to upgrade the transformer. So you have to be careful and just expect some delays, and you can't know the full cost of the installation on the front end, and you have to prepare your customers for this reality, right? We don't want to be naive. We don't want to over promise under deliver. That's what the solar bros do, and we don't want to be solar bros. We want to give our industry a better reputation. Pete, what else should our listeners know?
• 26:43
  Tim Montague: Pete, about solar and storage?
• 26:46
  Pete Sarelas: Yeah, so let's backtrack a little bit to just the solar side. I know you said, you know, we pretty much have the end of 2025, to PTO, meaning permission to operate any residential solar systems, and this is for residents who are purchasing or financing their system to make that the residential tax credit if you decide to go the PPA route, we have until 2027 so for customers who are on the fence, if they have a business that, or you know, residents or business that has a high electrical spend, now's the time to reach out to somebody. We're doing a reach out back to. We've got about 2000 customers or so that haven't gone solar, someone that we've pitched in the past for whichever reason they decided now isn't the time out of our first week of doing this, we reached out to about 50 people.
• 27:37
  Pete Sarelas: Got in touch with 20% of them, and 15 of them have decided, now's the time to go solar. And one of the big reasons for that is this last June, 1 increase on the grid. So comed Ameren had an increase. We've had so many.
• 27:58
  Tim Montague: You mean a rate increase? A rate increase, I'm sorry,
• 28:02
  Pete Sarelas: a rate increase which are affecting some people, up to 20% on their bills and businesses even greater, because that capacity charge went from, I think it was like 350 A kilowatt, up to almost $9 a kilowatt. So that capacity jump was so huge we have businesses that we started pitching in May, their June, July bills came, and now all of a sudden it's, Hey, why can't we get this installed next month?
• 28:34
  Tim Montague: Yeah, inflation in energy prices is very real. That is one of the big impacts of what's going on with AI data centers, electrification of transportation, electrification of everything, and frankly, the OB, Bb, but it's good for solar and batteries. When electricity prices go up, it means the value of solar electrons goes up.
• 28:56
  Tim Montague: Okay, if you're listening to this and you're not an energy professional, when the price of electricity goes up, the value of solar goes up, and that's why solar happened in Hawaii, in California, in New York, in New Jersey, those places have more expensive electricity, which makes solar more economical.
• 29:17
  Tim Montague: Here in the Midwest, we're sitting pretty with cheap nuclear and coal energy largely.
• 29:26
  Tim Montague: And of course, those, the cost of all electricity is going up, but All right, well, thank you so much. Pete, serious one. One of these days I'll learn how to say your name. And are you going to Vegas?
• 29:39
  Pete Sarelas: I am. I will be at Ari plus awesome. And this is, I guess, the first year I'm going there with a really solid plan to listen to a lot of speakers.
• 29:49
  Pete Sarelas: I feel like this year they've got better speakers on topics, on battery storage, on working with the grid through like what you were saying these interconnection times. So I'm really excited for
• 30:02
  Tim Montague: it. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI solar? I'm Tim Montague.
• 30:09
  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, 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.
• 30:37
  Tim Montague: 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. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. If you're an installer wanting to grow into large CNI solar, reach out to me. That's one of my special powers is helping installers grow into large CNI solar and batteries. Check out the book wired for Sun on Amazon. And Pete. How can our listeners find you?
• 31:14
  Pete Sarelas: Yeah, you can reach us at source.solar or 773-985-3992, and one thing to mention, because you said, if you're an installer, reach out.
• 31:20
  Pete Sarelas: If you're an installer who's looking into battery, or have a has a customer that's interested, but they don't have the capital, feel free to reach out to us. We'd be more than happy to help facilitate that.
• 31:35
  Pete Sarelas: You know, we don't have to be the ones to install it. We're also happy being the ones just to finance it. You.
• 31:42
  Tim Montague: There you go.
• 31:42
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much. Pete sorelis, Source solar. I'm Tim Montague.
• 31:46
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage.
• 31:51
  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.
• 32:01
  Tim Montague: 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.