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I Asked 6 CPS America Insiders What's Changing in Solar #337 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Joe Ross: I think the grid is growing, certainly at a pace, but I think the demand for energy is growing at a significantly faster pace. You look at data centers, that's really one of the biggest drivers for energy use today, and it's already having an impact on the average utility bill.
• 1:08
  Brian Baxter: We're the first, I think, I believe, to market with a fully integrated package, which is the inverters plus the batteries, all in one complete unit. This is,
• 1:17
  Bryan Wagner: in my opinion, probably one of the biggest breakthroughs we've ever had as a company, and I feel the 250 kilowatt 600 volt in the centralized version will possibly do more volume than all of our other units combined.
• 1:37
  intro: The clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger. The technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar, storage and micro grid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all each week, your host, Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of clean power consulting group brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now.
• 2:07
  intro: Here's your host, Tim Montague, where do you see the solar industry going in the next couple of years?
• 2:14
  Bryan Wagner: It feels like almost every three months it's another setback, another challenge, another thing we have to overcome. I feel we'll see a lot of the same over the next three years. I'm sure companies like ours and some of our partners, CPC partners, will figure out quicker ways to install, quicker ways to work with our equipment. So I think just the innovation will continue to speed up the clean energy transition. Where are
• 2:39
  Tim Montague: the hot markets for seeing on solar and storage?
• 2:42
  Tim Montague: As far as you see it in the Northeast.
• 2:44
  Bryan Wagner: New York and Massachusetts are probably our two big targeted states to get more involved when, from a PV perspective, we were involved in one and every two ground mount projects in the community solar over the last five years. So we're really excited about the stronghold we have in that market, not staying complacent and looking to now bolt on solar plus storage applications. So stay right here at home in our backyard and stay focused on doing that for us, focus is a hard thing. Doing too much has got us in trouble before, like most businesses. So we're going to where we know we can do really well, and where we can potentially become number one, which is commercial energy storage.
• 3:24
  Tim Montague: When it comes to ground mount solar. You've got, in my mind, three key products, the 125 the 250 and the 350 kW inverters, and now you have the skidded string. Tell us a little bit about why developers like the skidded string. The 250
• 3:42
  Bryan Wagner: kilowatt will upend the 125 this year, because it's a 600 volt platform. The 350 will upend our 275 and already is we want a 600 megawatt site that we shipped starting shipping last year.
• 3:56
  Bryan Wagner: We're continuing to ship now with the 350 and MV station. One thing we should talk about, in addition to the 250 603 50 is the 200 kilowatt community solar product at 480 volt is upending our 100 kilowatt 480 we've had so many new product launches and so many new products at once that it's almost hard to get the word out on all these we have to disrupt ourselves. If we don't disrupt ourselves, we feel someone else will.
• 4:25
  Tim Montague: Are there any customers or projects that you can highlight regarding the community solar utility markets here in New
• 4:31
  Bryan Wagner: York State, we've been one out of every two ground mount projects in New York State with our 1500 volt solutions.
• 4:38
  Bryan Wagner: So, I mean, there's so many customers to thank for that if you come to our Innovation Day, you can meet a lot of them.
• 4:46
  Tim Montague: It's true that's the best way to meet chin customers is to come to Innovation Day April, 22 to 24 in Dallas, Texas. But what else do you want listeners, solar developers, asset owners and installers to know that they may not know about CPS.
• 5:03
  Bryan Wagner: We care. We always say we care more everyone in our company, creating a culture that cares a lot more meaning like, what did we do today? What did we do yesterday? How can we improve it? Either today or tomorrow is in our DNA. It's why innovation is so critical to us.
• 5:18
  Bryan Wagner: So one of the things we're talking about here at the show, where we just won our first got awarded, our first set of projects here in New York State for is the skidded string. So skitted string is much different because it combines the benefits of central inverter and string inverter. So you can basically put 10 or 12, 250, kilowatt, 600 volt inverters, mount them on the skid factory integrated, and then we ship it to site. Comes with a million medium voltage transformer comes with switch gear. We can add, add other.
• 5:50
  Bryan Wagner: Hardware there as well, based on the customization that's needed.
• 5:54
  Bryan Wagner: But this is, in my opinion, probably one of the biggest breakthroughs we've ever had as a company, and I feel the 250 kilowatt 600 volt in the centralized version will possibly do more volume than all of our other units combined.
• 6:12
  Tim Montague: So what is it about skidded string that is compelling for customers?
• 6:16
  Bryan Wagner: The labor savings is huge. You're not having to go out in the field all around the array, again, your factory integrating. So you get a little bit more quality that could happen there in a factory setting than in the field. You can time all your construction now and ship these five megawatts at a clip to come out and speed up that whole site.
• 6:37
  Bryan Wagner: But also like O and M post installation, the O and M, which is operations and maintenance savings by not having to walk throughout the array. You're working on one pad, we'll have one flex at each pad so you're able to work on the 10 to 12 inverters, troubleshoot rate there. You're going to each pad and treating it like you would do a central inverter pad. The main advantage we have compared to Central is, again, the less maintenance cost, so you don't have to do the preventative maintenance, you know, every three months, checking filters and fans. So you know you're getting that benefits and combining both, yeah,
• 7:11
  Tim Montague: lower labor on the front end in the construction, and then lower labor on the O and M side. And just ease of any parts replacement that are necessary, right? You're swapping out a suitcase size, a piece of equipment instead of a bus size piece of equipment.
• 7:25
  Tim Montague: Anything else you want to highlight for our listeners,
• 7:29
  Bryan Wagner: I think you're going to see Chint continue to aim at that that string inverter market share, and increase that market share, something like skitted string will make a very sticky product already that at at string inverter become even more sticky with having the customization element that a central can offer. So thank you, Tim for all of your efforts and hard work, and we look forward to many more years together.
• 7:56
  Tim Montague: We're here with Luke Hardin, tell us a little bit about yourself, Luke, and what you do for CPS America.
• 8:02
  Luke Hardin: I'm a business development engineer here at CPS. Been here for coming on three years now. Came here straight out of college, actually had the opportunity to be involved in the internship program here at CPS as well, and CPS has guided me all the way to where I am now. So great in terms of development and even some out in the field experience as well, and getting involved in string sizing and the engineering department. So it's been a great time.
• 8:29
  Tim Montague: CNI storage is all the rage right now in the solar industry, right? Solar is great, but storage makes it work 24/7 and it provides a much more nuanced value stack. So tell us a little bit about CPS. Is CNI storage offering.
• 8:45
  Luke Hardin: We're coming out with our 125, kilowatt 261, kilowatt hour CNI energy storage unit. We're seeing a high demand in energy storage this year, in 2026 specifically, I'm working a little bit more in the Northeast. So the other factor in terms of people getting into the energy storage market are CNI energy storage is scalable.
• 9:05
  Luke Hardin: You can use multiple of these energy storage in parallel.
• 9:09
  Luke Hardin: Let's just say you want to start out with just a few of them. You could start building off of that with years to come. So the people that are a little bit hesitant try a few out and see how it works for your projects, and eventually you can always add on to that. Yeah, here we are in
• 9:25
  Tim Montague: Massachusetts, which is a great storage market.
• 9:28
  Tim Montague: They have special incentives for batteries New York. What are the other northeast storage markets in your mind?
• 9:34
  Luke Hardin: Definitely, Massachusetts, a big one. New York is going to be a big one as well, really, just all of the Northeast.
• 9:41
  Tim Montague: So what sets CPS apart from other storage companies?
• 9:45
  Luke Hardin: We take a lot of our customer feedback and implement it into our products.
• 9:47
  Luke Hardin: One example that I could list of that is a rapid shutdown integration and our wire boxes that came directly from our installers and our designers feedback that we implemented straight into our products. So we like to do a lot of listening to our customers and implementing that into the new projects. And we think that energy storage is going to implement very well into our PV Luke, what else
• 10:15
  Tim Montague: should we know about ESS adoption is accelerating, but installers have a lot of anxiety their supply chain issues. There's probably 50 companies that make batteries. But the question is, can you get a battery installed this year that will work
• 10:31
  Luke Hardin: for 20 years? Yeah, I think the main answer on that one is going to be our service factor. We really pride ourselves in service at CPS, and we're proven reliable. You can see the investments that we've made in our service department, our Texas warehouses, also our performance engineers that we have down in Texas that are available on our hot. Line at all times, and we're also have field service all around the country, so we're definitely proven reliable and have that service when it
• 10:59
  Tim Montague: is needed. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US.
• 11:11
  Tim Montague: The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chint power systems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more. I'm with Joe Ross. He is the
• 11:57
  Joe Ross: director of Channel Sales and national accounts.
• 12:00
  Tim Montague: Storage is the bee's knees. Solar is great, but if you can't store the energy from the sun, you really don't have a lot of things that we need in the built environment, like resilience or grid services, et cetera. The value stack of storage is much more dynamic than just solar alone.
• 12:17
  Tim Montague: Tell us a little bit about how you see the storage market.
• 12:21
  Tim Montague: Especially in CNI, we're seeing
• 12:23
  Joe Ross: increased demand from consumers, but also industry.
• 12:27
  Joe Ross: New technologies are coming online, so there's going to be a greater demand in the future, and solar is really a significant piece of that solution in both the CNI and utility space.
• 12:38
  Tim Montague: The grid is growing in the demand on the grid is growing.
• 12:41
  Joe Ross: I think the grid is growing, certainly at a pace, but I think the demand for energy is growing at a significantly faster pace. You look at data centers, that's really one of the biggest drivers for energy use today, and it's already having an impact on the average utility bill. So being able to offset that with an add on component, product, such as a battery, is really significant.
• 13:06
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the cost for consumers and business owners are going up, sometimes as much as 30% in the last year, significant uptick in energy prices, and so that increases the value of solar and storage.
• 13:16
  Tim Montague: But tell us about the Northeast market in particular from
• 13:21
  Joe Ross: CPS perspective, CPS is the US leader in CNI installations in the last nine years. So we know where a lot of these projects exist. And the great news is we're still doing business with a lot of the customers that install these projects. So it's a very logical and natural progression to incorporate our battery solution, our 62.5, and 120, 5k to be battery into those projects that we know and are familiar with and have serviced.
• 13:49
  Joe Ross: And again, because these customers are repeat. They've been doing business with us for years, they feel very confident heading that addition to their systems, if I'm
• 14:01
  Tim Montague: a CNI customer and I'm installing solar, I might reduce my power bill by 50% 50 75% is a good rule of thumb.
• 14:11
  Tim Montague: With a battery, I can do way, way more. I could four or 5x those savings.
• 14:18
  Joe Ross: The return on investment for a battery addition is about three and a half to four years, sometimes significantly less, sometimes less than three years. So essentially, the battery pays for itself in three years, and then, as you mentioned, the reduction in the cost of the consumer is then moving forward for as long as the project is viable. And we're seeing projects run north of 20 years.
• 14:43
  Tim Montague: So if you're an installer and you don't have a lot of experience yet in storage, what do you need to know to dip your toe in the water and get in the game? Yeah, I think
• 14:55
  Joe Ross: the thing about batteries is it has been a relatively new technology, so that's a significant part of our customers. They don't have a lot of experience. What you really need to do is just essentially take a look at the asset that you have, determine how many more years you would like that to produce, and then just do a simple math equation of whether you want to accelerate the return on your investment by adding a battery piece to it.
• 16:11
  Joe Ross: Reach out to CPS. We've got experts that are now exclusively focused on the battery technology. We'll present you with a short form that we go through and just determine what the best solution set is, optimize your energy management system, come back with suggestions, and then really lock down what you would need to purchase for that project, and we would subsequently follow that up with a quote,
• 16:40
  Tim Montague: yeah, for installers to get. In the storage game, it's really not that heavy a lift. You need to find good partners who are technically savvy and understand the value stack. You need to think about the value chain and supply chain. That is a big pain point, obviously, in solar and batteries. But I've heard from other reps this morning that the lead times on batteries for CNI are not that great.
• 17:05
  Joe Ross: Yeah, currently we're at about 24 to 26 weeks on the larger systems. A little bit less for the smaller systems.
• 17:12
  Joe Ross: But another point that is really impactful, I think, is the fact that you're purchasing this solution from CPS, a company that you've used in the past.
• 17:20
  Joe Ross: You understand how we respond to service. You understand the importance of O and M, so it's the post sale support that really is our biggest differential. And with the battery, it's just it's a carry on of that same philosophy of taking care of the customer through the life of
• 17:37
  Tim Montague: the project. Is there anything else you would like the asset owners, developers and EPCs to know about Chint your culture of service and your culture of innovation.
• 17:51
  Joe Ross: I've been with a number of different inverter manufacturers, so I've seen a lot of changes, and by far, this is the most stable group that I've ever worked with. We've got projects that have been running for nine years. We're still completely backward compatible with all of our components for those projects, we have a real time technical support team live during us daylight hours, so if there's any issues with any of your systems, you can get somebody live on the phone. We have the ability to remotely look at this equipment and determine what the root cause of the issue is and then implement a corrective action, which we typically accomplish within about 48 hours. So what you're looking at in terms of O and M is much less downtime, much more uptime and much more power production.
• 18:37
  Tim Montague: I'm with Brian Baxter, CPS America, and we're going to be talking about the community solar industry and the CNI storage industry, which are both booming industries here in the US. So Brian, give us a little context. How long have you been with CPS, and
• 18:53
  Brian Baxter: what exactly do you do? Yeah, Tim, I've been with CPS for about seven years now, and it started as sales account manager, and now I'm Director of Sales for the east the business has grown over the years. We sell commercial products from three phase string inverters now, including energy storage, and we have skidded solutions as well. So there's a whole gamut and range of products that we can supply.
• 19:14
  Tim Montague: Skidded versus decentralized is always a consideration, right? That's one of the advantages of string inverters, period, is you can sprinkle them throughout the array, or you can put them on a centralized skid, which we call skidded string. Yes. Why don't you just give us a quick highlight of the pros and cons of skidded versus non? Yeah.
• 19:33
  Brian Baxter: One of the skidded string highlights is that you get a fully packaged equipment set, so it's a full solution. It can include the switchboard, the transformer, and all of the inverters racked, so you can just drop that into place. So from a timing perspective, from a speed of installation, it's going to be the fastest way to build a site. And so if you're under the gun in terms of the clock and trying to get your project completed, it is going to really quickly enable a faster installation, plus reduce on site labor, because
• 20:03
  Tim Montague: the skid is literally put together off site and then shipped to site and just dropped in. So it's very analogous to a central inverter approach, historically. But then you have the O and M advantages of being able to quickly swap out relatively small
• 20:19
  Brian Baxter: pieces of equipment as needed, exactly and actually, even beyond just the smaller piece of equipment, the our inverter is that two piece design, so the separable wire box and so you can swap out the power head alone even more quickly than having to actually D connect all of the wires and terminations that you have inside. So it's actually like basically twice as fast.
• 20:41
  Tim Montague: Let's take a minute and also explore your CNI storage. CNI storage is a hot market now in the US, we have good incentives in states like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, California. What is it that makes CPS CNI ESS
• 20:57
  Brian Baxter: solution unique?
• 20:57
  Brian Baxter: We're the first to market with a fully integrated package, which is the inverters plus the batteries, all in one complete unit. So really, all you have to do is run your AC connection and your communication cable, and that's an integrated package that's going to run right from the start. Beyond that, we have the highest level of fire safety certification achieved so far on a commercial product that's the CSA 800 which is an offshoot of the ul 9540
• 21:25
  Tim Montague: Yeah, those certifications and fire safety are a big deal in ESS. What are the lead times if you wanted to procure equipment? For example,
• 21:33
  Brian Baxter: each project is different. So again, our team can assist in terms of sizing that energy storage product for your particular site. And if you have. PV on that site or not, either way, we can look at how that product is going to help with your your demand, charge, savings, things like that. So how are the economics going to be affected? So our team can help with that aspect. And then in terms of our delivery capability, we'll say roughly eight to 10 weeks, typically, sometimes a little bit better, but yeah, so we're ready to go.
• 22:01
  Brian Baxter: We can support that market
• 22:03
  Tim Montague: very quickly. So Brian, anything else about the skidded string our audience should know?
• 22:07
  Brian Baxter: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of different options. We do have a configuration tool and a process that we'll work closely with our customers with because of the flexibility that we offer, you can get your project dialed in to what you need. So if you save harbor to transformer, for example, you can get that skidded string without it, right? It's just a smaller package. And so things like that, we have some flexibility that we can offer.
• 22:30
  Tim Montague: Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects.
• 22:55
  Tim Montague: I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you just go to clean power hour.com click on strategy and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much. I'm with Luke slickty, who's a returning guest to the show, and Andre malachev, who's a new guest.
• 23:27
  Tim Montague: Andre is an applications engineer, and Luke handles utility sales for CPS America.
• 23:31
  Tim Montague: There is a transition going on, not just the energy transition, but the transition from central to string. When you guys think about central to string, just give us a couple of bullet points on what developers are thinking about and what they may not understand with regards to this option that they now have.
• 23:53
  Andrey Malyshev: So the Centrals, you have fewer of these big inverters to build the big projects, so fewer things to manage and look after that was the traditional approach to that design. So more recently, the price of string inverters have improved, as well as their quality and reliability and features of those string inverters have also improved. So now you do not need to necessarily worry about the central inverter being a big piece of the project, so that when it is offline for any reason, you lose a big component of your project, big component of your revenue stream for potentially protracted downtime because of part shortage, or, let's say, availability of the technician, or any other such similar supply chain issues, bottlenecks, and it's much easier just to stock couple extra string inverters in your C can right on site, and let's say one of them goes down. It's only a small piece of the project.
• 24:52
  Andrey Malyshev: You might schedule a replacement, let's say in a week, or maybe in two weeks, and just have a couple guys go out your own staff have to wait for the tech to fly in with specialty components. You just have your own you're more in control of your own project when you have string converters,
• 25:12
  Luke Schlicte: if you have skin in the game, if you're an IPP, you're going to be attached to that project long term, you're going to really want to consider string it's just going to ensure that your P 50s estimates are attainable. The problem with central inverter obviously having that single point of failure, it can be that extended downtime. You have hundreds of spare parts that you have to keep stock of. There could be a supply chain constraint on one that could lead to extended down times. So really, there's a lot of benefits and having that modularity and building these projects, especially when you think about some of the constraints with projects, there's fewer and fewer flat rectangles available out there.
• 25:56
  Luke Schlicte: So when you have odd shaped parcels, you have challenging terrain, the flexibility that you get with string inverters is really going to ensure that you're maybe able to put more DC blocks on that parcel, and you're going to be able to ensure more generation.
• 26:17
  Tim Montague: So when we're thinking about retrofitting central inverters to string inverters, there's the capex and the OPEX, and this is always the calculus that has to be done.
• 26:28
  Tim Montague: How do you explain this to customers?
• 26:32
  Luke Schlicte: Every project is different, but where I think we fit in as a great partner when you're looking at retrofitting a project is we can, for lack of a better terms. Be a concierge in terms of we'll look at those plant sets and those single lines, and our applications Engineers Andre and his team, they will provide a proposal for everything that you're going to need to consider, not only from the inverter consideration, but is it going to need a transformer? Are there other considerations that you're going to want to think about, and we're going to look at it from the owner's perspective, and doing what we can to keep those costs down, to help ensure that it's going to pencil
• 27:16
  Tim Montague: when you go to other more mature markets, like Asia and Europe, they're further along in this adoption right of string inverters. Historically, the capex was driving the adoption of central inverters, but the OPEX argument, as CapEx has come down, the OPEX is swinging in your favor. It's just more economical to do O and M on string inverters. Yeah.
• 27:41
  Andrey Malyshev: Over the last couple of years, the string inverters have become more in line with Centrals in terms of CAP packs. Now this will vary project to a certain degree.
• 27:52
  Andrey Malyshev: There, for the most part, the difference is really shrunk to very small gap, if any, and in terms of OPEX, I mean, there's definitely string inverters are a lot more favorable choice, and many people recognize that because you're not dependent on one supplier for parts and technician and support, you have better flexibility with string and you're less reliant on just one large inverters. And as more people recognize that the string inverters are gaining more traction in the North American market also, though, traditionally, yes, the EPCs in North America have preferred installing Centrals. But from their perspective, it's faster and easier. But this has changed in the recent years.
• 28:39
  Tim Montague: I also think about uptime production is when you lose the central inverter, you're losing a bigger chunk of the production from your site.
• 28:45
  Tim Montague: Do you guys have any anecdotal information about uptime and string inverters? One of
• 28:53
  Luke Schlicte: our customers approached me at re plus in Vegas this last year and told me that they retrofitted a one megawatt project switched from central inverters to string inverters, and they said since they've done that, they've had all time highs and productions from that site, which I think is interesting, considering the panels are probably a decade old as well. But really, I think there's another talking about the OPEX piece. There's a really big benefit too, in the O and M side, where, if we're talking about a central inverter here, it's requiring specialized technicians that I hear in that three to $400 an hour range where string inverters, it's technician level O and M. We put a big emphasis on making our inverters easy to work on. We innovated the separable firebox and power heads. So we're talking about as quick as a swap that you can make on a failed power head. So I really think that's a big consideration when looking at utility scale, as well as, how do you keep those operational costs down?
• 29:57
  Tim Montague: All right?
• 29:57
  Tim Montague: Anything else you'd like to share with our listeners about central to strength?
• 30:03
  Andrey Malyshev: You know, the OP time is a big part of it, the OPEX, yeah, and it's very cost competitive offer these days. So yeah, please take a listen to Luke and his teams. He got something to offer, and it's great product for, and it's great product for, and it's great product.