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The Secret To Avoiding Solar Power Downtime! | EP292 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Luke Schlichte: I think everybody knows that string inverters are easier, simplified, O M, you know, spare parts list. We say, you know, it's fans, but really we just advise taking, you know, having a handful or so spares on site, because, you know, again, you have a central inverter fail, catastrophic downtime, that four megawatt block is down, there's hundreds of spare parts that you have to have an inventory, and can be a supply chain constraint that the industry has seen before that can lead to prolonged downtime, and then you're additionally at the mercy of the specialized technician to perform the repair, where string inverters, it's technician level O, M, and it's a it's a swap, and we're talking less than an hour to replace that 350 kilowatt inverter.
• 1:50
  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.
• 2:00
  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
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: today. On the Clean Power Hour, we continue the journey. The transition from central to string inverters is real and prescient and happening in the US. And for good reason, my guest today is Luke schlichte. He is the utility sales rep for CPS America, otherwise known as chin power systems. Welcome to the show, Luke,
• 2:37
  Luke Schlichte: hey, thanks for having me. Tim, always great to talk to you. I
• 2:40
  Tim Montague: love this topic. I just think of central inverters as outdated busses, like they're just ginormous. It takes a huge crane to move these things around, and there was a day when they were the standard. But things have changed, and across the globe, you know, we forget, Luke, that the United States is not at the forefront of solar technology and design and construction. Unfortunately, I wish we were, but we're 10 years behind Asia and Europe and the one of the major trends in solar construction is this adoption of string inverters for utility solar. These are 100 to 100 megawatt projects to gigawatt now we have some 1.2 plus gigawatt size utility solar projects. These are really big.
• 3:28
  Tim Montague: These are 10s of 1000s of Acre solar farms. So anyway, Luke, give our listeners a little background on yourself and how you came to the utility sales role at CPS. Yeah.
• 3:41
  Luke Schlichte: Thanks, Tim, yeah. So I've been with CPS for almost three years now, been largely been in sustainability, but my career, but yeah, I had a good friend of mine, uh, refer me to CPS, and it's been an incredible ride. You obviously know about the team and the culture, the leadership we have here, so I've been very fortunate to be a part of the team. And I was really kind of drawn to our utility products, our high powered string inverters. You know, they're obviously the best spec for spec on the market. But really, you know, what interests me is there's a, there's a really big underperformance problem with utility scale solar in the US where, you know, that's really taking a toll on the production and revenue for these long term asset owners. And really, I think string inverters, modularity, and specifically CPS is solutions are the are the remedy there?
• 4:42
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and you know, it's this. It's a simple trade off that gets made. If you're an asset owner. This is a particular interest to you, because, yeah, on the front end, designing in central inverters might be a little cheaper still today, in 2025 but the long term project cost the OPEX is going to be lower with with string inverters. And it's not rocket science, right? Because when you lose a block, when you lose a central inverter, let's say a five or 10 megawatt inverter, right? That's a huge chunk of revenue. KWh is revenue, right?
• 5:22
  Tim Montague: Whereas with the string inverter, in the string space, we're looking at 350 maybe 375 Do you have a 375 yet
• 5:29
  Luke Schlichte: 350 that that's biggest, one, the big, the highest power string inverter on the market in the world. Yup.
• 5:36
  Tim Montague: So the 350 kW, yeah, it's like a small refrigerator, but two, two workers could carry that device.
• 5:43
  Tim Montague: You can have spares on site, in the trailer, in the in the container. There's just a lot of practicalities to. Having string inverters. I'm curious though, Luke, you know you're talking to customers day in and day out.
• 5:54
  Tim Montague: What are some of the conversations you're having and and what is it the customers like? About 350 kW string inverters?
• 6:05
  Luke Schlichte: Yeah, you know, getting back to the underperformance issue, you know if, if you are the long term asset owner, you have skin in the game, or you're using private equity, and you're not hitting those production projections, you know, then you're concerned about how you can relegate that and fix that.
• 6:30
  Luke Schlichte: And to me, it's clear it's modularity. And, you know, I think we're best positioned to kind of lead the transition to from central to string.
• 6:42
  Luke Schlichte: Obviously, it's the status quo.
• 6:42
  Luke Schlichte: We have a very capex focused system here. And, you know, obviously a lot of pre existing relationships, so you just keep doing what you're doing. But there's a better way now we have. I know I get from a lot of people that, hey, we've done this exercise 100 times where we do string verse Central. I guarantee that they haven't done it with a high power string inverter. That's 350 kilowatts.
• 7:11
  Luke Schlichte: They might have done it before.
• 7:11
  Luke Schlichte: When they're they're talking about 50 or even 100 kilowatts, but the math is different now.
• 7:17
  Luke Schlichte: And you know, there's so many different ways that string addresses all the underperformance problems, not just to at the inverter, but on the string level, combiner and tracker level, where that which are all the main downtime causes with the utility scale power plant.
• 7:39
  Tim Montague: And one of the one of the key decisions, I think, in solar plant design that gets made is, are you going to do a distributed or a skidded approach? Distributed you? And this is an advantage and an option. It with string inverters, right? You can literally sprinkle the inverters out throughout the solar field, typically at the end of rows, but depends on the design and or you can do a central version of that, where you bring all the inverters to a skid, and it's kind of apples and oranges. But what do you have to say about that distributed versus skidded design approach?
• 8:24
  Luke Schlichte: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the distributed I think, has a lot of advantages. And, you know, I like to say that there's no, there's no flat rectangles left anymore for the utility scale projects. So you're going to have, you know, weird shaped parcels. You're going to have topography challenges, and that's really where I think the distributed approach can be advantageous. But you know, similarly, you know, we have a lot of EPC partners that want to be able to have that centralized approach, to mimic a central inverter, but then have the benefits on the backside of the ease of ONM, the swap ability of string inverters, they want to have those benefits of, I'd say, our skidded string product was born out of the feedback and the want from our EPC partners that maybe they're participating in in a RFP that's calling for central inverters. Well, now we can mimic that with our skidded string you can, you know, still collect all your DC in the field, use your trunk cable or your your shoulders VLA, and then have that single input with our skidded string and be able to have that that benefit time there. So you're taking away that risk of catastrophic downtime that you have with a single point of failure in a central inverter. Yeah,
• 9:50
  Tim Montague: yeah. We're going to see that theme time and time again, catastrophic downtime avoided. That is the key phrase.
• 10:00
  Tim Montague: What about let's talk a little more about the financial impact of string inverters versus central inverters. In our previous conversation, you referenced a report from raptor maps. But what do you say to customers about this, regarding the financial impact of string versus Central?
• 10:20
  Luke Schlichte: Yeah, you know, I would say a lot of folks that I've talked to when I talk to them about our solutions that were specifically designed for the utility scale part of our industry that are string inverters. Their interest is peaked because they've already been pulling their hair out with some of the issues surrounding central inverters. You know, whether it is, you know, you know, we've talked about that risk of catastrophic downtime, they've lived that category.
• 10:50
  Luke Schlichte: Traffic downtime, and it's sometimes been weeks, months.
• 10:54
  Luke Schlichte: I've heard six months or longer.
• 10:54
  Luke Schlichte: I've heard of 200 megawatt projects that had 14% uptime after a year. You know, really, they're already looking for solutions. So, you know, really, it's, you know, the first question is the capex, like you mentioned, we're right there.
• 11:16
  Luke Schlichte: We're on par, or close to, with central inverters. Now, from an equipment perspective, you know, there are some learning curves that I hear about when you're designing with string versus central which you know, our applications engineering team will work as an extension of their engineering team to help dial in the design side, to help with string sizing, you know, design optimization. You know, we're here as a resource, and as you know, we view ourselves as a as a partner for the life of these projects. So not only on that front end, but you know that service is, you know, one of the main reasons why we've been able to have the kind of customer retention that we've had for and enjoyed that number one spot for market share with three phase string, really those the modular approach combined with the backstop of the best service in the industry, that's how we're going to ensure that your production estimates are going to be attainable.
• 12:25
  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 eight 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, 847168, to find out more, I did some quick math. And we have a we have a five megawatt project on campus here in central Illinois, in Champaign, where I live, and it has central inverters. But I did some quick math on a five megawatt inverter, okay, roughly speaking, for fixed tilt, which it's no longer its tracker now, but for fixed tilt, that a five megawatt inverter is producing 500 megawatt hours per month, it's a lot of juice, and this translates into, of course, savings for those PPA customers that are buying the power, and it translates into revenue for the IPP the asset owner. And when both of those go away, you're just looking at a hole in the ground. Basically, it's really a pain point. And in this case, the inverter was down for months because they couldn't get a replacement part. And so it wasn't just one month. It was like four months of downtime.
• 14:13
  Tim Montague: And you as an asset owner, as an off taker, you're just not happy about that. It's just really painful. So I do think that's just a no nonsense way to explain this to people
• 14:30
  Luke Schlichte: absolutely well into that. You know, CPS president, Brian Wagner, he likes to refer to the as the refer to the inverter as an ATM.
• 14:37
  Luke Schlichte: If your ATMs not working, it's not pumping out cash. So, you know, when people talk about capex, I try to turn the conversation to production.
• 14:48
  Luke Schlichte: Because, you know, the number one goal of building a power plant should be production and uptime. Production is king for everything that we do. So I really think the more as we go, more and more projects are going to be going with string inverters, just because they're going to make them more profitable.
• 15:11
  Tim Montague: I wonder if for our listeners who are not that familiar with large string inverters, what are some of the innovations that CPS is making to improve performance, reliability, serviceability and cost in this space?
• 15:33
  Luke Schlichte: Yeah, absolutely great question. Well, you've been to our headquarters in Richardson, Texas. In our headquarters there, we have our CPS labs, and as far as I know, we are the only inverter manufacturer that takes our RMA and inverters. From our customers, and we study them. We try to find out what went wrong and what we learn in the lab there, you know, we're building solutions to be, you know, included in products going forward. So lot of innovations that we've led with in the industry, one of them being DC enhanced that came from some of that work in CPS lab. So to that, we're constantly getting feedback, and we're receptive, receptive to feedback from our clients, because we want to listen to the market. I would say again, the 350 kilowatt inverter that is the highest power inverter string inverter in the world. It full power full 350 kilowatts of power up to 40 5c before it begins to thermally de rate. That's a higher, I guess, the D rate number than our competitors with a similar sized string inverter. So that's something that's going to ensure that uptime 15 mppts per 350 so for a 4.2 megawatt block, that would be 12 350 kilowatt inverters times 15 mppts, you're talking about a hundreds of mppts per four megawatt block.
• 17:12
  Luke Schlichte: That's advantageous, not only to reduce mismatch losses, but also now you have granularity in your data down to the MPPT level. So when there is a, you know, it might, might not be a failure in the inverter, might be a failure on the string combiner or tracker level, you're able to to identify where the issue is much faster. Having that kind of information, you're not you know, it's not a needle in a haystack. Would it would be with a central inverter and you have one or maybe four Max MPPT is on a similar size block.
• 17:51
  Tim Montague: Yeah, we have to remember, there are other problems that happen with solar projects. Is not just inverters and but having string inverters can help you zero in on where the problem is good point. So in that regard, what are some of the maintenance and servicing differences between string and central inverters that our listeners should know,
• 18:13
  Luke Schlichte: yeah, that that is huge. And I think everybody knows that string inverters are easier, simplified, O M, spare parts list. We say it's fans, but really we just advise taking, you know, having a handful or so spares on site, because, you know, again, you have a central inverter fail, catastrophic downtime. That four megawatt block is down. There's hundreds of spare parts that you have to have an inventory, and can be a supply chain constraint that the industry has seen before that can lead to prolonged downtime, and then you're additionally at the mercy of the specialized technician to perform the repair. Where string inverters. It's technician level O and M, and it's a it's a swap, and we're talking less than an hour to replace that 350 kilowatt inverter, it's even less time than that for some of our other products, but that spares on site can swap it in technician level on them, which, you know, I can't stress that enough, as you know, I feel like the specialized technicians, They are already spread too thin, and these specialized technicians, it's three, $400 per hour. Well, now that all these you know, huge utility scale projects of 234, 500 plus megawatts are becoming more and more commonplace. We're reading about every day. What's going to happen when they have failure issues. And we have these specialized technicians that are already spread thin, they're going to become become even more spread thin. And then we have labor issues with, you know, electricians and technicians, not just in the renewables industry, but everywhere. So I think that's going to be we have a looming concern there and string is gonna, you know, be the remedy here. In
• 20:18
  Tim Montague: 2023 I wrote an article in PV magazine about a clana project in, I think it's Beaverton County, Montana. It's called Apex solar. It's 105 megawatt DC solar project. Oh, sorry. Beaver head County in southwestern Montana. And there's a great quote in here from clana CEO. If you're not familiar with clana, check them out. They're a big global IPP.
• 20:46
  Tim Montague: But CEO, Jason Ellsworth says the prolonged downtown. Time for repair or replacement can be detrimental to project performance, referring to why they have switched to string inverters from Central inverter.
• 21:01
  Tim Montague: So check that article out. If you just Google Montague, central to string PV magazine, you'll find that article or reach out to me. Please check out all of our content. Clean Power, hour.com, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Luke, what else should our listeners know about your work and how you work with customers? Would love to learn a little more of behind the scenes. What's it like working with Luke schlichty, and what is your what is your specialty?
• 21:28
  Tim Montague: What is it that you're looking for, the conversations the types of clients that you're wanting to attract.
• 21:35
  Luke Schlichte: Yeah, really. I mean, hey, if you have skin in the game, if you're a long term asset owner, IPP, we are going to ensure the most amount of uptime. We're going to make sure your P 50 estimates are attainable, as you know. And I think and I think I already said, we view ourselves as a partner for the life of your project, so we're going to be as an as invested in the performance of that project. Is you. So would love to see how we can fit in to make your project more profitable.
• 22:13
  Tim Montague: And how can our listeners find you, Luke.
• 22:17
  Luke Schlichte: I can be reached at Luke dot schlichty. That's S, C, H, L, I, C, H, T, E, at Chimp power.com you can find me on LinkedIn and DM me.
• 22:31
  Tim Montague: Awesome. Well, I want to thank Luke schlichty, head of utility sales for CPS America again, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help the show. And with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage.
• 22:48
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much, Luke.
• 22:50
  Luke Schlichte: Hey, let's, let's raise the bar for utility scale solar.
• 22:53
  Tim Montague: All right, have a great day. You, too. You.