Latest / Clean Power Hour / Solar & Storage News: Perovskite Breakthroughs, Record-Low Battery Costs and Global Supply Chain

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Solar & Storage News: Perovskite Breakthroughs, Record-Low Battery Costs and Global Supply Chain · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your co host. We are doing our bi weekly solar and storage news with none other than the commercial solar guy.
• 1:01
  Tim Montague: John Weaver, welcome to the show, John.
• 1:04
  John Weaver: Hey Tim. It is very nice. It's overcast and cloudy here. I was gonna say, how a nice, wonderful, sunny day, but we had that yesterday, and I had wonderful site visits at solar projects that make me happy. So I hope you're doing okay, Timothy, I'm
• 1:20
  Tim Montague: in Dallas, Texas, actually in Richardson, which is a suburb of Texas, at Innovation Day, with the team at Chin power systems and several 100 clean energy professionals. It's such an awesome thing. This is day two, and there's training sessions going on. Sorry,
• 1:41
  John Weaver: what kind of show?
• 1:41
  John Weaver: What's it about? Oh, this is, this is
• 1:44
  Tim Montague: their annual conference that chin power systems, the three phase string inverter and battery storage company, makes or puts on for their customers and their partners. I am a partner. I'm a media partner. They're a major sponsor of my show, of course, and I do a lot of content creation with their staff and their customers. If you're a Chint customer, reach out to me, because I want to tell your story, whether we talk about Chint or not. But yeah, it's a wonderful event. I'm this. I've been here. This is my third year, and it keeps growing.
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: There's about probably all said 300 people here this year, and next year, they want to get 1000 people, so we'll see. But yeah, it's a very niche, very dense conference, a lot of electricians, engineers and solar geeks like me and you. So yeah, you should check it out sometime. But it only happens once a year in April. It will be in April next year. They don't know the date. It'll either be the first, first or last week in April, has a big facility here.
• 2:56
  Tim Montague: Sounds like
• 2:56
  John Weaver: a good conference.
• 2:56
  John Weaver: Technical focused on inverter layout. You can ask questions.
• 3:01
  John Weaver: You can exchange ideas with other designers. I listen to our electrical engineer talking with people, and every conversation, I always hear something and like, Oh, that's interesting.
• 3:13
  John Weaver: Most of it floats away because I don't get to use it on a day to day basis. But design, you know, doing getting better at design is something I'd love for us to be, you know, just be more experienced, learn our inverters better. What the strings can do.
• 3:28
  John Weaver: You know, being in the northeast, we have at low angles on our roofs. We can push our streams a little more, but it'd be great to know how, so that we can size things well, not waste and not risk our inverters.
• 3:44
  Tim Montague: So here's a geeky topic that came up last night. I was talking with Dr Z, who's the head of their storage division, but, but he's also a power electronics geek, and we were talking about what I call non injection, or what others might call Zero. What's the expression zero where you're not feeding solar onto the grid, right, right? I call it non injection.
• 4:16
  Tim Montague: What
• 4:19
  John Weaver: do you call it non export?
• 4:20
  Tim Montague: Non export, or zero export? Yeah. So apparently, you know, if you're in California or Hawaii or Arizona, you know, well about this, because this is an important thing in those markets.
• 4:36
  John Weaver: In Massachusetts, occasionally, yes,
• 4:39
  Tim Montague: and in Illinois, occasionally, the circumstances in Illinois that it becomes important is if you have an interconnection problem where the utility says, well, we'd love to interconnect your solar project, but we're going to charge you $3 million for an infrastructure upgrade, and a certain installer I work with has a situation like this on their hands. And of course, that is for for a scene I project.
• 5:02
  Tim Montague: That's a deal killer, right? But the way around that is to say, Well, Mr. Utility, we would love to do this magic called non injection, where the inverter will just automatically see that it is about to feed onto the grid, and it'll turn itself off or reduce. It
• 5:26
  John Weaver: will it will adjust the nppt arrangement on the modules. I believe, I believe it'll actually throw the modules out of efficiency so that they, instead of producing electricity, will won't produce it. I think technically, might be how it happens different places. Do it different ways.
• 5:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah. But so my question for you is, have you been involved directly in a project? Where you had to engineer non injection,
• 5:53
  John Weaver: yeah, yeah. We've had a couple non export projects. I'm thinking of one right now at the IMCA in Wareham. And the way we did it there, though, was that we had a battery, and it was all behind the meter, and it's all getting used on site. I've also had larger projects where technically it was a non injection, and so we are non export and in that case, but the reality was that the demand on site was just massively larger than the solar projects the roof that they had space. But while it was a non non Export System, and that help for interconnection just got through a little faster. The reality was that it was always going to be a non Export System, because the building was always going to absorb all the juice. But when it comes to interconnection and impact stays, it's great, because now we no longer there's a lot of risks that the utility has to calculate when you do an export system, and in places where the substations are full and power lines overlooked already, this is great. So, so yeah, not injection security. So how does chin How does CPS work with it differently? Or what do they do? Well, they just talking
• 7:06
  Tim Montague: about it, what it turns out. So historically, when I was at continental in Chicago, we solved this problem using a device called a Switzer relay, which I don't know very much about, but it turns out that many inverters have native capabilities now to do this non injection. Chint, it turns out, has had that technology built into their inverters, but they haven't turned it on yet, but it's coming now in the United States, and so they're going to start doing some pilot projects with their installers, on a on a case by case, in different parts of the country, but some of their some of their competitors, you know, SMA, I think, and solar etch have had this rolled out already. So anyway, so change is playing a little bit of catch up, but they actually have the secret sauce already built in. It's, it's mostly a software thing, but it's a combination of software and hardware. And then you also have to have a smart meter, an extra Smart Meter. I didn't quite understand where on the grid.
• 8:14
  Tim Montague: But anyway, good thing for us solar professionals to know about right, as the as the industry matures and attachment rates, sorry, not attachment rates, but penetration rates go up. Yeah. So we better get into the news, though, John, this is a good topic, but we could probably talk all day about non injection.
• 8:37
  John Weaver: Yeah, inverter.
• 8:37
  John Weaver: Conversations are borderline and definite. They are the they are the fun of our industry.
• 8:45
  Tim Montague: Did you really not know about Innovation Day?
• 8:48
  John Weaver: No, there's so many conferences out there that I don't know anything about. I only go to one or two per year.
• 8:53
  John Weaver: I'm so busy
• 8:54
  Tim Montague: and well, a lot of them are very expensive, but this is an virtually an all expenses paid thing, like all you have to do is get yourself here, and then they pay for your hotel and all your meals, which is amazing. And you get to network with a group of super cool solar professionals, and you get to geek out with real technical geeks at CPS to boot.
• 9:18
  Tim Montague: So it's like a super win, win.
• 9:18
  Tim Montague: It's my, it's my, it's my favorite Energy Conference now, so put it on your calendar. All right. Is this the first commercial sized perovskite solar panel for a large manufacturer. It also happens to be greater than 800 watts with an efficiency of just over 26% yes, I want to know is Calex involved in some way? No, well, I don't know who
• 9:49
  John Weaver: that is. This is Trina. I mean, I know that name, but I don't know who they are relative to this. You know, there's lots of names out there.
• 9:54
  John Weaver: Well,
• 9:56
  Tim Montague: they make perovskite coatings for solar panel makers to add to their solar solar panels. So maybe it does, I don't know. Well,
• 10:04
  John Weaver: I doubt it's here, but we don't know, because this is a Trina module that they introduced, and it's a tandem cell versus a coated glass product, it seems, however, there's limited data on it. I've only seen this one press release and nothing else, and this press release has been shared around the world and that, but it's the, to my best knowledge, from a large manufacturer, maybe the first certified large scale product that's been out there, and it's a 3.1 meter utility scale module. So it's like one of the biggest modules you can buy, but it's also the highest wattage module I've seen. Yeah.
• 10:50
  John Weaver: Within that form factor, and I did my rough math. And if so, if you design divide 800 by 3.1 it comes out to be about 26% efficient solar panel, which would be amongst the highest efficiency solar panels you can find.
• 11:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and that's the whole point, right? With the tandem is you're taking the PV and then you're sandwiching on top some perovskite, which gives you extra juice, yes, right?
• 11:22
  Tim Montague: You're catching more photons, basically, right?
• 11:26
  John Weaver: Catching more?
• 11:26
  John Weaver: Yeah, I guess you're catching more, yeah, because you have two layers that are you're actually catching different
• 11:32
  Tim Montague: photons. Yeah, I think you're catching the process.
• 11:37
  John Weaver: Yeah, they have these cool curves that show the wavelength of light, of light, wavelengths of lies, Tim, all lies coming from the sun, but they show these curves of of light. And so, like, you have one chunk that gets one type of silicon and then another chunk of light that gets the perovskites. And these are called the band gaps, right and so. So the perovskite, though, from what I've been reading, is actually being used as the main solar panel because it's harder to use, whereas the silicon is being used as the secondary panel because we're really good at working with it and managing it. So for instance, GCL, they have a perovskite module, and their perovskite module is about 19 to 20% efficient. Their silicon module is only eight 9% efficient. We think, Oh, we can do a 20, 25% silicon module.
• 12:33
  John Weaver: Yeah, you can. We can't combine it with perovskite in that setting, at least not yet. So it's interesting to watch, and I was just excited to see this headline. The model doesn't exist yet. There's no nobody can touch it. There's probably 10 of them in the world, maybe 100 I don't know, but we're now seeing a full sized perovskite module at 26% and it's not from Oxford PV, who I'm not emotionally 100% on. Yet, I think they might try to play the patent game and limit the rest of the world.
• 13:09
  John Weaver: They've been saying they're going to launch a module for years, and there's, I've only heard of a module once coming out of them, so it's just cool to see someone else. Now, I will say I also worry that it won't come to the United States for a while, because, well, tariff stuff is another conversation, but more importantly, it has to do with these patents. For instance, I'm hearing that top con modules aren't coming to the United States as much. Perk is going to hold longer here because of patent arguments.
• 13:42
  John Weaver: Whereas I just read an article in Europe, they're like, perk is gone Topcon. Is it because of the higher efficiency, the cost structures that come from powerful modules, you know, with a balance of system. And, you know, that's is a little dance.
• 13:58
  John Weaver: It's a little change. So, so we'll see. But it's cool seeing it hit the world. And if we really do get modules up to 34% for it's just going to be great.
• 14:05
  John Weaver: I mean, I've done some math before, roughly every 1% drop or 1% increase in efficiency is about 5% drop in levelized cost of electricity. As you move from, say, 20% 22% to 34% so really drop roughly. It's a curve, though, like at 20% moving up 1% is 5% up, 1% is 5% at 25 moving up, 1% is 4% curve, and it drops a tiny bit all the way up, but by the time you get to like a 34% module, I think your effective levelized cost of Electricity will drop like 40% 30% 50% some really nice, big, chunky number. And so just looking forward to, looking forward to new tech. I was like, new tech, yeah,
• 15:01
  Tim Montague: yeah. I had Scott Graybill on the show, I think last year or year before last, company called klux, C, A, E, l, u, x, they're making a perovskite coating in LA they're in Pasadena, California. They have a 50 megawatt plant, so it's, you know, small potatoes.
• 15:17
  Tim Montague: It's basically pilot scale. And they're not announcing publicly any partnerships, but they're working with a variety of panel makers to do what Trina has already done. Yeah, so it's good stuff. We should probably move on. You found a story about batteries in China.
• 15:42
  John Weaver: Yeah, I wanted to start high level the battery article that we're sharing here.
• 15:45
  John Weaver: It's simply the next large wave.
• 15:50
  John Weaver: Air in a massive capacity bid, six gigawatt hours, and the price of it is 65 bucks per kilowatt hour fully deployed.
• 16:03
  Tim Montague: And so that's very low,
• 16:05
  John Weaver: yes, sir. Like right now, if you're buying batteries in the US at the best, you're getting 150 bucks per kilowatt hour installed, but you're probably spending 250 to 300 still. It's just the reality of pricing as of now. But I hear some people. I've heard a guy say 175 is what he's pricing his batteries at, fully installed.
• 16:23
  John Weaver: So that's pretty cool number, but this is 65 and I just wanted to chat a little bit about why, one of the reasons why this is happening, just to bring it to our reader's attention and yours, and you probably already know, but battery cell sizes are massively expanding. And battery cells used to be 123, 100 amps, now they're getting up to 500 700 even somewhere. I don't know if I've seen 1000 amp I might have, but they're getting really big. And these large battery cells, they like physically, like, you know, this big size of a Coke can, or bigger,
• 17:08
  Tim Montague: yeah, because
• 17:10
  John Weaver: of that larger size, I guess they're able to pack more density into the battery packs, and then more battery packs into the containers. You know now we have shipping containers that are up over eight megawatt hours. And so when you have bigger cells, they have fewer connections, they have simpler machines. When you have more density within the same supporting package, it's like putting more Watts within the same aluminum frame. The aluminum frame still costs a buck, so to say, but the price per watt keeps falling because you get more Watts within it.
• 17:43
  John Weaver: That's what's happening with battery cells and battery packs and battery kits, and it's been happening for about a year or two at least, and last re plus, I got to talk to a few folks who said the next revolution in batteries is ongoing, and it's just us scaling these cell sizes. I saw a headline, or I was reading something BYD says that last year, their batteries dropped 20 25% this year they expect another 15 to 20% so Wow, batteries are gonna keep going down. And I've just, I've been wanting to bring this up on the show for the last few weeks, last few shows. And then this second bid came out, the first bid from this group, because this is the second one in this size. The first bid had BYD winning it at $60 per kilowatt hour. And that was the first time, this is back in October, November, December. That was the first time that these crazy, cheap numbers came out to the world. We were already seeing systems at 100 bucks in the headlines, sneaking around, but then 65 just kind of took a sledgehammer to it all and said, All right, next generation, we're here. Let's do it. So for
• 19:03
  Tim Montague: our listeners, not on YouTube, this is a story called China's Hua Deon announces winners in six gigawatt hour best tender with average bid at $65 per kWh. The story is in PV magazine energy storage, which is a separate website now, ESS hyphen news.com so kudos to PV magazine for branching out and creating a storage website. I think that's a good thing and interesting story. So thank you, John for bringing us that story about cheap batteries, which we're going to see a lot of if we if we get to see the future at all, we're going to see really cheap storage.
• 19:51
  John Weaver: Tim, what are you talking about?
• 19:55
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I know, bro, it's tough. It's tough that we have to ask that question. But it is question.
• 20:03
  John Weaver: This is where we are.
• 20:06
  Tim Montague: So are we going to stick to a 30 minute program today? We
• 20:10
  John Weaver: never stick to 30 minute programs, but we'll find out. Let's, let's hit it hard.
• 20:12
  John Weaver: So let's see if we can do it.
• 20:15
  John Weaver: Okay,
• 20:16
  Tim Montague: so you brought the butterfly back, bro, you're on blue sky again. Man, absolutely.
• 20:21
  Tim Montague: I don't know if I can handle this
• 20:27
  John Weaver: guy every day that's getting shared. What's
• 20:30
  Tim Montague: the story? While I bring the blue sky story up, it's
• 20:34
  John Weaver: just my project of the week. This is downtown in New Bedford, and I wanted to show off some little finer things that we have to deal with the this is a interconnect. Kind of story post, but we just got final interconnection approved on this project. It's 666 kW DC, about 552 kilowatts AC, and one to talk about some of the just a couple neat little nuances of it. So it's, it's, 666, KWC.
• 21:09
  John Weaver: It's spread across 14 roofs, and there's five unique interconnections. The interesting like, the interesting thing about this, and I wanted to show it off, is
• 21:23
  Tim Montague: that rendering properly. Now, let's see.
• 21:26
  John Weaver: Yeah, that looks nice. Okay, so this is like a map from the utility, one of their drawings, and you can see, like, where they have these different buildings and those ends, those are different interconnection points. So we have five of them, and there's five unique projects behind this. You know, this neighborhood of housing. And if you go one of the images to the left,
• 21:54
  Tim Montague: to the left, yes.
• 21:57
  John Weaver: So this document, you can't fully see it because it's, you know, it's kind of smallish writing. But what this is, it's a breakdown of the cost estimates that we have to pay to upgrade the power grid, which includes two 300 kilovolt transformers and several and about about 100,000 bucks of upgrades to the substation for what's called Three vo protection. Now, if you look at this document was really interesting. There's actually$542,000 of upgrades that were spent on the utility. We got a cost share portion of it, plus some of our own upgrades. And it was just really interesting to look at the different labor, how they break it up, the different work components, and the cost share even. And cost sharing is a new thing that I've had now in a couple of projects in the Northeast, where the state tries to figure out how to pay for substation upgrades without putting all the financial pressure on one party, and so I don't know exactly how that like that. Yeah, so in mass, we just had a substation upgrade, and the substation upgrade was for down on the Cape, the cape off of Massachusetts. And I don't know the exact price of it, but I do know for every kW that you connect to that substation, you now pay an upgrade fee of about$319 so it's not cheap, you know, point three cents a lot, point 30 cents a lot, something like that. And that's for the historical upgrade that occurred. And so now we cost share, and that's what's occurring here. And so for this document, you actually see all the other projects that are on the substation, 11.4 megawatts worth. You can see our new project at the top of that image. If you're looking at this on YouTube, you can see the 553, kW. And you can just kind of get a picture of what's happening here. And so I just thought it was a neat little insight into the development process of interpreting grid upgrades and how they're shared and that type of stuff.
• 25:06
  Tim Montague: So what is, how long does it take to get an interconnection agreement with this utility?
• 25:13
  John Weaver: This is Rhode Island energy, and this one we started submitting and late October, so we're now in April, and so we're talking six months of a lot of back and forth
• 25:24
  Tim Montague: that's not bad.
• 25:24
  Tim Montague: No,
• 25:26
  John Weaver: no, it's not
• 25:27
  Tim Montague: bad. In Illinois, in Illinois, we have a really troublesome situation in Northern Illinois, it's not bad, okay? In comet territory or PJM, it's not bad. The for DG interconnection, it might be six months in central and southern Illinois, in Ameren territory, it's three years. Is what the utility will tell you, if you need to go to a level four. So if you're if you're stressing this the grid in any way with your solar project, right, it could take, they say, 24 to 36 months, and as a result, community solar developers are avoiding Ameren territory altogether. Now they just said, it's not worth it. It's too long a wait, and I'm just going John.
• 26:17
  Tim Montague: It's not rocket science like why can't the utility figure out a faster way to clear this queue.
• 26:21
  Tim Montague: And of course, the developers and the installers are up in arms, and they're and they're griping as they should, to the IPA and the the ICC, the intern, the Illinois Commerce Commission, is the organization.
• 26:39
  Tim Montague: Ultimately, I. Yeah, that is our PUC. You maybe you call it a PUC in Massachusetts, I don't know.
• 26:48
  John Weaver: Yeah, public utility, yeah, yeah. Three years, that's very debilitating.
• 26:52
  John Weaver: It's
• 26:56
  Tim Montague: debilitating. And they know this, they know this, and this is just their way of fighting back. I think, right, they're just going, Hey guys, we love you, but we're gonna screw you anyway.
• 27:08
  John Weaver: That's rough.
• 27:08
  John Weaver: That's rough. Yeah, it sucks.
• 27:12
  Tim Montague: Yeah, stressful. I mean, I have, I was, I was, I'm an owner's rep on a project.
• 27:16
  Tim Montague: It's a small project, 300 KW, that's at an RV park. It's a great, lovely project for the owner and but it's a single phase infrastructure. And so the 300 KW is is a stressor, and now they're gonna have, they're gonna have to scale the project back to 100 KW, which will offset maybe 30% of their load instead of 80% of their load, if they want to get a timely interconnection, meaning a level two instead of a level four. So it's TBD. What's going to happen with that project? But it's really no bueno for anybody involved, including the installer, who's worked very hard to, you know, do some preliminary engineering and file a preliminary interconnection application sour apples, because upgrading they'll serve is to upgrade the infrastructure to three phase. But that's also costly, probably on the order of$100,000 Have you ever had to do that upgrade from single phase to three phase? I'm
• 28:21
  John Weaver: actually doing it on a project right now. The site visit I did yesterday is we're building a 200 kilowatt AC, 600 DC, what's in batteries at the end of a long road which is on private property, and that private property takes a single phase line off of the main street, and it's about half a mile down that private road, and we're in the process of dealing with that, of upgrading it from single. Do
• 28:51
  Tim Montague: you have a cost estimate? Not yet, not yet, but what we're actually
• 28:55
  John Weaver: going to do is trench for the majority of it, because it's, uh, we don't expect there to be rock, because we prefer to trench than to have the utility pay for Poles and their work, and there's also a bunch of trees and there's a road. So there's some dynamics where we think trenching will end up being more cost effective.
• 29:15
  Tim Montague: Why not boring?
• 29:19
  John Weaver: I don't know. I'll talk with my guy,
• 29:22
  Tim Montague: but I love doing that. Comparison. Is it cheaper to call to trench or bore and interesting? And it's, I just like boring because it's, I don't know, you don't have to dig a hole in the ground, but yeah, it's always a question.
• 29:43
  Tim Montague: All right, let's talk about Myanmar. Let's be grateful that we don't live in Myanmar, John, they're in the aftermath of a major earthquake. It's horrible.
• 29:51
  Tim Montague: Many people have died. This is on screen now. Myanmar earthquake disrupts solar wafer production global supply chain.
• 30:01
  Tim Montague: So not only is it a catastrophe for Myanmar and the people, it's also somewhat of a catastrophe, apparently, for the solar industry. What's the story?
• 30:15
  John Weaver: Yeah. So the you know that area is nearby China, Myanmar, China's share of order.
• 30:21
  John Weaver: There's also solar manufacturing in country, and it's just and apparently it's affecting solar factories, and it could affect solar wafer factories for months, is what a large manufacturer has said. And so it's just just a perspective for us in the industry, that our field can be affected by earthquakes and and things around the world. Because, you know, making solar cells involves robots that are very, very explicit in how they move in the space and how they put together. And, you know, you start throwing them around and bouncing them against each other, or you mess up a building, or you mess up the electricity, and very sensitive hardware gets limited, and so I just, I'm wondering what's kind of effect is going to occur on the global market? I have a feeling it's going to be muted, because we already have a lot of excess solar wafer capacity. So maybe it won't have a big effect, maybe it won't have any effect. Maybe it'll have a small effect, I don't know, but at a minimum, it's just insight that man earthquake hits and could affect us somewhere. So just thought it was interesting, and I. Yeah, well, not
• 31:43
  Tim Montague: to mention the tariffs that the tariffs that Trump announced yesterday on virtually every country on earth, he just has it out for everyone, including, unfortunately, Thailand, where a lot of inverters, for example, are made, but also solar modules, it's just going to make everything expensive. I don't, don't, I don't see how that's going to help our economy. The theory is that it's going to drive manufacturing back to the US, but that takes so long. We do see it happening because of the IRA, not because of the Trump tariffs, but tariffs today could mean factory in five years. But then, of course, Trump won't be in office any longer, unless he has his way and gets to run for a third term. But yeah, it's a global economy. I'm a fan of globalism.
• 32:46
  Tim Montague: I think it's just a it's an emergent property of us becoming a massive civilization, right?
• 32:56
  Tim Montague: We have colonized the entire Earth now and brought industrialization to the entire globe, basically, and so we're interdependent. I want China and America to be friends. I read a story in The New York Times about Huawei is innovation campus in China. They said it was like Disneyland for technology. And the journalist was frankly blown away at how advanced the technology is when it comes to things like humanoid robots. China is building a lot of humanoid robots. Always been banned in the United States, right? You can't buy Huawei equipment. But guess what? They are a powerhouse, and they are innovating their way out of the band. They've launched a cell phone operating system to compete with Android and iOS, which apparently is quite good.
• 33:59
  Tim Montague: I used to have a Huawei laptop, which was excellent. I now have a Dell laptop, which is good, but I liked my Huawei better.
• 34:08
  Tim Montague: Interesting. Shout out to Chris leppman. He's here. He's he's one of our faithful listeners.
• 34:12
  Tim Montague: Thank you, Chris. I will be dropping an interview with Chris leppman about the solar panel industry and Imperial Star Solar who make really good solar panels right here in Texas, in Houston, Texas. Imperial Star is not a household name yet, but I think they are going to be. So if you're looking for solar panels, talk to Chris leppman.
• 34:43
  Tim Montague: You can find him on LinkedIn.
• 34:43
  Tim Montague: He's very easy to find. All right, what's next?
• 34:50
  John Weaver: Something cool has started to happen, and I'm going to share my screen. And I think this might be the first time it started to happen. So can you see my screen? What's being shared? There? Tim,
• 35:02
  Tim Montague: no. All right, let me, oh, I have to do. I have to click another button here, there,
• 35:08
  John Weaver: ah, there. Now, sharing. All right, let me mouse over very specific things. So first off, everybody, I'll say, I'll describe this. This is the EIA. It's called the hourly electric grid monitor. So you can find it at eia.gov/electricity/grid, monitor. And this roughly shows roughly for the lower 48 states, all electricity generation from all the sources and all kinds of neat little ways. You can look at batteries, wind, solar. You can look at it regionally, lots of neat things, and it has historical data and historical data for very tiny things. What I want to look at right now, and something has started to happen for the first time, to the best of my knowledge, and I'm just going to point out one of the days, but I think for the first time in March, Thor generation is sometimes the second largest electricity source in the United States. And that's interesting because, at minimum it's really interesting because if we think about solar, it's still only 678, percent, 678, percent of all electricity, like for January, is 5% for May, which is the peak month, it may cross 10% but here on March 25 at 2pm with this particular model, we see that solar was generating over 91 terawatts of. Generation out of maybe a total of 400 so solar was peaking over 20, 25% of all energy at this particular moment. And it was number two behind gas, and it passed nuclear, which is roughly a solid 80 terawatts, 24/7 around the US. And this is just cool.
• 37:06
  John Weaver: And I have a feeling sometime in April we're going to see solar peak on a Sunday or a Saturday as the number one source in electricity in the US, if it doesn't get too hot, too fast. I also have a feeling that in April we're going to see 50% of our energy come from clean, non emission sources for the whole month. So that's my hope for the month
• 37:29
  Tim Montague: of April. Yeah, yeah. So there's more solar than almost any other source except for natural gas, right? Yes, yes, sir, yes, sir. More solar than nuclear, more solar than coal, more solar than wind by a long shot. Of course, wind fluctuates a lot, yes,
• 37:51
  John Weaver: yeah, yeah. And if you like, for instance, if you scroll to the right, you can see that green loop right here where that's wind peaking at 91,000 and it's takes over the number two source. But what's really cool, you can go somewhere like here, which is, if you look at this day, you see this is alright. So I'm fitting moving around on this screen here, trying to get my mouse in the right place. And we're looking at 318 so March 18. We can see that the number one source was natural gas at 106 number two was nuclear, 85 with wind and solar right behind it at 80 and essentially 88 so the three largest clean sources, nuclear, wind and solar, are over 240 terawatts of output, where coal and gas, we're only at 150 so we add 66% of our energy at that moment, something like that is coming from clean, non emission sources. Actually, if we add in hydro at 25 we're now talking 262, 70 out of 400 so maybe 70% of our energy was coming from emission free sources at that moment. So it's just kind of neat to see it pop through in these charts, like the high level of clean stuff. So it's just not kind of nice. So there you go. There's some positive news.
• 39:22
  Tim Montague: I do like the EIA Data. I don't like everything about the EIA, but I like their data. So should we talk about Hyundai? Or probably not going to get to all these stories. But what else should we talk about today? Well,
• 39:37
  John Weaver: we talk about Hyundai real fast, so officially, as of a couple of days ago, you can now charge officially, your Hyundai and your Kia at the Tesla Supercharger network, using your own adapter prior your Hyundai or other vehicles could charge with what's called the Super dock. No, the magic dock, but that wasn't at all locations, and so you had to kind of poke around. But now all of the Tesla network is available for Hyundai cars, and I have a Hyundai and I have an adapter, and I tested it this weekend, and it worked great. And I'm very happy. So I just it really opens up the network of where you can charge your car and where you can drive your car, and because the Tesla Supercharger network is the number one way to charge people in the United States, and so I was just really happy to see that finally hit and you
• 40:34
  Tim Montague: are a Hyundai electric vehicle owner, right?
• 40:38
  John Weaver: Hyundai, Hyundai on ionic files, 2022. Is what I have. We actually just leased a second one for my company, a 24 so one of my, one of my co workers, is driving around in the newer version of my car, and they actually had a better trim too, because they didn't have the cheap trim when I showed up.
• 40:57
  John Weaver: So, so that's kind of cool. Oh yeah, I do like the car. I think it's a solid, solid vehicle. And I'm very happy with this adapter, and that's roughly the same adapter that I have that I use to charge the Tesla positions,
• 41:12
  Tim Montague: yeah, when are we going to unify on a single port style?
• 41:22
  John Weaver: Well, I mean, I don't, I don't really like the concept of everybody only doing one port, because it's, it's we need to learn. We need to get better. I mean, maybe we can unify. But you know what? The Tesla charger is a better charger so far. I mean, there's less gear, less hardware doesn't fail as often. They're much cheaper. They click in fast. I don't know. I like people arguing over technology and competing, but you do have a good point if we, I mean, imagine if there were different gas stations. Well, I guess there are. You got these only got gas but,
• 41:59
  Tim Montague: yeah, I just don't I think we want one kind of plug. Probably we want it to be mainstream. We want it to be easy. I'm thrilled that Tesla's opening up the network. They definitely have the most robust network. Kudos to Elon Musk for thinking of that and skating to where the puck is going to be.
• 42:17
  Tim Montague: That's probably the last good thing he did.
• 42:22
  John Weaver: Well, yeah, I could never, no one go on that topic, not today, but, but there's sort of, there's sort of a focus now, though, in the United States, at least, on the Tesla charger, which I think is called the NACS, North American charging standard, is what they call it.
• 42:41
  John Weaver: And the 2025, version of my car comes with an NACS standard plug with so you don't need an adapter anymore.
• 42:53
  Tim Montague: Yeah, for that.
• 42:53
  Tim Montague: Love it. So, so maybe
• 42:57
  John Weaver: that's it. Maybe it's already happened. So it's moving moving along. Do you
• 43:04
  Tim Montague: want to talk about the excavator?
• 43:06
  John Weaver: Let's do one last thing and then let you get back to work, because you got that.
• 43:08
  John Weaver: Sounds good.
• 43:12
  Tim Montague: We'll talk about your electric 422 kilowatt hour battery. Yeah, any electric excavator,
• 43:20
  John Weaver: 420 something dude, that could power your house for like, a month and a half without solar. I mean, it's just, you know, it's just an excavator, but it's for, first off, it's a giant battery. Its size is what they said, specifically so the unit can work for six to eight hours a day, which is very logical. Your you're the robot.
• 43:42
  John Weaver: People goodness, their luminous, luminous, their their upgrade for their robot for solar panel stacking, was specifically to get them to the point where they could offer their robot for six to eight hour work day. I'm starting to like when I hear manufacturers say that, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy, because this isn't a cool, neat machine you're building. This is a work creature that they're coming together with, and that means it's serious, get on site, do some work, labor type of hardware. And I like that, and because it's, you know, it's a real piece of gear now. And it
• 44:27
  Tim Montague: turns out the drivers, the drivers were operators, as they would be called in construction of these machines, really appreciate the EV models, because there's a lot less vibration and there's a lot less fumes. They're sitting in that cabin. Yeah, it's sealed, but they're breathing fumes, and they don't like that. It's not good for their health. So this is a win, win, right? You can make clean electricity with solar or wind, and now juice your construction site. It's clean. It's good for everybody.
• 45:00
  Tim Montague: I love it, yeah. They say how much it cost, you
• 45:07
  John Weaver: know, I don't think I noticed that in the article.
• 45:13
  John Weaver: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the only thing I noticed in cost was that they, they did estimate that the D annual diesel cost for the unit would be about $76,000 a year, whereas the annual electricity cost looks like it's going to be about $45,000 a year. So in terms of pure energy savings, that's it, 30, geez, which is, that's cool. That's pretty nice. Yeah,
• 45:41
  Tim Montague: that'll help pay for the vehicle, which is probably not cheap. I
• 45:47
  John Weaver: mean, it does these things,
• 45:49
  Tim Montague: probably cost, like, half a million dollars.
• 45:51
  Tim Montague: It's a big machine,
• 45:55
  John Weaver: real fast. So what's the model number here?
• 45:57
  John Weaver: Well, you got to get running, so shortly, it's a 25 ton excavator. About that cost,
• 46:05
  Tim Montague: 25 Imperial times,
• 46:09
  John Weaver: 25 times. Pretty neat.
• 46:13
  Tim Montague: Well, I can see that's how you measure that's how you measure excavators in tons.
• 46:19
  John Weaver: Maybe that's what they can lift and move, but, but I don't truly know. So I'm seeing here that the unit, a comparable unit that's not the electric version, costs about 160 grand, 100 between 155 grand for a used one up to 220 but that's a half a million dollar machine brand new. You.
• 46:42
  John Weaver: Somewhere around there, maybe more. Yeah, pretty neat piece of gear.
• 46:48
  Tim Montague: Cool. Well, thanks for all the news, John, yeah, you should probably check out our website. Clean Power hour.com, go to the events tab.
• 46:55
  Tim Montague: If you haven't looked at our events tab, we try to track many of the conferences happening across the US, all the RE plusses. Just in Chicago, we have three great events, Midwest Expo happening in June, check it out, I'll be there. Then the solar farm summit in August.
• 47:16
  Tim Montague: Check it out, I'll be there.
• 47:16
  Tim Montague: That's a agrivoltaics conference. And then October, we have Ari plus Midwest, so check out the Events tab. How can our listeners find you? John?
• 47:31
  John Weaver: Easiest, best way is commercial. Solar guy.com, that's my website. We stick to it. Also on blue sky and LinkedIn as well if you want to get good information. So that's where I try to share blue skies, number one, for sharing for now LinkedIn number two, and our website number three. So commercial, solar guy.com that's us all right.
• 47:56
  Tim Montague: Well, we'll see you again in two weeks, on a Friday. Next time, probably not a Thursday. We had to do Thursday today because I'm flying tomorrow back home to Illinois, hopefully, if there's not tornadoes, and with that, we'll say, let's grow silver and storage. Take care John. See ya.