Latest / Clean Power Hour / Innovation in Rooftop Solar Racking with Costa Nicolaou, CEO PanelClaw | EP182

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Innovation in Rooftop Solar Racking with Costa Nicolaou, CEO PanelClaw | EP182 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Costa Nicolaou: The philosophy for us has to always look at the market, understand the market and be prepared. So, you know in this sector predicting the future is really tough. So we focus on being prepared for the future. And an example of that is today chemical has enough manufacturing capacity, domestic manufacturing capacity in the United States to support the entire flat roof sector by ourselves.
• 1:16
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• 1:30
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• 1:36
  intro: Together we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:43
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, we're gonna geek out on rooftop racking for the commercial solar industry, I say disrupting and innovating. In racking my guest today's repeat guests. He is Costa Nicolaou. He is the CEO of Panelclaw my all time favorite rooftop racking company. Welcome to the show, again, Costa.
• 2:06
  Costa Nicolaou: Tim, it's great to be here. What an awesome platform. And what a great medium for chatting with folks about this amazing industry that we're in. So thank you for having me.
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: Again it is it is a privilege to work in clean energy, like we're, we're capitalists for good. And we're doing good for the world for future generations. It's it's it really is a feel good industry.
• 2:28
  Tim Montague: It's not without challenges, right? Supply chain challenges, the cost of products, labor, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera legislation. You know, we're here we are in 2023. We're riding the coattails of the IRA, which was passed last year, the inflation Reduction Act, which has a myriad of incentives, several 100 billion dollars of incentives for the industry, you see all these factories now popping up. And this includes solar panels and batteries, and EVS and of course racking products. So Costa give our listeners a high level, what is panelclaw? Why are you the de facto leader in flat roof solar, and then we're gonna get into some of the things that really make you unique beyond your wonderful flat roof claw fr product?
• 3:22
  Costa Nicolaou: Well, Tim, that's a very, very broad question. And so I'm happy to answer it as simply as I can.
• 3:29
  Costa Nicolaou: But you know, we're very proud of PowerClaw of the fact that we are absolute specialists.
• 3:32
  Costa Nicolaou: Rooftop is the only thing we do and rooftop CNI is the only thing we do so our team, and I always think about it this way, look, if we're not the best, and not the best by a bit but the best by an absolute mile, then we're not in business, because we don't have anything else that we do. We don't have carports we don't have trackers, we don't have a residential system.
• 3:52
  Costa Nicolaou: Rooftop CNI is the only thing we do. So our team is driven to be the absolute unequivocal best at it. So that's, that's been one part of our success. And so what does that mean? That means we have to have the absolute best products. When we innovate, we're looking to disrupt not follow. When we launch a new racking platform, we want everybody to copy us copy the features, we want to be the one that's always ahead. And we've been really good at that over the past 15 years. We also want to do on the services side, the things that make our customers lives easier. And for us that's meant reliability on the engineering side, support on the permitting side, those are human beings and people, but also digital solutions, that that increased velocity, that's claw s and claw logic for piano claw.
• 4:42
  Costa Nicolaou: Those are really had really been critical to our success over the past few years. And I'll tell you right now, racking, and digital solutions are both on par in terms of the value they provide to our partners for our offering and our success.
• 5:02
  Tim Montague: I'm going to put your website on screen for those watching the YouTube channel, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. That is the best thing you can do to help others find this content. We're doubling the industry between now and 2030.
• 5:17
  Tim Montague: Right we need another 250,000 professionals to join us between now and 2030. So please give us a rating and review and check out our YouTube channel. It's very robust. All of our content goes on YouTube as well. So here you see claw IFR, right on your landing page proudly made in America. And you've got five degree 10 degree, you've got dual tilt. And what I love about the system is you see the grid underneath the transparent solar modules in this in this schematic here, right obviously, the solar panels are not transparent in real life.
• 5:50
  Tim Montague: because they're collecting sunlight, but the grid does does differentiate you because it means that the entire array can be a ballast, you do see ballasts blocks here, you have to look carefully, but so you need less ballast. And, and so you call those you call that the grid or the rail that yeah, that the system is sitting on. And so you end up with this mesh on top of the roof. And it's just very elegant. But I guess if for for lay people who are not geeks, about solar racking, Costa, what is it? What is it that separates Clif Bar from your, you know, the dozen or other flat roof products in the United States?
• 6:35
  Tim Montague: Well,
• 6:36
  Costa Nicolaou: if you look at the evolution of flat roof mounting systems, it's kind of interesting, right? Flat Roof in the US started with fully attached systems. Nobody knew about ballast and what that was.
• 6:44
  Costa Nicolaou: And then Bill, the owner started complaining about poking holes in their roof. So the ballasted system came to light came to being. And when the balanced systems came to be, there were two types of companies battling for design architecture. They were rail based designs, the sun links of the world, for example.
• 7:03
  Costa Nicolaou: And they were the non rail designs, I think PowerLite had a non rail design early on. And back then the panels were small, and they were beefy, and they were tanks. So when Pinnacle launched, we said, look, we don't need rails, that's metal on top of metal, that's rigidity on top of rigidity, that's a waste of metal. We're going to non rail base route. And we did an unreal based better than anyone else in the world at the time. And that's one of the reasons we rose. So quickly, we had a three component to nuts and bolts system back in 2008, when everybody claimed easy to install, but they had these Erector sets that were impossible to install. So we came to being as a non wheelbase company, we cut our teeth in it.
• 7:45
  Costa Nicolaou: But then we saw something interesting happen, the panel started getting bigger, the frame started getting thinner, and not as strong. And we said wait a minute, this corner clamping non rail based architecture ain't gonna work much longer. So we looked at the rail this architectures that had existed and realized those were way too rigid. You can't have a rail based system on a roof that does this. And every roof does this undulating and is wavy, that's not flexible. So we set out to solve that problem. And that's what claw if our good classifier was the first flexible rail based design for a roof. And what I mean by flexible, I mean two things.
• 8:26
  Costa Nicolaou: First, we're designing one module at a time, you don't have to install two or three modules together on a rail, like the old sounding system, and the system actually flexes a little. Okay, so it flexes a little bit on the roof, it's semi rigid, because if it's too rigid, it's not installable on a lot of roofs.
• 8:45
  Costa Nicolaou: So we did that. And then on top of that, we throw in a bunch of other stuff that nobody had done before. On a flat roof, the flexible piece was one. The other piece was the ability to install all the racking without having panels on the roof. So you can build out the entire grid. Heck, you can add the ballast before a single module arrives. And that's important because of what you said earlier, there have been a lot of supply chain disruptions.
• 9:11
  Costa Nicolaou: Maybe you're on a tight timeline on a roof, and you need to get going. But your panels want to write for three weeks, but you want to get going on the roof.
• 9:16
  Costa Nicolaou: Well with a lot of mounting systems. You can kind of place the stuff around but then you have to reshuffle it when the modules get there. With our system, you can lay out the entire grid, tighten the nuts and bolts, the single nut sorry, there's a single bolt in our system. This is it. Okay, that's the only piece of hardware you need to install our system. It's an M six bolt. And then when the panels arrived. The third piece of awesomeness in our design is you put away your tools. You put away your wrenches, you put all your drills, and you use your hands to click the system, the panels into the system, no tools. That was pretty awesome.
• 9:53
  Costa Nicolaou: And then another amazing feature. The NEC code required I think starting 2017 module, rapid module shutdown on the roof and that really catapulted solar edge onto the rooftop market and optimizers onto the rooftop market. Well guess what we worked with solar edge to develop a way to mount their optimizers on our racking in a way that nobody had done before.
• 10:15
  Costa Nicolaou: That's pretty optimal and awesome. Instead of attaching it to the module, underneath the module and having to get on with CLI far, you attach it sideways on our module connector, the QR codes are visible. Once the installation is done, you can visibly see all the connections it's located on the perfect spot for reducing the need for whips on the roof. Pretty awesome way to mount optimizers on the roof so we did a lot with that platform. I can keep going and going and going. We improve corrosion resistance we're using zinc aluminum, magnesium 5x, the corrosion resistance as you can see, and it with no price premium. Nobody talks about that. But it's pretty cool. So we did a lot on the hardware side. And when I said innovate and be miles away from everyone else, well, that's what we did.
• 11:03
  Costa Nicolaou: And now everyone else is starting to catch up and have features that are similar and look kind of the same architectures that are, you know, when you first look at it look pretty similar. So guess what, we're still innovating, we're going to do the next disruptive thing. By the time they're done copying us, we'll have the next thing ready.
• 11:19
  Tim Montague: And what I really, you know, was looking forward to about this is the digital platform. So I will put a link to our first interview in the show notes when I was with continental two years ago, we did an interview where we geeked out just on cloth are so you can look forward to that. But you've developed a platform called claw OS for design engineering, and I believe permitting. So tell us about claw less. Yeah.
• 11:49
  Costa Nicolaou: So Claus is something that we've been using internally now for decades. But we were one of the last companies to launch a platform where you can do all of this online. So think about a couple of our competitors that had platforms where you could go in, you can slap the panels on the roof, you can answer a couple of questions, and you can get a very raw basic permit, package, and your bill of materials and engineering calculations. Well, the projects we work on are pretty massive, or sometimes small, but really important, like the project on the roof of the Center for Disease Control, right? Headquarters. These are big important with a lot of eyeballs on it. Our in our engine class is D best, most robust, most flexible platform for engineering these systems on the roof. Yes, you get a bill of materials. Yes, you get a calculations package. Yes, you get a racking Construction Set.
• 12:46
  Costa Nicolaou: Those are table stakes, you can get that out of any tool. But what's behind those detailed calculations, defendable calculations to code calculations, we can do designs to FM Global requirements, we can do designs to a specific jurisdiction, we can on a single roof in our cloud platform, if you have a building, the schools are famous for this. Above the gym, you might have a PSF limit of x above the classrooms, you might have a PSF limit of why?
• 13:15
  Costa Nicolaou: Well with claw as you can define x and y y PSF limits within the same roof, you might have a portion of the roof that's EPDM.
• 13:23
  Costa Nicolaou: And another portion of the roof that's tar and gravel because it hasn't been replaced yet, while you can design with tar and gravel and EPDM and multiple platforms, right? So it's it's pretty flexible, and pretty robust. And there are a lot of dials in it, by far, the most flexible platform and optimized platform in all of the digital of all digital platforms that I've seen out there for that group.
• 13:50
  Tim Montague: And what just for our installer listeners, you know, who really know in detail how solar project works? What are the inputs? You know, Can you can you take a Helia scope and upload that into Cloud OS or what is it that you're putting in, you can
• 15:01
  Costa Nicolaou: so you can bring stuff in from Helio scope, you can bring stuff in from CAD. So there are multiple imports. So you can do the design with AutoCAD with with our tools, or you can you can import a Helio scope as well. So what you bring in is the slapping panels on the roof piece. But we also launched in a native tool where you can sketch out the building inside of claw as and put placed the panels inside of the tool itself. So you have the option to design into, you have the option to bring in here your scope, you have the Bosch option to bring in AutoCAD.
• 15:39
  Tim Montague: Very cool. And is it truly soup to nuts, design engineering and permitting or because that piece is deep, there are many 1000s of jurisdictions around the country, right? Yeah,
• 15:54
  Costa Nicolaou: so all the racking permitting side is done in site instead of clause. So we're not doing the structural building analysis part of the permit package. You don't have the electrical part of the permit package. But everything you need to get the racking piece permitted is inside of class. You get an engineering calculations package and a matching racking Construction Set from class and it's in minutes. It's incredibly fast. I think right now it's supporting over 100,000 panels on a single roof. It's pretty awesome.
• 16:27
  Tim Montague: We were talking in the pre show about the growth of panel cloud over the years and changes. You were acquired by Enstall formerly as dec in 2020.
• 16:33
  Tim Montague: Let's talk a little bit more about the big picture of how the industry has changed in the last couple of years. yours and, and where you're going. And then I also want to talk about you, you you like to talk about these pillars, and you have another product that is not visible to the public. But it's a it's another digital platform around logistics, which is quite interesting.
• 17:00
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah. So let me talk about that first. Because it's pretty cool. And, you know, I wish we could say we were geniuses with it. No, we weren't because it's available in all sorts of other industries, we were just the first to solve it inside a flat roof. So the digital platform that we're talking about is claw logic.
• 17:16
  Costa Nicolaou: It's sort of mirrors, claw as claw SS, design, permitting engineering, okay. And so that gets you to submitting a permit package into a building department and issuing a purchase order to panelclaw.
• 17:31
  Costa Nicolaou: Once you issue the purchase order, the traditional process has been the PIO comes into panelclaw, we send out an order acknowledgement back to you saying, Hey, we received your purchase purchase order, and we're confirming that we can hit your ship date. And then you know, a couple of days go by or a week before we ship, we send out another note or call you and say, hey, the order is ready to ship is the ship date still the same? And usually here, no, we gotta move it, push it pull in and pull out. And all of that is done via phone calls and emails.
• 17:59
  Costa Nicolaou: And we're sitting there saying, Well, you know what, if I want to order socks for my kids, I go on Amazon Prime, I look for socks, I find a sock, I push a button that says it's going to be there on the third. And then I keep checking my orders. And I can see the little Amazon truck coming towards My House. And I can see that it was delivered.
• 18:15
  Costa Nicolaou: And I never have to call Amazon or get an email from Amazon, or figure out where my delivery is or what's going on. I can do it right here. Right? Well, why can't you do that with racking.
• 18:23
  Costa Nicolaou: It's not rocket science, right.
• 18:27
  Costa Nicolaou: So that is claw logic claw logic is Amazon Prime for flat roof racking. Okay, you can the post order piece. So the process now is you place your purchase order with us. And when you place the purchase order, we send you a link, and you can click on that link, set up your account and you can see your order in our system. Actually, you can see all of your orders. In our system, you can see the different lines, you can see how many pallets are going to be on the truck, you can see how much the pallets weigh. You can see when the truck is leaving, you can see if we shipped half the order or the full order.
• 18:59
  Costa Nicolaou: Sometimes people want to split the orders. Right, you can see your bill of lading. Once the order has been received and someone signed for the order, we upload the bill of lading. So you can go and see who signed for the order. You can see your credit limit, you can see your invoices, it's order management on a digital platform. And to our amazement, nobody else had done this. Everybody's still doing emails and phone calls, which is incredibly inefficient.
• 19:20
  Costa Nicolaou: Because what if somebody's on vacation? Or what if something changed, and you forgot, you can go on the website and you can go on our page, and you can literally see where everything stands. It's pretty awesome.
• 19:33
  Costa Nicolaou: It's pretty basic. But guess what? Nobody has it. We do. And it's pretty cool. It's called claw logic.
• 19:39
  Tim Montague: I love it. Like you said, if if somebody is on vacation, that just doesn't matter, right? You have complete visibility into what's going on with your order, which is which is very unusual. And I love that analogy. The Amazon Prime of rooftop racking every, every company should have this. And it's only a matter of time, of course. But these
• 20:00
  Costa Nicolaou: build these platforms. And by the way, when I say nobody has it, nobody in flat roof has it. Sure.
• 20:05
  Costa Nicolaou: diffusers might have tools that are like this, and they might have had them for a long time.
• 20:07
  Costa Nicolaou: But what was amazing to us is nobody seems to have done it and CNI. And certainly no one else in CNI flat roof had done this before. And the feedback from our customers had been has been tremendous. If you're doing only one order with us a year, you might not see the benefit of it.
• 20:23
  Costa Nicolaou: It's kind of cool. But we do a lot of portfolios. If you're doing 300 400 500 projects with us a year. And in any given point in time you have 20 or 30 in the hopper. And you have five project managers at your company. They're coordinating all these projects. And the procurement person is trying to figure out how all these cats are being herded? Well, that procurement person can log into our website and see where all the orders for all the PMs are.
• 20:42
  Costa Nicolaou: It's it again. i Yeah, I can't oversell that enough. It's been amazing. Oh,
• 20:49
  Tim Montague: I wanted to you mentioned distribution. So if I'm an installer and I want to acquire CLI for product, do I work directly through patent law? Or are you also available through distribution?
• 21:02
  Costa Nicolaou: So we have traditionally been a direct only company but we started now selling through green tech renewables and BayWa. So those those are the two distributors that we offer qualifier to today. So you can buy from us or you if you're used to buying from from Green Tech renewables or from BayWa? Absolutely, you can go to them and they'll have our product available. That's pretty cool. You asked another question, Tim that I didn't answer. And that is How did everything go with Enstall? The Enstall acquisition has been found tastic they are exactly who they said they were in the pre acquisition discussions and I say that because it's sometimes seems rare. You know, companies say one thing and then you get acquired and something else happens. They are exactly who they said they were. And then some. Stein is a true visionary. The vision that he has for Enstall is fantastic.
• 21:56
  Costa Nicolaou: And we've been very fortunate that all of the shared services that they offered to us have really enabled us to grow and accelerate the adoption of flat roofs. So it has been absolutely tremendous. And it's as exciting today. And it was 15 as it was 15 years ago, and it was three years ago when we were acquired so that says a lot right. And you're a panelclaw, we're all still even more fired up to go build more flat roof solar.
• 22:22
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America. The maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 25 to 275 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 252 75, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts the 250 to 75 pairs well, with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions go to chintpowersystems.com To find out more so Enstall is originally a Dutch company. Most people would know it as as Dec.
• 23:03
  Tim Montague: That's how I knew it when you mentioned en style. I was like what who is that? But now I get it and and so there but there's a number of brands for our listeners to if you're if you're not familiar, just go to Enstall that calm but eco fasten iron Ridge panelclaw blue bass, sulfur and CPS are all brands.
• 23:21
  Tim Montague: I'm not familiar with some of these brands, but very robust.
• 23:24
  Tim Montague: global company. And but I'm curious, like so you're the you're the flat roof racking brand within Enstall. Yes. And are you strictly a US racking company? Are you working in other markets?
• 23:42
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah, so that's a great question, Tim. So in the US and stole acquired four brands, they're acquired eco fasten, I enrich quick mounts, those are all in the residential sector, and penile claw in the flat roof sector. So in the US we are the rooftop CNI platform for Enstall, eco fasten and iron Ridge are the residential platforms in the US. Pinnacle has a sister company in Europe, that is also owned by Enstall called CVX. They are the pinnacle of Europe. They work with a large commercial CNI customers doing what we do in Europe. So systems going on on the roofs of IKEAs, Amazons, et cetera, in Europe are going through CPS and in the US, that's panelclaw.
• 24:25
  Tim Montague: Got it anything about anything else about working with Enstall you wanted to discuss?
• 24:33
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah, I think you know, one of the things that that I'm really excited about is the business model for them, not just the companies, they have acquired the required best in class companies, and allowed us to grow and supported us in our growth. The shared services model, where finance the shared service, HR is a shared service.
• 24:53
  Costa Nicolaou: Setting up new manufacturing is a shared service. What that does, what that means is panelclaw doesn't have to do that anymore. They take care of that for us. What does that allow us to do, then it allows us to focus on service, it allows us to focus on product, it allows us to focus on our customers. So that ability to focus on helping our partners win without having to worry about capital formation without having to worry about setting up a new manufacturer or a new capacity, they take care of all of that. So now the ability to make our customers and our partners really, really happy.
• 25:28
  Costa Nicolaou: And help them deploy more solar.
• 25:34
  Costa Nicolaou: That's pretty much what we do now. And it's pretty awesome.
• 25:36
  Costa Nicolaou: It's refreshing. It's liberating. And the proof has been our growth, we've grown quite a bit since they've acquired and it's it's been a lot of fun.
• 25:45
  Tim Montague: Can you talk at all about that? Because I like to say, you know, we're still down here at the bottom of the S curve. We are starting to go vertical. Yeah, literally, this industry is going to double by 2030. And we're already 250 or 270,000 people strong, major industry, but about to get super major. But what you know, when you think about the growth curve and the momentum, how does that impact panelclaw? Well,
• 26:13
  Costa Nicolaou: look, the philosophy for us has to always look at the market, understand the market and be prepared. So, you know, in this sector, predicting the future is really tough. So we focus on being prepared for the future. And an example of that is today penile claw has enough manufacturing capacity, domestic manufacturing capacity in the United States to support the entire flat roof sector by ourselves. So, what does that mean? Well, It means that if the market doubles, you know, we don't have to add double the capacity, we have to add a little bit more capacity.
• 26:48
  Tim Montague: 20 gigawatts, in your estimation is that
• 26:52
  Costa Nicolaou: the US flat roof market somewhere around 1.4 gigawatts a year, give or take in the CNI sector. And that's just an estimate, nobody tracks it. So we estimated around 1.4.
• 27:03
  Costa Nicolaou: Got it.
• 27:05
  Tim Montague: Innovation is one of your hallmarks Costa? And and you kind of ooze innovation. So let's, let's talk about that in our last couple of minutes together. What are how do you see innovation? And what is your particular role, I guess, at penile claw in, in, you know, keeping the innovation rolling, so to speak.
• 27:26
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah, well, we we, we set the expectations high for the product development and innovation team, which is within the Enstall Shared Services Group, we demand a lot of them.
• 27:36
  Costa Nicolaou: But look, the basic definition, there are a lot of companies that launch products, and they launch a lot of products, and they equate launching products with innovation, which is fine.
• 27:46
  Costa Nicolaou: That's that's a valid definition, you're launching a new product, you consider yourself an innovative company fine. That's not my definition of innovation, my definition of innovation, and the standard that we set for the group that's developing flat roof racking for us is different. Innovation, to me real innovation is when you launch something that nobody else has, when you do something that no one else has done.
• 28:09
  Costa Nicolaou: That's innovation, not just launch a product because you're trying to catch up to somebody else's product, you launching something that truly doesn't exist hasn't existed before. And penipuan has been really good at that over the past 15 years. And the proof is today, you know, I was already plus at our booth in Las Vegas. And I had folks coming to us and saying, Have you looked at that booth, it looks at your product? Have you looked at their booth that looks like your product? And the answer is great. Fantastic.
• 28:31
  Costa Nicolaou: They're starting to catch up.
• 28:36
  Costa Nicolaou: That's awesome. We got there first. And by the way, when you really dig into those products, they're not the same. They're starting to look the same. But they're not quite there yet. And by the time they catch up, we have the next thing already launched, that that's what drives me to drive our team at the Shared Services Group and Enstall to keep us ahead of everyone else to keep launching stuff, hardware, and digital solutions and services. That are things that no one else has done that solve problems for our industry that nobody else has solved in a way that nobody else has solved them before. And we've been really, really good at and actually Since being acquired by Enstall, we've gotten better. So it's really exciting. Does that make sense?
• 29:12
  Costa Nicolaou: Tim?
• 29:15
  Tim Montague: Absolutely like going where no one's gone before is so vital. That's one of the things I appreciate. You know, people like Steve Jobs like Elon Musk. You know, Elon is in the news in so many ways. And people love to hate on Elon, because he is kind of crazy. But he created the Evie market in the United States with an American made product. That is awesome. And you know, it's just hand over fist better. And the sales show that right? Like nobody else can touch Tesla in the United States when it comes to EVs. You bet.
• 29:47
  Tim Montague: And, and so you can hate him for all the other things. But he's created a market which is very important part of the energy transition because of the carbon footprint of transportation. But Costa, you mentioned a few of the things in
• 30:05
  Costa Nicolaou: You know, Tim, if I can stop you there.
• 30:07
  Tim Montague: Go ahead.
• 30:08
  Costa Nicolaou: That's what Stein boss is doing for Enstall.
• 30:10
  Costa Nicolaou: Right? He's the next one. He's already there. He's a visionary.
• 30:13
  Costa Nicolaou: He's an amazing leader, a great culture person, instead of Enstall will follow him to the end of the earth. And he's driving us and motivating us to do these things to carry the solar system on our shoulders, and make solar installers our heroes, right and to empower the accelerated deployment of rooftop solar all over the world. And so if you want to add another visionary to your list, Stein boss is one that you should add to that list. Cool.
• 30:40
  Tim Montague: Well, maybe you can help me get him on the show.
• 30:44
  Tim Montague: I would I would love to talk to him. You mentioned three pillars that kind of drive your how you frame things at your business.
• 30:53
  Tim Montague: Can you tell us what those are and and how they impact where you're going? Yeah. And you and you are going some new places too, which I'd love for you to to discuss as well.
• 31:05
  Costa Nicolaou: Oh, you bet. So, look, we already talked about the racking innovation and making sure that our focus on flat roofs and our products on the rooftop side are ones that others follow. Not, not ones that follow others. Right. So we talked a lot about that. The digital solutions, we're increasing velocity, were reducing friction. We're lowering soft costs. We already talked about those. There is another pillar that we've been working on for a long time. And again, another great part of being a great thing of being part of Enstall is ESG. You know, our customers customers.
• 31:44
  Costa Nicolaou: Talk about ESG a lot when you talk about Google when You think about Microsoft, when you think about Prologis. The ESG initiatives are everywhere in the Fortune 500 companies, right? They're all over the place in the Fortune 500 companies. But if you look at the solar sector, yeah, we're green, where renewable. But where are the ESG initiatives?
• 32:08
  Costa Nicolaou: Well, Enstall just released our first ever ESG report, you can find it at enstall.com. And you can find our ESG report. We're working on our ISO 14,001 certification. And on top of that, we now have an ESG rating from Sustainalytics. For Enstall, that puts us at the low risk that looks at our the risk of, of, I think it's our supply chain. And our score is the second best possible type of score that you get for an ESG rating. And we're just getting started. So to find a racking company that talks to talk, and walks the walk on the issue, I'm by the way, sorry, this is also just about to become public. Sia has a diversity, equity, justice and inclusion certification.
• 32:54
  Costa Nicolaou: Well, guess what? Panelclaw, Ehrenreich, Pico fast and just to achieve a server SILVER CERTIFICATE certification for C as the E ij, sort of certification program. We were bronze last year, we got to silver this year. And I think I think that there are only five companies within the certification program that have achieved silver or higher. So again, you talk the talk, we walk the walk on ESG as a racking company to name other racking companies that that you're hearing saying ESG and actually doing something about it. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty invigorating. Oh, and one last thing. Enstall has an organization called as Dec Enstall empowers. Where we're providing training, installation services funds, it's it's providing, think of it as a foundation within Enstall, where we can provide free racking, we can provide training resources, we can provide funds to help train people and deploy solar for folks that don't have the means to do it. As the can powers, sorry, Enstall empowers is a pretty awesome organization. Again, another awesome thing about being part of the Enstall family.
• 34:08
  Tim Montague: Very cool. I look forward to talking to Stein about all of that. One last thing you know, you talk about ESG. And the carbon footprint of all the stuff we make the built environment. Well, you have to make steel products. Steel has a very high carbon footprint historically. What are your What are your strategies for migrating to a lower carbon steel? Yeah,
• 34:32
  Costa Nicolaou: so first of all, definition of low carbon has has to be commonly understood. And we're not quite there in the US.
• 34:39
  Costa Nicolaou: We're there in Europe. Cory Geiger, our Chief Operations Officer for the US is looking into all of this for all of the Enstall companies. It matters to us, I would point you back to our sustainability report. And it covers where we're going and what's next. A lot of our challenges right now in the US are around the availability of clean steel, low carbon steel, find the definitions of that we care about in our packaging, we care about it in our transportation we care about in everything that we do. And I would say it's a journey for us.
• 35:15
  Costa Nicolaou: So our sustainability report is is one milestone in this journey, and outlines other milestones that we have outlined between now in the next couple of years. So it's a journey. And it's one that really matters to us, like I said, we talk the talk and we walk the walk.
• 35:33
  Tim Montague: I mean, now the US has launched the hydrogen hub initiative, right? The the USDA, OE is funding green hydrogen around the country, you can make steel with green hydrogen, the Swedes are doing it. So I look forward to seeing how how that evolves. i One final thing, you've been very involved with SCA, in a group of manufacturers, and, you know, I'm very involved with icea, the Illinois solar energy or Illinois solar and storage Association. But tell us a little bit about your involvement with SCA, and why should others in your position, other OEMs. And it it's not just OEMs but in particular OEMs consider participating in SCA.
• 36:24
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah, so CEA is our Federal Trade Association, our national trade association.
• 36:27
  Costa Nicolaou: Yeah. And then you have local chapters, or affiliates and independent chapters as well. So CEA is the national organization, Industry Association, one of the national industry associations, and I would say They are important when it comes to federal policy.
• 36:45
  Costa Nicolaou: They are absolutely amazing the inflation Reduction Act does not pass without the involvement of the solar energy industry association. So within CEA, I've been involved as the Chair, Vice Chair of the distributed generation division for two years. And then I chaired the distributed generation division for four years. And then Abby Hopper, the CEO created a manufacturing division four years ago, right before the last election. And I was fortunate enough to be elected as the first chair of that manufacturing division. I've been chair now for four years, two terms to two year terms. So I'm terming out at the end of December. And we grew the membership for the manufacturing division from eight founding members, to now over 100 manufacturers that are members of this division within the industry association. And within that four year time span, we helped shepherd the white paper and the policy to page policy paper that drove a lot of the elements in the inflation reduction act a lot of the incentives in the inflation Reduction Act that we see today.
• 37:51
  Costa Nicolaou: So a very powerful, very powerful division within Syria, growing influence within Syria.
• 37:55
  Costa Nicolaou: And also, it's important to be able to monitor to mobilize the manufacturing jobs. That's something that we hadn't been able to do that as an industry before we talked about it, but we weren't measuring it. And we weren't mobilizing it. And now through Sia, we're able to both measure and mobilize the manufacturing sector to support the industry at the state and federal level. So that's been amazing. And I look forward to continued involvement with SIA.
• 38:23
  Costa Nicolaou: It's a it's an awesome Association. And by the way, you also asked anybody, anybody, any company that is in the solar sector, should be must be a member of CEA, when you look at other sectors, biotech, education, law enforcement, they all have industry associations, and they're all incredibly well funded, and incredibly powerful.
• 38:43
  Costa Nicolaou: We want solar to arrive, one of the metrics that I always look at is how powerful and how well funded is our Industry Association. And the quicker we get there, the faster we will grow. So if you're in sola, and you're not a member of CEA, for as little as $750, to as much as a lot more, you can become a member and contribute. And I urge every any company in the sector to join sia.org,
• 39:12
  Tim Montague: well said that cia.org will check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and reach out to me, I love connecting with my listeners, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can contact me through the website. And with that Costa, how can our listeners find you and Pamela?
• 39:34
  Costa Nicolaou: Well, you can you can find me anytime.
• 39:36
  Costa Nicolaou: Panelclaw.com is our website, you can reach out through there, and I'm always available. But Tim, before I leave, thank you for all that you do. You know, one of the things that this industry really can benefit from more is great voices like yours.
• 39:53
  Costa Nicolaou: When somebody asks the right questions when somebody wants to drive the industry, and bring folks on that can enlighten us on a topic. And you do that with each and every podcast. So I'm a big fan. I'm a big listener, and I'm extremely appreciative of all that you continue to do for our industry. So for that, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, we really appreciate it.
• 40:13
  Tim Montague: Well, thank you, I really appreciate that. And I appreciate you, Costa, you've made some wonderful connections for me, and I really appreciate you making time for the show. It doesn't happen often enough. So with that, I'll say thank you for listening. I do this for my listeners for the 1000s and 1000s of energy professionals or aspiring energy professionals out there. Thank you, and let's grow solar and storage on tomorrow. Take care.
• 40:41
  Tim Montague: Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about.
• 40:56
  Tim Montague: You are part and parcel of the energy transition whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional.
• 41:05
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• 41:14
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• 41:14
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• 41:57
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• 42:33
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