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AI & Robotics Revolutionize Solar Work · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your host, bringing you the latest and greatest solar, wind and battery news, bi weekly with none other than the commercial solar guy. John Weaver, welcome to the show, bro, Tim.
• 1:03
  John Weaver: Tim, how you doing?
• 1:03
  John Weaver: I'm breathing. What I'm breathing heavy because I just finished doing my little hallway
• 1:09
  Tim Montague: workout here. Oh, I thought you were getting turned on, hanging out with me, man.
• 1:13
  John Weaver: Tim, where there's a children's show. Do you remember
• 1:16
  Tim Montague: when we had that talk with the bartender about how we were a
• 1:19
  John Weaver: couple? Wow? Tim, which, which. All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about
• 1:25
  Tim Montague: solar. The day you came back to the Clean Power Hour from your hiatus there for a little while, but we gotta remember
• 1:32
  John Weaver: that that's funny.
• 1:32
  John Weaver: Geez, we could talk about Vegas stories. There's all candidates out there.
• 1:38
  Tim Montague: The question, the question of the week, John is, how are you using AI in your business on a day to day basis?
• 1:44
  Tim Montague: Because it's so integral now,
• 1:46
  John Weaver: well, that's a good question. So Tim, Tim and I were talking AI before the show, because he has a certification from, I guess, WSI, which training and and so I thought to bring up thing that we actually did. So a sales guy and I, we were approached doing RFP as part of a broader new building construction. They want solar as a little piece of it. So there's some general contractor, Western Mass Building a whole bunch of stuff, and they needed solar.
• 2:14
  John Weaver: And we gave them a quote, and they said, Hey, do this portion of the scope up to the meter and everything back. We'll do all the major integration and stuff and building, the building and all the kinds of things, pulling permits, everything. And we said, all right. And gave them the number, broke it down, gave them components, and then the last piece that they brought up was, Oh, can we get a scope? I said, Oh, yeah, we'll get you a scope. You know, I was just going to write out a list, because, you know, in my spreadsheet, I break down each task, each component, and that builds up to a cost. Add a contingency. I said, All right, let's do a scope. Now they had given us a nice 1000 page packet. RFP, only about 20 of it, of course, is solar for the they being a permanent package, the general contractor, which I believe, came from the local jurisdiction, okay, and so this is actually just a GC, so this is all permitted, everything.
• 3:14
  John Weaver: Interconnection approved, that type of thing. We're just doing pure construction, and they gave us a nice permit package. So as an experiment, I said, Craig, Craig's our sales guy. Craig, Craig sergeant, who's a big chiefs fan. He's going to watch the raiders and the Chiefs play this weekend from row five. So if you see him on TV, big redhead guy, yell at him. I said, Craig, let's make a scope.
• 3:36
  John Weaver: And I said, You know what, Craig, let's give chat GPT, because we have multiple subscriptions in the office.
• 3:44
  John Weaver: Let's give chat the one line diagram and the site plan. And let's give it very explicit directions to build us a work scope, to install all the solar with all the hardware, and also stop at this point
• 4:03
  Tim Montague: and that drawing you're referring to, or just the one line, not like an IFC, full stack of drawings, site
• 4:09
  John Weaver: plan and one line, those are the two things we did.
• 4:12
  John Weaver: That's it. And we said, Please create us a scope, doing all the solar work, stopping at this point, and it created a beautiful document Submittable to the customer. Took 30 seconds.
• 4:26
  Tim Montague: You didn't have to do a lot of editing,
• 4:31
  John Weaver: excuse me, and no minimal. Minimal, yes, I could probably show it to you. I will show you the I
• 4:39
  Tim Montague: love this. This is a great application for so if you're listening to this, this is why I became a WSI certified AI business consultant, because there's a lot of stuff that you can be doing in your daily workflow that's going to save you a shit ton of time and make you go faster, further, faster.
• 4:56
  Tim Montague: That's my mantra. John, I am the AI Sherpa now for solar, wind, battery, storage.
• 5:03
  John Weaver: So, so that's it. I was going to look for the email real quick and share it. But Wellesley,
• 5:08
  Tim Montague: it's all good.
• 5:08
  Tim Montague: It's all good. I love this project. Clean. Is that, is that project one or still not one?
• 5:17
  John Weaver: Um, I believe they are bidding. So we actually were. We were solicited by two separate GCS on the same project. So the bid was easy for us the second time. We're just like, boop done, but I think they have to submit next Tuesday is the deadline. That's what I think I heard. So so we don't know, but I hear
• 5:39
  Tim Montague: my favorite success story from a workflow.
• 5:42
  Tim Montague: It's not brand new for me, but we installed a chatbot on cleanpowerhour.com that's where all this content lives. So you need to go there if you're listening. And check it out, all of our audio, all of our video and on YouTube, of course, but, but there's a little bubble in the right hand corner on the landing page. Clean, Power Hour, calm, click on the bubble, and then you can have a text or a voice conversation with that chat bubble. We built it on technology called Voice flow, which is a state of the art for voice chat. I learned today from my friends at WSI that McDonald's uses voice flow. So thank you shad, my virtual assistant who helped me build this chat bot, but we trained it with my entire book, many conversations that I've had over the years, many trainings that I've given and so it's truly a CNI solar expert there for you to ask questions of. And I would encourage you to try it. And now it will also eventually try to get you to schedule an appointment with me if you demonstrate any interest in talking with Tim Montague, which is its primary job, but first and foremost, it will answer questions. So check it out. And I would love to hear your feedback in the comments on LinkedIn or on YouTube, whatever. So let's get into the project of the week, though, John,
• 7:03
  John Weaver: project of the week is from us. It's a carport, solar power carport, but we're very at the end of it, and I wanted to talk about it just a tiny bit because of what we're working on, and, and, and some of the challenges from it. And so this is the ending, some of the ending pictures. And from here, you can see the car ports in the background. This is, I believe this is an 880 ish kW, DC project.
• 7:36
  Tim Montague: And what's the, what's the tilt? It looks fairly steep for a carport.
• 7:41
  John Weaver: I think that angle is because of the pictures. It's like a five, five degree tilt.
• 7:43
  John Weaver: Yeah, these are, these are pretty, actually pretty chunky size carports. And, yeah, so there's a nice angle, and, and so the what I was really wanting to show off or talk about this one, first off, it's just beautiful. I just love carports and, and they're just big, chunky. It's real construction, man, you got to get into the ground. You got to dig stuff out. You got to rebuild parking lots. Take some take some work to get these built, pouring concrete.
• 8:11
  Tim Montague: It's fun. Now the foundation is the most intense part.
• 8:13
  John Weaver: Probably, yeah, foundation is intense. This is the DAS. So this is going to be an also energy data acquisition system help the asset owners understand what's going on. But the real fun with this one is that we had a massive and this is actually 350 kW DC. We had a transformer, utility transformer. That was a headache. And the reason it was a headache is that the design was done in 2021, and interconnection and everything was approved. And over the course of four years, utility requirements change. And so as we are coming to close out this project, we're reaching out to the utility. We say, hey, we need a transformer. Here's our drawings. They're like, ah, we want to change those. And we're like, Guys, we're about to dig a hole and put your put your transformer there. And they're like, well, we need a different type of transformer. We need a different type of hole. We need to move this power line. We need to manage this trench, and we need some extra medium voltage work from you guys, and then the transformer placement, the actual containment area, multiple layers of material, multiple inspections over the process, as we move from having nothing there to having a hole and then sand, and then fabric, and then stones, and then more this and and then bollards. So I just wanted to talk about the fact that interconnection for this one was a challenge. It was cool. We're done with it. We were told yesterday we should expect the transformer to be dropped off on the 15th, so that's about 12 days from now, and that would move us toward PTO on the 15th, which is a nice just makes us happy. We got certificate of completion already for all the non utility work. So the town is happy with us and and that.
• 10:04
  Tim Montague: So it was just and remind our listeners what, what was the racking they use? What racking company?
• 10:10
  John Weaver: Solar mounts. Is a solar mount carport racking system with selectria inverters.
• 10:15
  John Weaver: Very nice, yes, and I don't, I can't remember the modules because I didn't buy them. The developer purchased the modules and the carport for us, sure.
• 10:30
  Tim Montague: So, all right, we're going to go to Norway now.
• 10:33
  Tim Montague: You found another vertical solar store. Way for story from Norway. They have launched a single cell tall, very unique form of vertical solar. So if I can get this on screen, I. Let's see. There we go. This is in trumpsa, Norway, which is in far northern Norway. I've been there. It's coastal community, beautiful place, very mountainous, very cold and dark in the winter though, John, I'll warn you, cold and dark.
• 11:07
  John Weaver: So first thing I'll point out is that this is different. Cold and dark. Of course, it's like borderline Arctic Circle.
• 11:13
  Tim Montague: Dude, it is. It's right near the Arctic Circle.
• 11:18
  John Weaver: So first thing I thought was cool, and from this picture is you could see these, like racks on the on the ground.
• 11:24
  John Weaver: There's something on the ground that they're attaching to, yeah?
• 11:26
  John Weaver: And then you see these guys wheeling out, in essence, a module,
• 11:30
  Tim Montague: yeah, that's a module split into vertical rows, yeah, yeah.
• 11:35
  John Weaver: And it's essentially a module that they're rolling out. I thought that was just
• 11:38
  Tim Montague: kind of neat.
• 11:38
  Tim Montague: What's the wattage of that unit there? Do you know the model?
• 11:40
  John Weaver: I think it's only like two 300 watts. I saw a piece of data somewhere that may have suggested two 300 I can't remember right now, so don't, please, please, manufacturer, don't quote me on that.
• 11:53
  Tim Montague: I think it's very cool. So, but has somebody has done the math and the side by side analysis that somehow this pencil is better because money talks, John,
• 12:04
  John Weaver: this pencil debtor far north, because the vertical works. There's no mechanical attachment needed to the roof because they're so low. What they say is that there's nothing, no
• 12:15
  Tim Montague: mechanical they're Joe, but wait there, they must be attached to each other, so it's like a mesh. Yeah, yeah, the vertical version, it's very analogous to earthos. Yes, it's earthos for rooftop,
• 12:29
  John Weaver: sorta, sorta, but, not, but whatever. But yes, vertical works. Vertical works further north. Yes, look at that. Just little rows and rows of vertical solar and it's just cool. I just think it's neat. So this is a record system size install. This is 320 ish kW, which I think brings them up to, like, 1.3 1.4 how
• 12:51
  Tim Montague: do they get the snow off? John, uh, I don't know.
• 12:56
  John Weaver: Maybe they don't.
• 12:56
  John Weaver: Maybe they just deal with it.
• 12:58
  John Weaver: Yeah.
• 13:00
  Tim Montague: I mean, obviously the snow is not accumulating on the cells, but it's accumulating in the rows between the cells and quickly covering the whole array. If you get, if you get eight inches of rain, of snow, right, which they certainly get.
• 13:13
  Tim Montague: But I mean, Trump says not as not a super snowy place. I don't think it's more rainy. But anyway, maybe one of our listeners knows. Perplexity knows for sure, John, that's my favorite search engine. Now, perplexity, have you gotten into perplexity? No, but
• 13:30
  John Weaver: what I did just start fiddling with was Claude.
• 13:36
  John Weaver: I'm gonna add Claude. Oh yeah, I love Claude, my number two. Chat as my number one. Well, I'm just used to using chat as my number one. And then, like, for instance, I was talking with one of my with my office manager, and we were talking about how to use it. We'll use chat to create it, look at it ourselves, and then use Claude to double check chat, so that we have a, you know, two separate tools there working together.
• 13:58
  Tim Montague: What I often do is I search up a company or person in perplexity, then I copy that into chat GPT, that's basically the prompt. I have to add a few things at the top, but like, I'm preparing for an interview.
• 14:11
  Tim Montague: Okay, with this person. Here's my pre interview. Here's my bio from perplexity, and then I'll run that through chat, and then I'll run that through Claude as, like a clean up so that, yeah, they work well together. It's a concert. I'm having a little AI concert in my office every day.
• 14:30
  Tim Montague: It's beautiful thing, dude, I love this vertical solar though.
• 14:33
  Tim Montague: What's the what's the name of it? John, can you remember the name? Nope. Come on, bro, we got to give people our the name of this technology.
• 14:42
  John Weaver: We're just talking we have no idea who this guy is.
• 14:44
  John Weaver: Okay, give me second. Seconds, near seconds to Pete, well, it started with a PV magazine article, I think new record system for vertical here it is, all right, so over easy, I believe, is the manufacturer, over easy solar. So I'll give you, oh
• 15:01
  Tim Montague: yeah, over easy.no. Is their website. My browser immediately remember that, and this, this project, is on their landing page. Now the Trump's a Terminal and Terminal, and is like a bus station, probably or or maybe a ferry station, or both. But, yeah, check out Tromso sometime, John, it's, it's a beautiful, beautiful place. In the summer, the winter is probably a little harsh and depressing,
• 15:27
  Unknown: yeah? And dark, like you said, dark and cold. Yeah, it's
• 15:32
  Tim Montague: it is dark, unfortunately. All right, what else we got going on here?
• 15:39
  Tim Montague: Surveillance cameras captured two people getting out of a car and setting fire to the solar panels. The climate of hatred that risks fueling copycat attacks the comments under the.
• 15:49
  Tim Montague: Reporting to fire reporting, too many have expressed satisfaction with the gesture. Yeah. Oh, you had to do this. Holy crap. This is
• 16:01
  John Weaver: Sicily. Yeah, that's I wanted to bring up the comment section. That's why I copy pasted that in there for you. Just the interesting dynamics of solar. You know, where it's energy, man, we're not just in a build a thing business. We're not like building, I don't know. We're not cutting the lawn, dude, we are. We are competing with energy some of the wealthiest, most powerful groups of people in the 20th, 19th and 20th century, and they're doing their best to hold on to the 21st
• 16:27
  Tim Montague: Okay, so first, this is a story in PV magazine.
• 16:30
  Tim Montague: PV system fire under investigation at suspected arse as suspected arson in Italy by Massimiliano tripodo.
• 16:40
  John Weaver: What a cool name, Massimiliano. Come on.
• 16:44
  Tim Montague: He's got it going on for sure. So do we know why these people set the solar on fire. Was it that they have some beef with the solar industry, or it was just, oh, we're going to cause trouble.
• 16:58
  John Weaver: Oh, well, it seems like the politics are pushing, at least, per some reading that I saw the local politics, or maybe not be very pro solar.
• 17:08
  John Weaver: Maybe, maybe the, maybe it's mafia related, I don't know, but, you know, there's something about people wanting fossils in this area. Do they have gas money? Do they have oil money?
• 17:23
  John Weaver: You know, what are they part of?
• 17:26
  John Weaver: I mean, that's my assumption.
• 17:26
  John Weaver: Let's see, you know, then there's just see people who
• 17:30
  Tim Montague: big fire housing, solar panels. Yeah,
• 17:35
  John Weaver: to bomb out, yeah.
• 17:35
  John Weaver: So I think it's, you know, it's politics, you know, it's interesting. There, I had an article I saw this morning from heat map. They did some questions with people who've actually built solar and to see their opinions and what their neighbors are, and they're all turned out positive. And it's like, even though these people might have a rough opinion going into
• 17:55
  Tim Montague: it, oh, really, solar changes minds. So what you're saying, You
• 18:00
  John Weaver: know what, it is, a big paycheck for leasing your land for solar changes minds.
• 18:04
  John Weaver: That's That's what matters.
• 18:09
  Tim Montague: And this is important. Yeah, this is important. I want to, I want to drill down on this phenomenon just for a second, and then we'll get on to your next story, which is solar construction firm Blue Ridge power issues mass worker layoff in North Carolina, the layoffs are happening. Okay?
• 18:28
  Tim Montague: So a landowner can double or triple their income by leasing their land to a solar developer, which makes it super attractive for the land owners. One of the impacted groups that we don't talk enough about is tenant farmers, who are making their livelihood by rent, by renting other people's land and growing crops, and when the absentee landowner rents their land, which for in my area of the world, the bread basket of America, by the way, 40% of the land is owned by absentee landowners. These are people who have lots of real estate holdings in various and sundry places. They may be me, maybe from Illinois, but they've moved elsewhere, often California, I find but we need to have a holistic perspective about this.
• 19:16
  Tim Montague: John right, like solar is an impact. I ultimately think it is a net good for the community because of the tax money that flows to the school district, to the fire district, to the library, so many little things get funded by solar, wind and battery projects, and it's good for the land, right? You're taking the land out of what is in in Illinois, heavy industrial farming of of corn for ethanol, 200 times less efficient than solar, by the way. I learned that recently. Or beans, right?
• 19:52
  Tim Montague: So what do you think about this topic, though? I'm just curious, like, Are you are you rolling with my thought process?
• 19:59
  John Weaver: Yeah, um, I mean, solar is definitely a net positive. Most solar isn't being placed on highly productive land. It's being placed on the land that's needs some rest.
• 20:10
  John Weaver: Even, you know, if you go to Illinois, you know you have eight feet of subsoil. I got a good friend of mine, Michael Lewis Galant. He edits my articles for PV mag, so he teaches me. But you guys got top soil there, so it's sort of valuable. Well, he lives in New Bedford, but he's from somewhere in Illinois. Him and his family are from there, and they moved to California. So there you go.
• 20:28
  John Weaver: You uh, yeah. So, you know, it's a net positive. The even if we 100% move to solar for all energy, we're talking 2% of land,
• 20:46
  Tim Montague: yeah, exactly.
• 20:48
  John Weaver: Oh, great, you know, great. We can max. Out we could cover. I mean, I'm not worried about it. If that, you know, this is a political thing.
• 20:54
  John Weaver: This is, yeah, this is, this is having fun. This isn't political, actually, Tim, this is money. This is the fossil people continuing their attack on the minds of the American population. And that's just it.
• 21:09
  John Weaver: That's just fundamentally it.
• 21:11
  Tim Montague: And you mean the backlash and the funding of nimbyism? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's and it's and it's like, so if you're, if you're a, if you're a, like, a county board member in a rural community, you have a choice.
• 22:20
  Tim Montague: You can either benefit from wind and solar and battery development, or you can pass on the opportunity, because we only need 2% of the landscape. Only a small fraction of parcels in America are going to get leased for these projects. If you make it too difficult for the developers, they will gladly go elsewhere. I'm not encouraging that, but it's but it is. It's time sensitive, because we only have a 20 year window now where we're doing this, and then we're done, frankly, we have all the solar in the world we need in 20 to 30 years, and then we'll do lots of O and M and repowering, and it's like HVAC all of a sudden. You know, it's a thing, and you need solar installers and solar companies, but we're not green fielding so much.
• 23:03
  John Weaver: So there's a story I thought about sharing that was from South Dakota, and it's a town that destroyed some dudes opportunity, like he goes this land. We weren't using it. It's it's fallow land, or you
• 23:15
  Tim Montague: don't want to talk about it.
• 23:18
  John Weaver: Oh no. I was just we have a 50, a list of 50 other stories. But the key thing is that it lines up with what you just said. Uh, they rejected the plan at this town, in this South Dakota town, which has no other money, and they built it somewhere else in South Dakota.
• 23:33
  John Weaver: Like great, you don't want to hear wonderful. We have no problem making your competition down the street the same project. There's plenty of land.
• 23:43
  John Weaver: Don't get stuck on yourselves.
• 23:43
  John Weaver: You know, you think it's special, it's everybody can grow food, and we're not taking that much. So I'm, I'm obviously pro building some solar, but we don't need to, but great, we'll do it.
• 23:55
  Tim Montague: Yeah? All right, so let's talk about Blue Ridge power. Yeah, I'm a fan. I'm a fan of Blue Ridge. I've always heard good things about them.
• 24:02
  Tim Montague: They're the EPC arm, pine gate renewables,
• 24:08
  John Weaver: yep, and I know some people at Pine gate.
• 24:10
  John Weaver: They're cool people that I knew, yeah,
• 24:12
  Tim Montague: out of North Carolina, but they're having mass layoffs, probably because of the O, triple B. But what?
• 24:17
  Tim Montague: What's the story, John, this is, this is PB magazine by Ryan Kennedy, solar construction firm Blue Ridge power issues mass worker layoff in North Carolina.
• 24:27
  John Weaver: Yeah, it's because of obv and forward looking projects and construction. And it combines, though, with other states. But it's, it's definitely related to that
• 24:38
  Tim Montague: bunkum I've been to Buncombe County, yeah.
• 24:42
  John Weaver: So it's a it's just, I brought it up because I wanted to bring up. You know, right now the solar industry has other people getting laid off in other places. There's other companies that have laid off people. Pine gates laid off its development staff first, I believe, and so they cut back a lot of future work. And, you know, there's residential people getting laid off everywhere.
• 25:01
  John Weaver: That's been going on for a while. We just saw a couple of big resi companies lay off chunks of people. Was it freedom, solar, I think, or maybe mission, one of the big ones had a big round. So it's just, it's happening, and it's, you know, it's interesting, because this is so soon. I mean, these are bigger companies, so you would think they have pipeline projects through like, 2019 2029, and stuff. But I don't really know how these big ones work, but just kind of seeing it, seeing it happening.
• 25:33
  John Weaver: And yeah, you know, want to bring it up. And if anybody's looking to hire some people, like we're looking at an electrician right now, and we're about to hire him, he seems like nice guy, and he's smart, he knows a bunch of stuff. So you know, there's gonna be some good electricians and good installers who are going to be out there in the market, if you're looking for people to scale up over the next couple of years, and a bunch of them live near Asheville.
• 25:55
  Tim Montague: So yeah, Asheville is where Buncombe County is, or vice versa. Buncombe County is.
• 25:59
  Tim Montague: Asheville is the seat of Buncombe County. That's the only reason I've been there. I went to Asheville. I was thinking about moving to Asheville, John, and then it was too expensive, so I didn't and then they had that horrible hurricane, and it was brutal. But yeah, I in 2022 I was thinking about moving to Asheville, North Carolina, but I had to stay here for the pickleball and the sailing, which is just too good a combo, and they didn't have as good sailing. They had pickleball, but no sailing. So mountain so yeah, you lose. Yeah.
• 26:36
  John Weaver: I hope everybody at Blue Ridge, good luck. And anybody's looking to hire, those are some. Good peaks?
• 26:43
  Tim Montague: Well, yeah, there's, there's always opportunity, right? There's always a silver lining. This contraction is going to make us stronger. We will come out leaner and meaner. We'll get rid of the fat. And I'm not suggesting that good people aren't going to get caught up in this, and good companies, they will. And you know the this is them being proactive, actually, and trying to survive, right?
• 27:08
  Tim Montague: They see this way, this, this dip coming, and they're going, Okay, we're battening down the hatches. And because it's not going to be easy. If you're a solar alone EPC, it's not going to be easy. I think a lot of solar loan companies are going to get into other things, or go away, and you're going to adopt AI. So reach out to me if you want to get an AI, preliminary AI assessment, which is the gateway to my world. But, um, yeah.
• 27:36
  John Weaver: Back to the news.
• 27:36
  John Weaver: Back to the news, all right.
• 27:39
  John Weaver: Back to the news. What do we got?
• 27:43
  Tim Montague: We're not going to cover all 50 stories. John, I had a hard stop at 1240 my time.
• 27:48
  John Weaver: So yeah. Tim, there's always plenty of needs.
• 27:52
  John Weaver: But a revolution wind, you want to talk about? Or, stud, yes, just real quick, easy one revolution wind, a judge has ruled that the project can restart. This is a fully permanent project, 80% done
• 28:09
  Tim Montague: the where is the project? John, off the coast of Rhode Island, yeah, it's good to say, yes, Rhode Island off the coast of Rhode Island, offshore wind. It was put on hold. Right?
• 28:20
  Tim Montague: Yep. Now it's back from the dead
• 28:23
  John Weaver: maybe a month. And Orsted said it cost him $2 million a day. Holy cow, various sitting around doing nothing because you got to rent oats.
• 28:32
  John Weaver: Yes. So $60 million in just garbage, just garbage extracted because whatever
• 28:42
  Tim Montague: that's enough to make a company say, You know what, I don't really need the US market that badly. Like, we're just 5% of the energy market globally, right?
• 28:52
  John Weaver: Like, I heard somebody really smart say, there's now a risk premium to invest in the United States that's now added.
• 29:04
  Tim Montague: I remember a I got to hear that. But yeah, I get it.
• 29:08
  John Weaver: I had a person who I was talking about a deal with.
• 29:10
  John Weaver: They were thinking about growing into the US, and they said, You know what, we can't grow into the US because we have countries in our portfolio that the US might not like, and if we have a project from the US in the same place as another country, China was amongst the countries that might cause an issue. So we're not going to work in the US right now. It's like, oh, never been that guy. We've never had that issue. Now we do the US is that market. So it's interesting. It's the next one.
• 29:41
  John Weaver: This is a prize for you.
• 29:42
  Tim Montague: Tim. Oh, dude, you found the Lumi story? Yes, yes,
• 29:46
  John Weaver: there's, there's a PD magazine article associated with it. But I just wanted to surprise you. I didn't want to label it. I just want you to see it. Check out this process. I have some comments on it. I have some comments notice there's one human being doing physical work per row, and it's the person underneath who's doing stuff.
• 30:03
  John Weaver: Actually, I guess technically there's two, because there's a fork
• 30:08
  Tim Montague: over there. That's a tough job. Man squatting down all day like that. Holy cow, yes.
• 30:14
  John Weaver: So one person doing physical work out of a whole row, whereas there used to be about five, at least four, two people to move it, two people to place it, and then one person with the bolts. And I can very easily see a machine underneath handling that bolting and the connection of the wires. There's nothing magic going on underneath there, robot with a few arms and some cameras. No no questions asked. Yeah, so I I could foresee this. And right now, again, there's two, those two little forks. You can see the machines. There forklifts that are holding the pallet, but I've already seen machines that will hold the pallets, so there's no reason to have a pallet separate, you know. And there's already machine with that holds the pallets and the arm on it. So it's just one machine doing both. So I can see a row of modules being installed with only a manager watching, yeah, it's first time I saw it.
• 31:15
  John Weaver: That was the video that made me see it for the first time. And I should have seen it before, but that was it. Oh, yeah, here's the story. Here's the
• 31:21
  Tim Montague: story in PB magazine, robot speed installation of 500,000 panels at solar farm in Australia. Ng and US based luminous, have tested autonomous robots at 250 megawatt Gorham bot, East solar farm in Australia, by EV folly, nice story.
• 31:40
  John Weaver: Yeah, they got like 5 million. Australian
• 31:43
  Tim Montague: bucks. Yeah, they got a huge grant in here, and
• 31:47
  John Weaver: the numbers in there, it's like talked about somewhere in there, and they're part of the program that Australia is trying to push the cost per kilowatt hour of solar under a cent. And this,
• 31:59
  Tim Montague: that's the Montague number ascent Australian or ascent us
• 32:03
  John Weaver: Australian, Australian. Penny, Yeah, cuz that'll be like four, which be like 6070, point 6.7, over here.
• 32:10
  Tim Montague: Okay, yeah, Australia, yeah. Penny, a wad in the US is also a target to unlock green hydrogen. Matt Campbell beats this drum at Terra base and Jim Tyler at earthos. Also two great interviews from last year, but
• 32:32
  John Weaver: so that's it, man, I thought it was neat seeing that robot move around.
• 32:35
  Tim Montague: Congrats to Jay Wong and company at luminous.
• 32:40
  Tim Montague: Jay Wong and Jay Park. You guys have done a great job growing that company. They're on their fourth generation bot now. So they're iterating fast. They're moving,
• 32:50
  John Weaver: oh, they're in the field. When you're in the field working, that's what, that's what you get to do. So pretty
• 32:57
  Tim Montague: neat. That's cool.
• 32:57
  Tim Montague: All right. What else
• 33:03
  John Weaver: I want to show you a cool picture. It's first time I've kind of seen it. It's this next story that's on the list, this offshore installation.
• 33:09
  John Weaver: There's 1.8 gigawatt offshore.
• 33:15
  John Weaver: But I just wanted to show you the picture of that thing that they're how they're deploying it, you know, they're putting in piles. So this is an offshore of China. And the picture on the screen that you're going to be able to see is this giant so there's a big boat that floated out some kind of barge and and then just a giant chunk of solar that's being dropped on top of piers in and they didn't specify the depth of the water, but they're just dropping it on top of piers, and it's just cool to see. I'm sure they built it in a factory or on the side of the street, I don't know, but just
• 33:54
  Tim Montague: but what's the end end application? So the story is, China builds 1.8 gigawatt offshore PV project in Bohai Sea State led 1.8 gigawatt offshore PV plan in changli, China's heibay profit province is set to become a model for large scale, large scale marine solar.
• 34:15
  John Weaver: Wow, just floating.
• 34:15
  John Weaver: I mean, it's just floating solar. I mean, that's wrong.
• 34:16
  John Weaver: It's no, no, it's earth based.
• 34:21
  John Weaver: Uh, they specify two or three of the subsections because there's like four pieces that are they specifically say fixed mount.
• 34:29
  John Weaver: You can see it in the top. One uses fixed mount structural designs, so I assume all of them do, but it's
• 34:34
  Tim Montague: just fixed. Yeah, it's just cool. Yes, it's got to be expensive as heck, though.
• 34:41
  John Weaver: Land is free.
• 34:45
  Tim Montague: Well, wow. Still, man. I mean, those piles have got to be massive, right? Yeah, true. I mean, it's like building a dock out of solar panels, kind of a solar dock.
• 34:58
  John Weaver: It's like, it's like a racking system, doing foundations, driving 12 to 15 foot deep piles. I mean, this is much harder, but,
• 35:07
  Tim Montague: well, yeah, it's just everything you're working on the ocean. Everything is harder on the ocean.
• 35:12
  John Weaver: Big Boat Man,
• 35:15
  Tim Montague: that's good. Find good. Find
• 35:16
  John Weaver: just neat, just a neat system, really big, I don't know, just cool to see, neat to see everything that China loves doing. They're so, so pushy.
• 35:28
  Tim Montague: All right, you found a story about solar cable theft. Yeah, steel 50 kilometers of cable from 11 megawatt solar farm in Germany, worth $117,000 this is sad. I don't, I don't like, I don't like these stories. But this is a real thing, you know, stealing cable.
• 35:48
  Tim Montague: It happens in the US too.
• 35:52
  John Weaver: Absolutely it happened, actually happened, not in a project that I was on, but a project that was my company was on back in 2015 really?
• 35:59
  John Weaver: Yeah, I used to work for Beaumont solar, South Coast, Massachusetts. TPC had a shipping container full of copper just storing comics on site. And had to be an insider.
• 36:11
  John Weaver: They only stole the copper direct from the shipping container overnight. Had big clippers, clip gone. Oh, well, I assume big clippers, yeah.
• 36:27
  Tim Montague: Well, I mean this, this photo looks like copper, but it's copper or aluminum, and they're both super valuable.
• 36:40
  Tim Montague: Copper prices are going up to.
• 36:40
  Tim Montague: Right? I don't want to talk about it. Tim, that actually probably drives more theft,
• 36:48
  John Weaver: without a doubt. Of course, I can show you a scary chart. Type into Google right there. Type in Google copper price, and it's just an ugly chart. And it's even after it fell off. I do do. Oh, my God, it's over five. What happened? I wish I hadn't told you to go there.
• 37:06
  Tim Montague: It's not quite there. It's 477 Well, this is 511 Anyway,
• 37:13
  John Weaver: do year to date, please. Not five year, year to date. There we go.
• 37:16
  Tim Montague: What was this?
• 37:16
  Tim Montague: What was this in July? What happened?
• 37:19
  John Weaver: Oh, that's, that's when Trump said, Yes, I'm gonna do a tariff. And then he said, Nah, I'm not going to do a tariff. Oh yes. And back in April, you can say I'm going to do a tariff. And then they said, nah. But then he came back, and everybody thought he's gonna do the tariff. This is stressful.
• 37:36
  John Weaver: This has caused bidding issues for me, because I had a portfolio that I thought I was going to be building in January, February, March, and we bid more expensive copper, and we told the customer, listen, this is what's going on. And then the customer said, No, we need to start now. You can procure the copper immediately. I was like, Oh, awesome, but we had to redo our bid because it was 100,000 bucks over on copper alone, because we're bidding it at 530 instead of 440 and when you apply that across multiple megawatts, that's big cash. And then I think I'm bidding projects in 2027 Tim, what the heck is going to happen between now and 27 Tim? So you have no idea. It's a challenge to bid multiple years out for project costs. And I have to, we have to get better at our contracts and specifying, hey, if something out of our control whacks the price.
• 38:28
  Tim Montague: And I would argue that the GPT is probably are a good ally in this bidding venture.
• 38:37
  John Weaver: Sure, sure. Tim's going back to the AI. So everybody, if you need any help setting up your contract
• 38:42
  Tim Montague: language, he's gonna help you. You're learning, John, you're learning slowly, but you're learning. All right, let's talk about what, what happens behind the meter. Stays behind the meter. Did you like that title? Tim, did you like that? That's pretty clever.
• 38:57
  Tim Montague: John, I had to give it. I came up with that one. All right, all right.
• 39:03
  John Weaver: So, so this one is big for utility scale folks, essentially the what we all knew as professionals has been accepted by the big boys, the Feds and FERC, the Federal whatever, whatever Federal Energy Management Group commission. What they simply said is that solar plus storage doesn't matter how much you have. If the inverter is at, say, 79.99 then that's what the system size is. You could have a gigawatt of solar and five gigs of batteries, but if your inverter is 7999
• 39:40
  Tim Montague: Why is the combined statistic relevant.
• 39:45
  Tim Montague: What is the conversation that you're in?
• 39:48
  John Weaver: You got to scroll to the bottom to see the law discussion on it. But essentially it was the fossil fuel industry was attempting to hurt the solar industry. And so what they said is like, Listen, your site has the ability to produce 160 megawatts with your solar at
• 40:10
  Tim Montague: 60 but this is the utility pushing back. No, this
• 40:14
  John Weaver: is the edits Edison Institute, the EEI, the utility lobbyist group. You know the people who are like, we want coal, those guys, old people, people that should fall off a cliff, they're the ones pushing this lawsuit, and they want to simply add another million dollars to the cost of being a solar developer by being assholes. But so they sued, and then FERC. And here's a person I'm going to make an insult to somebody. This is really annoying, fat guy that guy that used to work at FERC called Neil Chatterjee, and he was owned, owned by the fossils. And I think he changed his boat because his boss, Rick Perry, that loser from Texas who didn't even know that the Department of Energy managed nuclear power when Trump placed him in the thing 12 feet over his head, him and the coal guy that died from Ohio recently, Jim Murray, asshole again, all these people pushed Neil to allow this rule change, and then we had to sue him. And who sued him was Abigail. Abigail from Sia, Solar Energy Industries of America. So thank you, Abigail. Thank you sia for winning this lawsuit.
• 41:20
  John Weaver: Good job. We owe you some dues.
• 41:22
  Tim Montague: All right. So we need to, we need to give our listeners some more context, though, I think, yeah, this story is called, what happens behind the meter. Stays behind the meter. It's by John Weaver in PV magazine. And there was a ruling in this was a national ruling, or a girl, yeah, this is okay. So there was a federal ruling that. Somehow you might measure the size of a solar plus storage project by using the combined statistics. So if you have 80 megawatts in this case of solar, 50 megawatts of battery, you've got 130 megawatts of project, right and project and they're saying, no, actually, the court is saying you only have an 80 megawatt or whatever the inverter rating of the project is, yes, and
• 42:11
  John Weaver: they have a certain term. So if you scroll, actually, if you scroll all the way to the top, I put it in the top of it because they use a certain legal term. It's called the fact that it was a Facility Manager. Oh, I didn't put it here. Okay, we're gonna have to scroll down a little bit, but they have a very specific legal term they use, no send out capacity. That's it, the second to the last line in the first paragraph, okay, they use the term send out capacity, which is weird. It's not a term we generally use. I mean, we use it connection. But they said, Send out capacity. But that's, in essence, the inverter. Could you output?
• 42:48
  Tim Montague: Well, let is that.
• 42:48
  Tim Montague: So let's just grok this for a sec, right? If you have an 80 megawatt solar facility and a 50 megawatt battery, do you actually have the capacity? It totally depends on the gear and so forth. You're often not putting out both of those onto the grid. You're probably charging the battery with the solar
• 43:09
  John Weaver: probably it depends on how the battery is designed to run. Let's say the most expensive time of the day is at 4pm when solar is ramping down.
• 43:15
  John Weaver: So you can potentially have some solar output and then the battery filling up the rest of that inverter. But usually in our world, that's not the way it works. Solar runs in the day.
• 43:25
  John Weaver: Anything you want to put in that battery, you probably want to run it from six to 9pm or or five to 10pm during the evening peak. So So yeah, so this is just a this is a thing that all of us knew was common sense, but the courts had to argue it. And so the reality is, you can build a whole city behind the meter.
• 43:42
  John Weaver: All that matters when it comes to output, if you're trying to get PURPA is, what's your inverter? What's your grid connection? Size is so so that that was good story. I like
• 43:55
  Tim Montague: that one. Well, we had a visitor, and I didn't say hello. Thanks Dustin for being here. I use chat GPT all on all my contracts. It's really good, and has even gotten me better deals, catching things I missed.
• 44:10
  Tim Montague: Yes, the GPT is very good at understanding this verbosity, which is often something we know as a contract, which drives me insane. But yeah, for redlining contracts Absolutely, or writing contracts, good stuff. So thanks for being here, Dustin.
• 44:31
  John Weaver: But now Dustin, even if it's as a VPP this system, it still can only output at its max interconnection number. And that's really where the argument came. You can have solar and a battery behind the same meter, but even if they're both pushing as hard as they can, they're gonna get limited by the site inverter. So it doesn't so VPP is just fine.
• 44:54
  John Weaver: Yeah, one could argue every power plant in the US is part of the national VPP, but not really.
• 45:02
  Tim Montague: All right, I got to wrap up. I'm going to Kentucky Lake to sell my flying Scott sailboat in a regatta. And I want to thank John Weaver for being here so studiously bringing us great news stories in solar, wind and storage on a bi weekly basis. We'll be back October 17 at the same time.
• 45:21
  Tim Montague: That's 12 noon, Central, 1pm Eastern, and check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do. Well, Where should our listeners find you? Mr.
• 45:35
  John Weaver: Weaver, commercialsolarguy.com, and share it, because my Google food has been dropping because of all this AI
• 45:42
  Tim Montague: stuff. I was gonna say not under a rock. That's definitely the last place to look for John is under a rock.
• 45:48
  Tim Montague: He's not under a rock. He's out there installing solar day in and day out. Super impressive,
• 45:54
  John Weaver: trying, trying so commercial solar guy that Tom and Tim. Tim, what kind of AI tips are you gonna give us?
• 46:00
  John Weaver: What's the ending AI tip for the day? You got to give us one before we can go.
• 46:04
  Tim Montague: My My tip for the day is get on that bicycle. Most people are walking the bicycle.
• 46:09
  Tim Montague: Think of AI as a bicycle, and you see people riding, and you go, that looks kind of cool, but I'm afraid get on the bike and ride it, and you'll learn to use chat, GPT, Claude and perplexity in concert, and then you can do more complicated things. I'm working on some automations.
• 46:29
  Tim Montague: Check out my chat bot. That's also I really need feedback, John, I would love it if you because you're such a geek, I need geeks to kick the tires on the chat bot. We call them Tim bot. And. And try to break him or do something, try to make him hallucinate, give him some mushrooms. Okay, John, all right, sure. All right. Thanks so much, everybody. We really appreciate you. And with that, wait,
• 46:58
  John Weaver: what? Dustin?
• 46:58
  John Weaver: Sorry. Dustin, three chats.
• 47:01
  John Weaver: Chat. GPT is the first one, the second one is Claude, and then the third one, yeah, Claude, and then the third one is going to be what's the third one?
• 47:10
  Tim Montague: Tim, perplexity.
• 47:10
  Tim Montague: Perplexity. And I have to have a paid subscription to perplexity, because I ask it so many questions. It's a freemium model. Like all of them, freemium, you can get free questions answered, but you'll soon be addicted, and then you'll be on the 20 Buck hook, but it's worth it. All right, let's grow solar. Thanks, Tim, let's grow solar. Take care.
• 47:28
  Tim Montague: John.
• 47:37
  Tim Montague: All right, well, I screwed up and screwed up.