Latest / Clean Power Hour / Why is USA Residential Solar So Expensive? The Real Reason U.S. Solar Is So Expensive #344

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Why is USA Residential Solar So Expensive? The Real Reason U.S. Solar Is So Expensive #344 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Geoff Greenfield: The first modules I put on my house, when I was building that off grid house, were 53 watts. I got them out of the back of home Power magazine up a classified ad. All I could afford were used. There wasn't a tax credit to worry about. And now we're installing they were expensive. Five hundreds and 600
• 1:12
  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 here's your host, Tim Montague,
• 1:47
  Tim Montague: my guests will be familiar with me saying that the modern era of solar started in 2010 but my guest today started a solar company in the year 2000 which is very early. The technology dates back to the 50s. So solar technology is fully mature. It's getting gradually better, but we're there. We have the technology to completely green the grid. It's not a question. My guest today is the founder of third Sun solar, and it was an award winning B Corp EPC that did commercial, institutional, government and residential prior to its acquisition by focusing in 2022 he's also the co founder of a company that you will be familiar with called conductor solar. We've had Mark Palmer, the other co founder, on the show, many times now, I think four times, but it took me two years to wrestle Geoff Greenfield to the ground, so I'm grateful for him letting me do that. Welcome to the show, Geoff.
• 2:46
  Geoff Greenfield: Thank you. I'm glad it wasn't a true wrestling match, or I probably wouldn't be here to chat.
• 2:51
  Tim Montague: Well, you're a pretty athletic person, but you're the other thing I didn't mention is that you're on the board of NABCEP. We got to see each other again at the NABCEP conference recently in Milwaukee, great event, and I'm so grateful for your service to NABCEP. So I'd like to start the show and the conversation with Why does NABCEP matter? Because I feel very passionately that NABCEP is very important for solar professionals, and then we're going to do a retrospective and talk about the history of the solar industry and how we got where we've gotten, and where it's going. So Geoff, why does NABCEP matter?
• 3:24
  Tim Montague: In your mind?
• 3:27
  Geoff Greenfield: A great question. You know, when we started NABCEP, it was kind of like fears for aspiring but not yet technically or maybe even professionally competent people making the industry look bad, giving consumers a bad experience, dangerous systems out there, etc. And that was kind of following up after the solar thermal era, when there were definitely a lot of bad actors that gave the industry a bloody nose, and it's it's evolved over the years, but it's still serving that same same service. It's allowing installers and installation companies and PV professionals to have a credential, a third party vetting of their professional qualifications that they can bring with them to customer meetings, on their job searches, etc. As solar has gotten more mainstream, it's less the chuck in a truck folks that could give us a bad name, and it's more good meeting people, maybe even professional engineers or professionals from other industries that are entering solar there's a lot to know. There's a lot of specialized information. So our qualifications and our standards have evolved over the years, and I think now more than ever, give people an idea about are they dealing with someone who is competent and an expert in the technology that they're about to embark on.
• 4:54
  Tim Montague: I think it's very important that we all share a common body of knowledge and understanding of the technology, what it can and cannot do, what is safe, what is unsafe, what is the state of the state. And so NABCEP being the North American Board Certified Energy practitioners is the gold standard in the solar and battery industry. If you don't hold an ABS up credential, I would encourage you to do that.
• 5:21
  Tim Montague: The pvip is kind of the pinnacle on the technical side for installers, PV installation professional. I myself got the PV technical sales certification, but now there's a whole family of certifications.
• 5:31
  Tim Montague: Just check them out@nabcep.org So Geoff, any other thoughts about the Milwaukee meeting before we move on to your illustrious career?
• 5:44
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, sure.
• 5:44
  Geoff Greenfield: One more thing about NABCEP, it's not just technical qualification, it also has professional F. Ethical considerations. There have been organizations that have lost that because of issues and with the door knockers and some of the state attorneys generals coming after solar, bad actors that are out there, I think that's another thing to call out. I was excited at Milwaukee.
• 6:13
  Geoff Greenfield: I wasn't sure what to expect after the policy changes of the political election and everything that's happening, especially in the world of residential and so when I arrived, especially after the air travel, and it was a little bit slow on night zero, I was a little concerned. But then, bam, the next day, people arrived, got through their flying adventures, and it was full steam ahead. It was great energy. People are positive.
• 6:39
  Geoff Greenfield: People are, you know, obviously with, you know, all the policy considerations going on, pulling projects ahead. Most people are very busy, but there's also new people. I was meeting some people that were pivoting into solar and trying to network, trying to learn what they don't know. Met some young people that were aspiring to get into a solar career. So it's always really exciting, and kind of brings a new energy to
• 7:10
  Tim Montague: the My only regret in the last five years of being a solar professional is not going to enough conferences. So I'm really leaning into that this year. I'm probably going to go to 10 conferences, something like that. I'm headed to re plus southeast in Atlanta. I'm going to ACP in Houston. Of course, I'm going to inner solar and re plus in Chicago and the big one in Vegas. Re plus Vegas. But So Geoff, tell us a little bit about yourself, and what was it that inspired you in the year 2000 to establish a very well known solar company now known as cocusing. But what was it about you and your background that pushed you to make that shift then, well,
• 7:59
  Geoff Greenfield: gosh, it's hard to believe that it's been more than 26 years. I was I had a little bit more hair on my head. I had a beard, and I was probably more on a tie dye than a tie back. Then sustainability, the environment, climate change.
• 8:14
  Geoff Greenfield: Those are topics number one, two and three for me and my family at the time, and we wanted to build a sustainable house, and I bought land that did not have access to water and electric.
• 8:27
  Geoff Greenfield: That's how I could afford the land. We built a house as green as we could at the time, with plenty of compromises, and I put a solar system, an off the grid battery based solar system on to power it. People were intrigued.
• 8:39
  Geoff Greenfield: People were curious. People wanted me to help them with their solar systems. And so very quickly, I added solar consulting, soar, you know, help to my as a side hustle. I was doing affordable housing development for a nonprofit at the time, and that was my career, but the side hustle quickly got really exciting, and I decided that I wanted to go full in. So after doing a couple subcontracting jobs on the side, on the weekends and evenings. I quit my day job in June of 2000 jumped in with two little babies and a house and a wife and uncertainty, but it turned out like it was a good move. Looking back,
• 9:27
  Tim Montague: I love solar because it is the confluence of technology, sustainability and people, and I love all three things, and I'm just a fish in water in the solar industry.
• 9:38
  Tim Montague: That is also another regret I have. It's okay to have a couple of regrets. I don't have many, but I regret not getting into solar earlier. I was doing solar thermal in the 1970s in my backyard with my dad, who was a DIY techie and very interested in sustainability and energy.
• 9:53
  Tim Montague: And I grew up in New Mexico, which is an energy state.
• 9:56
  Tim Montague: There's a lot of energy related mining activity, uranium mining, and there's some ginormous coal plants that cause massive pollution, which are now shut down in the Four Corners region and replaced with solar and batteries. But, but anyway, energy was just it part of my life as a young person, I strayed and became an ecologist, then I became a social worker, the people part, right? I love being a helping professional, but I should have been an MBA. I really. I thrive on working with business people, and that's another thing I love about the solar industry is it's a business, right? And you're working with business people, whether you're, you know, a boots on the ground installer or labor or electrician, you're, you're in a business. And I like to say that technology is wonderful, but people make the world go around. And even in the age of AI, which I cover. A lot now, on the show that is more true than ever, people make the world go round, and we need to lean into our humanity. We also need to plan for the future that is emerging. And I think largely that's the role of government.
• 11:03
  Tim Montague: Of good government is takes care of the population and can throw resources at problems that aren't necessarily economical, but I digress. So paint us a picture of the solar industry in the year 2000 because I recall Mike Hall is another professional I've had on the show, the founder of Borrego. I think he said in the year 2002 when he started Borrego, we were doing, I think a megawatt a year in the United States, a very small amount of solar we're doing. We're doing, you know, 40 to 60 gigawatts a year, now, 1000s of times more. But paint a picture when you got in and then let's, let's unwind this string of of your path to focusing and conductor solar.
• 11:50
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, sure. It certainly has changed quite a bit. The first modules I put on my house, when I was building that off grid house, were 53 watts. I got them out of the back of home Power magazine out of a classified ad. All I could afford were used. There wasn't a tax credit to worry about, and now we're installing. They were expensive five hundreds and six hundreds, yeah, and the price per watt. Someone was asking me about that the other day, they were not $10 a watt, but I think they were up there. I think new modules were around $8 a watt just for the glass. And I think the used ones I got were, you know, around $6 a watt. So it's, it's, it's come a long way in so many ways. The other big things, you know, back then, there was not solar economics. You did it because it was a requirement. So you didn't have power and you needed to get power to the site.
• 12:50
  Geoff Greenfield: So off grid was truly a value proposition, or it was all about the environment, and you're doing it for the sustainability issues. Even today, we've got lots and lots of customers where you know they want it for sustainability reasons, but they have to make it pay for itself.
• 13:06
  Geoff Greenfield: Back then, it was just not about paying for itself at all. Yeah, it
• 13:11
  Tim Montague: didn't pencil, so to speak, exactly,
• 13:15
  Geoff Greenfield: you know, unless you're counting your carbon impact, externalized costs. We were also doing mostly battery based systems, and not with today's, you know, easy batteries, but with painful batteries that were heavy and dirty and needed care and feeding and watering and and eventually died. Anyway, I went,
• 13:37
  Tim Montague: Yeah, lead acid was the technology of the day, and it has its trials and tribulations. It worked. Though you could do a solar and battery system with with a lead acid system, right?
• 13:49
  Geoff Greenfield: I did it myself, and I went through four replacement battery systems before I finally got to the lithium ion batteries that I've got right now, which I've been working flawlessly now for almost a decade.
• 14:04
  Tim Montague: Yeah, yeah. So the technology is constantly evolving. I mean, it has asymptoted, right? It goes through an S curve. The efficiency of the panels has a physical maximum, and we're approaching that. Now, you know, modern, commercial solar panels are in the 23 24% efficiency range. I think 30 or 32 is the physical limit for for Crystal and PV. There's other technologies that are coming in, and we're doing tandem now, layering perovskites on top of that, blah, blah, blah, but for all intensive purposes, we're there. We have the technology we need. It's very mature. It's very robust. Solar panels are commodity. You know, a lot of people like to freak out about, what brand am I going to get of solar panels? And I'm like, it doesn't really matter. Just buy a good one. There's many good ones. Get a good one. That's right.
• 14:57
  Geoff Greenfield: So let me challenge you a little bit. Tim, you did, okay, good that you know the efficiency we're approaching those diminishing returns. So there's two ways to talk about efficiency, and you were talking about energy per square meter, or conversion efficiency, and that's obviously a component, but I think we still got some room to go on economic efficiency, where you bring in that other component.
• 15:22
  Geoff Greenfield: Even though we can get very minimal improvements in energy delivered per square inch, we still are bringing the cost down one way or another, and that's more of a systemic approach.
• 15:34
  Geoff Greenfield: Also, we're starting to see more and more of that in the industry, that it's less the panels are commodity, the racking, the this, the that now it's really requiring systems thinking to really get the next couple pennies per watt off of the installation cost. And that's overall systems thinking for the organization that's installing, the design, the integration, all that stuff. So we still have some room for improvement here, although I will say we're already there in terms of cost effectiveness and grid parity. We've come, come and come and surpass that.
• 16:10
  Tim Montague: I mean, the thing on this, I love this topic, okay, in solar economics, the thing that really gets my goat is that it's more expensive, sometimes two or 3x more expensive in the US to install a residential solar system than it is in Australia or Germany. Now, Australia and Germany are very similar from a quality of life perspective, they're both very developed modern societies.
• 16:32
  Tim Montague: There's no good reason why it should cost more in America than it does in Australia or Germany, and yet it does, and we don't have some of the conveniences of next day permitting we're working on that the solar app is a step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for that initiative to make it just quicker, faster, easier to get a solar array permitted and installed, we have to reduce the soft cost. We have to reduce the cost of the technology as well.
• 17:02
  Tim Montague: But the real headroom, I think, the real opportunity, is the soft cost, and this is the permitting. And you think, Well, okay, you file a design, and you pay a fee, and then you get a permit, and the answer is, well, sort of, right? There's tends to be back and forth that requires humans sitting there thinking about answering a question from an age or an hj, not being responsive, not being timely, right? And just the clock ticking, and that's that just makes things more expensive.
• 17:37
  Tim Montague: What are your thoughts on, how can America reduce the cost of solar?
• 17:43
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, well, you're definitely, you know, everyone's in alignment that permitting and soft costs are.
• 17:49
  Geoff Greenfield: You know, permitting is just one of the soft costs out there. I'd say the utility interface is another permitting world that slows things down. But I'll back up and point out that, at least in Australia, their their material costs are lower than ours. We've got, you know, tariffs, we've got all these different kinds of, I don't know, mechanisms that are perhaps with good intent, to try to build our domestic manufacturing capacity. But if I buy a module just up north in Canada, it's a lot less expensive than if I'm buying a module here in the States. So there's still room to go on the on the material side, and I would say we're also still in a much more custom environment here, our customers would probably not want us to tell them, you can choose Size A, B or C, but a lot of the efficiencies of larger organizations slamming out solar and in Brisbane is, you know, they've got standardization and they've Got pre kitted inventory. There's lots of different things, and we've got at least at our end, our residential consumers that we're still serving here are at the higher end of the income spectrum. This is a big technology spin for them, and they want that custom attention.
• 19:56
  Geoff Greenfield: So I think that's part of it, that there's going to be customer expectations that want a high end experience.
• 20:06
  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 Chint power systems, com, or call 855-584-7168, to find out more. I love it that we've come full circle. The solar industry started with solar and batteries for off grid, and now solar and batteries, and batteries alone, right, are becoming an industry, and Jigar Shah likes to say that you're no longer solar professionals.
• 21:11
  Tim Montague: You're battery professionals that install solar. And, you know, I don't really care what we call ourselves, but batteries are integral, and you have to be knowledgeable about batteries.
• 21:22
  Tim Montague: The value stack is somewhat complicated. It's different in every geography and every utility. It's easy to exaggerate, just like it is solar. The value do you have?
• 21:32
  Tim Montague: You know, a need for resiliency.
• 21:32
  Tim Montague: That's a big question. Some regions have more outages than others, and if you have more outages, there's a better use case for having batteries. Yeah, and then you have states where there's incentives, and I love that. I'm in one of those states, in Illinois, I don't know, does Ohio have any good battery incentives?
• 21:51
  Geoff Greenfield: You know, I might get in trouble for saying this, but I think in Ohio, if we wanted some battery incentives, we'd have to bury them, and then we could say that you can drill for them, or mine for them, and that people might might be interested. So no, no, we are.
• 22:02
  Geoff Greenfield: We're not a a an incentive state anymore. I will say, though, that it's interesting. People come to me asking about resilience and the residential scale. It's a no brainer. You've got a freezer full of food. You lose that. You know, it's, it's, it's terrible. And so people can, like, decide for themselves if the resilience is a value prop and how much they want to spend on it. On the commercial level, people are interested in resilience until we really get into the numbers, and then they might even find out they've already got a big generator.
• 22:39
  Geoff Greenfield: They already have, you know, ups for some critical you know, it pieces. And what's really driving storage adoption here is, we're in the PJM and the peaking value of selling energy into the grid, ancillary services, etc, or changing your tariff with the peaking events that can make a battery system pay for itself pretty quickly, even better than solar
• 23:07
  Tim Montague: in some cases. So and that makes me think of the commercial space ancillary services. So let's talk about residential versus commercial solar. When did cocaine make that transition and put on the table all the things that cocus doing today?
• 23:25
  Geoff Greenfield: Well, let's see. I'll back up because it's easier to start Smalling and move forwards. So again, we started with, you know, off grid tree huggers, back to the land people, back in the 2000s we got in with a nonprofit that had access to decommissioned solar modules. And again, these were like 55 watt Siemens SM series modules, real small form factor, and there's a warehouse of maybe about six megawatts of used modules that this nonprofit was distributing to schools, and so our company, third Sun solar, got in to do these two kW and one kW demonstration projects across Kentucky and Ohio and a couple others. That was our very first commercial experience. I was not a commercial contractor.
• 24:10
  Geoff Greenfield: I was a political science major turned, you know, solar homeowner turned solar small business person, and I was very lucky stepping, you know, for many people, stepping from residential into commercial involves a lot more risk and a lot more fancy contracts and a lot more customer expectations.
• 24:30
  Geoff Greenfield: In hindsight, it's pretty amazing that I got things done the way I got them done. It was me and my buddy walking around in school, stepping on desktop to desktop, working through a drop ceiling, trying to get it done before midnight. We really had no business doing this. It was pretty wild kind of wild west installers back then, and What year was this? That must have been probably 2004 2005 okay, it was a we didn't know what we didn't know. In a lot of ways, we're dealing with inverters with 110 volt outputs.
• 25:08
  Geoff Greenfield: You know, these were 1000 watt inverters. It's pretty wild how the technology has evolved. So our first real commercial project was with a parks district as a public entity.
• 25:20
  Geoff Greenfield: They had formalized multiple bidding, etc. I had to go increase my insurance limits to qualify, and we got the project done. We learned a lot along the way about contract. I didn't know what a liquidated damages clause was. I just thought I wanted to get it done in time.
• 25:37
  Geoff Greenfield: But no, apparently, it's really important to get it done in time. So, you know, we didn't know. We didn't know back then in terms of documenting supplier delays and all the other things that modern construction, you know, takes for granted. So, long story short, the company grew piecemeal, and bit by bit, we added more and more people.
• 26:02
  Geoff Greenfield: We got more and more qualified to do the work we were taking on, and we kind of grew in project size along with company size, to the point where we were doing several megawatts a year.
• 26:15
  Geoff Greenfield: We had a single project that was just under four megawatts, and it had a bond, a performance bond, on it, and it was a stretch for our company to get that bond. Bonding is related to, obviously technical confidence and track record, but largely related to balance sheet, and it was my wife and my life savings and our personal guarantees on this. There's.
• 26:39
  Geoff Greenfield: Another opportunity to do another similar size project, rooftop project of about just under 2.8 megawatts, and we could not get the bond. It was really, really frustrating. And they just said, Hey, nothing personal. It's not a strike against you. It's just the numbers say that, based on the amount of money in your your balance sheet for your company, we can't get you a bond. And so at that point, I went out looking for Capital to help augment our balance sheet, and we found kokosing. Kokosing is the largest general contractor in Ohio. It's on the ENR list.
• 27:16
  Geoff Greenfield: There's lots of different categories, but it's, I think, in the top 50 to 60 right now in the nation. On that list, it's a multi billion dollar company with several 1000 team members serving Ohio in the Midwest as well as the Mid Atlantic. And it's amazing. The projects we do, we do heavy highway and bridge building. We do vertical buildings, hospitals and schools. We do we're involved in a lot of industrial projects, factories and a lot of wastewater and water projects, things that make solar actually look kind of simple. A lot of these projects are four or five year projects that are very complicated with lots and lots of team members, and they were interested in solar. They've been in thermal, cogen, etc, before, new energy, and saw which way the writing was, kind of saw the technology of solar has evolved to the point where it's it's real enough that they wanted to get into it in a big way. So they acquired us four years ago and threw some resources into our organization that we didn't have before, and that balance sheet and the technical capacity, and now, like this project behind me as like a nine point, some megawatt project, the old company would not have been able to do that. And for the new company. It's, it's a small project, so it's pretty phenomenal.
• 28:47
  Tim Montague: What do you say to owners who are considering making this big step of taking outside investors?
• 28:53
  Geoff Greenfield: Gosh, it's, it's pretty scary. But it comes back to just about anything else you've ever done all your life, from from getting your first summer job to dating a girl, to trying to decide what college to go to, trust your instinct. It came down for me to handshakes and my own diligence about the people I was doing business with. And I had heard horror stories about mergers and acquisitions having gone wrong, so I was very cautious. My company is our baby. We named it third son, because it was like our third child after two little sons rolling around on the ground at the time, and my team members, my employees, they're like family, and I was looking really hard at who was their new family going to be? It's like getting married to someone, and it worked out great in hindsight, but at the time, you don't fully know. You can't possibly know, so you do have to check, check your instincts and you know your kind of, your spidey sense, and
• 29:51
  Tim Montague: trust it. So were there? Were there any significant trials and tribulations with that acquisition? You know what? What can you? What can you tell us about the challenges and opportunities? Obviously, it unlocked big opportunities.
• 30:03
  Tim Montague: Right? Doing multi million dollar projects became possible because of the balance sheet of focusing, and that's a very good reason to do what you did. But what else did you have to transcend in order to get there?
• 30:19
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:19
  Geoff Greenfield: Well, you know, I became, I moved from being an owner to being an employee or a team member. So that was kind of strange. And I would say, you know, within the organization, going from plus or minus 40, you know, team members, you're nimble, you're fast, you can make a quick decision. Now there's checks and balances. We have to go through a process.
• 30:42
  Geoff Greenfield: Things take longer. Is more formalized. I think the culture changes a little bit. You know, it's back in the day, it was a scrappy little team of us against the world. There's a lot more. I don't know. People were working harder for less money because they believed in the cause and they believed in the team. I think that we still hold on to some of that. We've got some true believers that really believe in the cause. But I think it's fair to say we've graduated to the state where there's a lot of people there.
• 31:15
  Geoff Greenfield: It's their job. They're showing up, you know, for their job, they're not showing up necessarily, because they want to change the world. That's a natural progression. I'm really proud that we, we did the transaction. We cut over to new systems, new payroll, new HR, all that stuff. Our customers didn't see a change. This is all doing mid install of, you know, dozens of projects and. Our employees didn't see a change.
• 31:44
  Geoff Greenfield: We made payroll week after the cutover, and there was a lot of planning to do that. There's a lot of hard work by our team and by the kokosu team to make that that cut over. It's it's not to be undertaken lightly.
• 31:59
  Tim Montague: And paint us a picture of how big focusing solar is in a good year. How many megawatts of solar Are you installing? And how does that break down residential, commercial and small utility?
• 32:12
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, I apologize I didn't bring the numbers to have in front of me.
• 32:15
  Geoff Greenfield: Tim, so this is kind of vague and top line. We residential. A lot of people were wondering whether or not we should continue with residential at all, even before we did the acquisition, and our residential is is still churning along.
• 32:32
  Geoff Greenfield: It's, it's a couple million dollars a year, but we got, you know, a lot of PR out of it.
• 32:40
  Geoff Greenfield: It's a good training ground and recruiting ground for installers and electricians and designers, and so we operate that as a smaller division within our organization, and then top line.
• 32:53
  Geoff Greenfield: Now we are in contract talks for projects in the 100 megawatt scale, which kind of blows my mind. Wow, haven't executed any of those. We're building projects. I think our largest single project that we're on a build was like 67 megawatts Kokosing, because of our heavy highway and civil division and bridge building, etc, we we self perform civil so that makes us a little bit of a unicorn. In the EPAC space, there's a lot of strong companies with a lot of strong electrical practices, but we own the largest equipment fleet east of the Mississippi and so we've got those bulldozers and excavators and GACs and pile drivers that we can mobilize from one site to another site pretty quickly, and we don't have to worry about a subcontractor, you know, promising that they'll get to us next week and then, you know, a month goes by.
• 33:51
  Tim Montague: What else should company owners and operators know about making this transition from light commercial to big C&I and utility, solar.
• 33:59
  Tim Montague: You know, for the most part, people just don't know what they don't know, and they find out by trial and error. And you know, some of them have the wisdom of working with consultants like myself, who kind of have been there, done that, and can help them avoid mistakes and glom onto the best practices, the best equipment, the best technology. But what do you say to owners that are on this journey into large C&I and utility? Yeah, that's
• 34:37
  Geoff Greenfield: what would what would I tell Geoff back then that I wish I knew? Yeah, exactly. You know, I think a lot of us do handshake business, and we're, we trust, and we work with other people. The bigger projects that there are, the larger the organization, the more you have to rely on legal documents. And it's, it's sad, but I was really lucky. We didn't have a single lawsuit, a single legal issue. We had some frustration. But working with subcontractors, if you're in the EPC or GC role and you self perform, you send your guy out there and he tells you the truth that you know he did it or he didn't do it, you're dealing with layers of subcontractors, and maybe they have second tier subcontractors. It really comes down to legal agreements. It really comes down to documentation. And construction can be a dangerous world of legal fights. And there's really, really sad situations out there where, where the good guy or the good gal trusted and assumed integrity, and at the end of the day got screwed. So be careful and and realize that larger commercial projects, it all comes down to you. Might you might know your solar engineering, but you need to know your construction management, your legal, your scheduling, the things that are, I would call boots and suspenders, kind of construction rules that have nothing to do with solar. It's more about how buildings get built.
• 36:13
  Tim Montague: So in our last few minutes together, Geoff, what's on your mind about the future?
• 36:17
  Tim Montague: What plans do you have for focusing and for Geoff Greenfield,
• 36:23
  Geoff Greenfield: well, you know, I, I think that we're all navigating through the one big, beautiful bill and the changes, you know, we, we had tax credits finally extended with a nice 10 year runway. And some might argue that that the IRA was a little bit too generous. But now we've swung really hard in the other direction, and there's some companies that didn't make it, some companies that are still in the throes of deciding whether or not they're going to make it. But I would say again, after the NABCEP conference and talking to my friends, I'm also part of the amicus solar cooperative. So that's a group now. It's about 90 top tier installation companies, and we all exchange. It's not just procurement that we do together, but we exchange best practices and Intel and collaborate on projects. And it's great to see how these organizations are surviving in the the post tax credit era, because it's coming really quick. We're burning through, you know, a lot right now, but everyone is starting to get ready for 2028 and beyond, the rising electric costs driven by AI, et cetera. Those are hard for a lot of people, but I think they are putting a more accurate market price on the true cost of electrons, and the higher the conventional energy costs are, the more sustainable our clean energy business model is there's some people trying to guess whether or not there's going to be a renewed tax credit, maybe a technology agnostic tax credit.
• 38:09
  Geoff Greenfield: I think that there's not going to be one. I'd be happy to be wrong, but I think that we are reorganizing ourselves to compete without a tax credit, and we're getting lean and efficient. And the technology part of it, the materials part, you know, continuing to bring the pricing down, and then innovative business models of, you know, more collaboration and reducing soft costs are the way that we're, you know, making solar pencil as we move forwards, I'm excited about continuing to watch energy storage evolve, you know, the so many different players in that space, from the actual, you know, few battery suppliers out there, to the large number of integrators, you know, boxing these things up and putting some nice hardware and software together, to the business model of deploying it again. I think jigger is pretty spot on talking about how we are storage vendors that also sell solar. I think that's the way we'll look back at it in about 10 years. I'm not sure when the exact cutover is going to be, but at every level, storage adds value to the end user. It adds value to the energy grid into all of us, and it really helps solar, along with the other clean energy technologies, step into its is full potential as being a 24 hour a day, 12 month out of the year, energy source
• 39:37
  Tim Montague: for for the whole globe. I wholeheartedly agree that the tax credit is probably not coming back. I talk about that on the show quite a bit.
• 39:44
  Tim Montague: I'm be happy to be wrong like yourself. It's okay if it does come back. It won't hurt. But we have to play as if it is not coming back. We have to get more efficient and effective at doing the job of installing solar and batteries. And again, batteries are the bees knees. They're so much more multifaceted of a technology than solar alone. I love solar, but batteries really just tie the knot in so many important ways and give us the potential for seven services.
• 40:17
  Tim Montague: Large industrial facilities are not going to go off grid with solar batteries today, anyway, they're going to need other things to be off grid because they consume so much electricity, and batteries are still relatively expensive, but with grid services, you can install a sizable battery and make it pencil quite nicely. But it all depends on that value stack, and that value stack is different. And so reach out to me if you want to learn about the value stack, and if it makes sense in your jurisdiction.
• 40:49
  Tim Montague: That's the thing is, sometimes it does work and sometimes it doesn't. So you need help. You need partners like intelligent generation, who I've had on the show several times. Check them out if you're in PJM, they're the best software as a service company, in my opinion, that helps you monetize the C&I battery.
• 41:11
  Geoff Greenfield: Yeah, plus one, plus one unsolicited plug for Dave and Calif. Great team, great technology, and they really know the value prop and can help end users understand it. Hey guys,
• 41:25
  Tim Montague: 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 tool. 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.
• 41:57
  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. All right, Geoff, well, we're going to leave it there. I thank you for all your work in the industry, your work on the board of NABCEP, for CO founding two great companies, third son and conductor solar. Kudos to you, and I look forward to seeing you again at a trade show in the near future. Geoff, oh, well, to my listeners, please check out all of our content here at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. And if you appreciate it, tell a friend today. That's the best thing you can do. So Geoff, how can our listeners find you
• 42:51
  Geoff Greenfield: if they want to reach out? Yeah, awesome. So kokosingsolar.com, is all things cacosing, and obviously, these days, with AI and search. You don't even need the.com anymore, and then I'm not as active on LinkedIn as some folks, but please reach out if you're not yet connected, especially if you're younger and navigating a career. There's so many different roles to contribute, and we need so many different people from all roles in this big energy change that we're part of. Thanks Again For Everything you do, Tim and to the Clean Power Hour team. And full speed ahead, we need, we need to get to accelerate the shift to clean energy. That's my tagline. And now more than ever, I'm Tim
• 43:35
  Tim Montague: Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Thank you so much, Geoff. Thank you.