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CATL Signs Record 200 GWh Battery Deal: What It Means for Storage · Clean Power Hour

• 0:56
  John Weaver: Right? Ladies and gentlemen, we're on the Clean Power Hour. Miss Tim Montague, he is having some internet issues because he's located on site somewhere with one of his clients. So you may see me jumping in to talk for him a little bit, but we're going to get going because it's 20 seconds in clean power hours coming. Hey Tim, welcome back.
• 1:18
  John Weaver: Hey, we're we're chatting. You know,
• 1:22
  Tim Montague: I hear you are live, John. I am live from Rockford, Illinois, today.
• 1:26
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour.
• 1:29
  Tim Montague: I'm your co host. Tim Montague, my internet is a little unstable, so John might have to carry the baton today, but it's a great day. It's sunny and 65 on November 14, which is nuts.
• 1:41
  Tim Montague: And how are you? And where are you? You're no longer in a hole in the ground. John, where are you?
• 1:47
  John Weaver: I'm in a different site now. The picture behind me is a project we have. That's Rochelle. She's our project manager on the roof. So I'm not in a hole right now. I'm still in my little closet hole in my office, but we're still in Cambridge, and it's not 65 here.
• 1:58
  John Weaver: It's in the 40s, low 40s. So I still gotta,
• 2:04
  Tim Montague: well, it's coming.
• 2:04
  Tim Montague: You always get our weather two days later. So nice weather on Sunday, maybe,
• 2:11
  John Weaver: absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, we're doing alright.
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: So I just wanted to give a quick shout out. I was at mosia, the Missouri Solar Energy Industries Association yesterday in St Louis. Good, small event, but very good event. Shout out to John the Executive Director. Thank you for your hospitality. I had a great time with my client, power sync solar. Shout out to power sink in southwest Missouri, residential and commercial installer, and now I here I am in Rockford. I'm a traveling man. I was in Toronto on Monday and Tuesday. John visiting WSI, the AI consulting firm that I am licensed through, and looking forward to not seeing you on December 2 and third, unfortunately, in Chicago for ICA, the Illinois solar and storage Association, we have our annual meeting, and then great networking event, and then re plus Midwest, and I think it's co joined with re community solar. I want to say something like that, but the Midwest is on fire. John, we have new legislation in Illinois. Three gigawatts of batteries are coming to Illinois. We already have a great battery incentive, but we're getting more, and we're getting VPPs, and life is good. How are you
• 3:34
  John Weaver: busy building building car ports? You know, it was really interesting to see the laws that you guys passed. I spoke with a couple of people in your state. Covered it for PV mag. So it was cool. You expanded the size of your solar program for the coming year to balance out the slowdown later because of the OBB right tax credit shifting, which was just really great. And I saw I was involved, not involved. I watched some of the people who were filing it, so it was kind of cool just to see them as they were writing it, then submitting it, then seeing the process, and then it happening. So, yeah, we
• 4:14
  Tim Montague: call it the omnibus energy bill. I can't remember what the official name is. It's got some esoteric name, but it's a good it's a good wind at our backs here, we already have a very good renewable energy credit program in Illinois for DG, including community solar and batteries, and now more incentives for batteries. And like you said, it's a lever, right? The states are an important lever, and because the feds are crunching down on us, trying to take away our incentives, really trying to squash clean energy, and it's just not going to work, John, because LCOE talks, and we are the LCOE in the world really well, we're cost competitive with gas anyway, and we're way more cost competitive than nuclear. So the question is, how are we going to get all these data centers online and juiced up? And my answer is, micro grids initially. And my colleagues at CIR are building data centers, designing and building data centers, and they see this that some of the data center operators design with micro grid as a phase one while they wait for their five year interconnection queue. Wait, but
• 5:31
  John Weaver: it's interesting, I guess. You know, I haven't officially had any data center Association. I don't know how many are going to get built in New England or Massachusetts, maybe, but, you know, I am seeing people talk about the price of energy as associated, or as they believe is associated. The data centers.
• 5:50
  John Weaver: And I had a residential customer who reached out and they said, Hey, can we get a quote install, etc? Said, Absolutely, we can help you. However, just want to let you know that, you know, we can't guarantee for the end of the year anymore, and so very specifically, he said, Yep, don't care about that. Data centers are coming. Price of energy is going up. I got a heat pump and an EV got a price of electricity is going up. Got to install solar. It doesn't matter. So it's like, wow, it's in people's minds. It's starting to become a thing, and it's in people's minds. And it's interesting. See what's happening around the nation too.
• 6:24
  John Weaver: There was a one out in Oregon. I didn't put it on our list. Maybe we should cover it, but there's a data center explicitly that was able to move through the queue faster and get approval to install, because batteries and solar are going with it initially. So it's going to happen, and it's kind of and I hope we're, you know, get pulled up. You know, the incentives are going away, but the price of electricity is going through the roof. I think on our list, I have a link to Bloomberg natural gas pricing to show that it's the highest price right now, not inflation adjusted, I think, but the highest price since the end of, well, it's not the end of, but since it fell down after the Ukraine war. So that's a,
• 7:01
  Tim Montague: that's a thing, you know? Yeah, I like to say there's only, there's only three guarantees in life. Now we used to have two, death and taxes.
• 7:07
  Tim Montague: Now we have growing energy prices, and that's a double edge. It is hard on consumers and I and I feel bad for low income consumers. You know, middle and upper middle class Americans can afford a 20% bump in their power bill, but low income people cannot, and so it is important that we have equity eligible, so to speak, incentives to allow low income residents to take partake in either rooftop solar or community solar, and we've done that here in Illinois. And that legislation, by the way I looked it up, it's the clean and reliable grid affordability act.
• 7:46
  Tim Montague: So you see the word reliability, and this is a thing that we all as energy professionals are going to be leaning into for the next two decades. Really, it's all about reliability and resilient, resilience and affordability. So it's not a bad name, reliable grid affordability act. I like it the CR GA Yeah.
• 8:12
  John Weaver: There was a lot of neat stuff in there. I Who did I speak with? You know, I'll tell you right now, because I covered an article. I covered it. And then Maria brie, who is our attorney, my company's attorney, she recommended I speak with somebody, and her name was Miss Katie McFadden, and she is a lobbyist. Yes, yes, she's a lobbyist. Yeah, that's why I ended up speaking with her. She gave us a really nice breakdown of all the things in it. It's a massive bill, I mean, just a bunch of things. So, so, yeah, so, good luck. You know, good luck. I'm gonna try and get out there and build and visit. I need to, need to visit. You.
• 8:47
  John Weaver: Don't Tim, it's been a
• 8:49
  Tim Montague: little don't try.
• 8:49
  Tim Montague: Don't try. Yeah, just on that plane, bro, yes, yes. All right.
• 8:52
  Tim Montague: All right, let's get into the news. You got a story about C, a T, L, C, A T, L's energy storage deal gives spark to Chinese battery stocks. What's the story?
• 9:05
  John Weaver: All right, so first, the main story is just that this really big deal was signed with this company called Beijing hyper strong. So hyper strong is the way I know them.
• 9:16
  John Weaver: They're a battery developer, and here's what it is, though, and like it led to the stock market popping a little bit, but they they made an order of 200 gigawatt hours of energy storage to be deployed over the next three
• 9:31
  Tim Montague: years. Can you blow that up at all? So, so it takes up the whole screen. Oh, you mean, like, right now it's a little, it's a little narrow on screen for our viewers. How's that? Yeah, you can go even, even wider.
• 9:45
  John Weaver: I don't know if it will go any wider, because now it's,
• 9:49
  Tim Montague: you can't just fully hit the expand button on the here.
• 9:51
  John Weaver: Watch what happens when I do that. I got a giant screen. It's like 36 inches.
• 9:54
  John Weaver: Tim, you know, can't do that, so that's cool. Yeah, so, but the thing about this 200 gigawatt hours, I did some math, and it's over here on this document, on our document, so I'm gonna read it off. But the math is that 200 gigawatt hours, if it was deployed in next year, it would represent almost 60% of the annual capacity to be deployed.
• 10:22
  John Weaver: And then if you spread it out over the next three years, and you pretend that battery capacity is going to expand a whole bunch over the next three years, it would still represent 10% of a massive global deployment capacity. So this deal with kale, who's the biggest battery company on Earth, this is the biggest battery deal ever signed. Maybe it must be, I don't know, but I think so. And yeah, and. Oh, sorry, Tim, but it was just a massive deal. Maybe, yeah, maybe, yes,
• 10:59
  Unknown: possible. I love it so,
• 11:02
  John Weaver: but it was so big that it moved the markets like and other things happened like, Cato, like, opened a deal with, uh, or something happened where cato's lithium mine is moving forward, and the price of lithium is moving up again. So there's just lots of battery stuff going on. And I think we I think you got to delve into it.
• 11:18
  John Weaver: I know Tim, you said you're working on a top secret battery project. That's cool as heck.
• 11:25
  John Weaver: Good luck. I have a few in my queue, trying to build a couple batteries and own them. So it's just, this is just big news recently, and it really kind of sparked my interest the capacity of this deal. It's just massive.
• 11:34
  John Weaver: It's relative to the whole world this deal, that's how and it moved the stock market one deal.
• 11:42
  John Weaver: So I thought it was cool.
• 11:44
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that's pretty cool. That one deal can move the stock market. And I like the name hyper strong, yeah. So another story on blue sky. Ess global capacity projected to be 340 gigawatt hours.
• 12:00
  John Weaver: Yes, yeah. So this is starting to do that math.
• 12:04
  Tim Montague: Let me share my screen. I think I have that. Doo doo doo doo doo doo,
• 12:10
  John Weaver: yeah. This is literally just breaking down the math relative to that deal, but showing what's happening in the rest of the world relative to batteries. And something real interesting is happening that was unexpected. The amount of grid tied energy storage, yet again, is confusing and surprising people. There were predictions that grid storage would only be 10% of global capacity, and the car batteries would just dominate and be 90%
• 12:41
  Tim Montague: you may have to do the sharing. I'm not succeeding in sharing that screen so
• 12:46
  Unknown: you're over two today.
• 12:46
  Unknown: Chrome.
• 12:50
  Tim Montague: Chrome does not like stream yard for some reason.
• 12:54
  John Weaver: All right, let me zoom in here, because I like to zoom out on a lot of stuff. So first you can see this, that math I did here. You know, the the global this is relative to the Catal deal. So this is me sharing it on blue sky. But here's that math, the global projected capacity, about 340 gigawatt hours. This one purchase would have been 58% of it over the next three years, even if I guesstimate 35% growth, this deal still would have been 10% of the global and here's a picture of what the global is going to look like.
• 13:28
  John Weaver: This is one of my favorite battery guys, Simon Moore is we should reach out to them. But this is kind of neat. 2025 we'll see that grid storage will become 20% of the global battery market of 1.7 terawatt hours, which is awesome. That means grid storage is going to be bigger than the entire battery market of the year, 2120 or 2021, that's two years, and it's just the grid portion. So our growth is just massive. I mean, you can see this here, the growth that's occurring and but those, just
• 14:05
  Tim Montague: those charts, are showing the EV storage, right?
• 14:09
  John Weaver: No, both. This is all storage. So the 70% the big number, that's EV, yeah. So if you come over here, so the yellow is EV, the orange is batteries, portables, and then other portables.
• 14:20
  Tim Montague: Oh, so the orange is the the orange is the grid storage.
• 14:24
  John Weaver: Yes, yes. And so you see, in 21 it was 8%
• 14:27
  Tim Montague: Yeah, through the four, you also see, you see the opportunity for vehicle to grid, don't you?
• 14:34
  John Weaver: It's so massive, it could take over the world. I mean, it really could, and we want to do that absolutely, absolutely the vehicle to grid opportunity. So there's a document I've seen, and I could share another article that's funny. Here's here's the thing.
• 14:48
  John Weaver: EVs are a defense strategy in China. I almost shared this in our group today, but I haven't finished reading it, but China has a one terawatt hour vehicle to grid policy goal statewide.
• 15:00
  John Weaver: They're thinking, yeah, they're they know this car, these cars are valuable, and the rest of the world needs to catch up, because China's going to pay attention and make use of it.
• 15:13
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And just for context, like the statistic that sticks in my mind is six terawatt hours is what the US could use to green our grid, six terawatt hours of storage. So a terawatt of storage is a lot of a lot of storage. And, you know, I get excited about 20 megawatt hours. You know, that's a large, that's a large CNI, so storage project, and so anyway, so I'm not surprised that China is leaning in to V to G, and we're still just, we're still just dreaming, really, about V to G.
• 15:50
  Tim Montague: Um. I don't think any market in the US has really fully embraced B to G has, have they
• 15:56
  John Weaver: not fully I mean, I only see tests. I don't know if I've seen like, a full embrace.
• 16:00
  John Weaver: No, I've only seen tests. And in California, maybe maybe a touch or two, in like Oregon and Washington, some of the smart places with this stuff, but no full embrace. There's something out in Virginia, you know, there's busses. There's more bus V to G than there is car V to G that I've been seeing in the news because, because they're looking for ways to maximize the value of busses, and you have third parties owning them. So there's, there's some dynamic, dynamism there, but not, not too far, yeah.
• 16:33
  Tim Montague: So should we talk about this off grid dual access tracker that you found? Yeah?
• 16:35
  Tim Montague: And wrote a story about in pieces. My
• 16:40
  John Weaver: two stories. These are my two stories for the week that you get to see me. Yeah?
• 16:42
  John Weaver: This is a cool little unit. Tim, you should get one, put it at your cabin off in the woods.
• 16:48
  Tim Montague: Well, I could just put in my backyard. Yeah, I don't. I don't have a cabin in the woods.
• 16:55
  John Weaver: We should work on that, Tim,
• 16:58
  Tim Montague: but this thing would fit in my backyard. I can't put solar on my roof because I have a huge shade tree of a I have a silver maple, which I love because it makes my back porch shady and it cools my house all summer long. And actually it's good insulation in the winter as well, even though it doesn't have leaves on it.
• 17:17
  Tim Montague: But this, this is like a seven kW tractor. You're going to have to Oh, yeah, there you go. You got it on screen? It's got a very unique, very unique design, though. What's the unique design?
• 17:30
  John Weaver: Yeah. So this is like a suspension system, bridge type of racking thing. You can actually see the wires down here a little bit easier, but they use this suspension instead of heavier metals. And the way they described it, they said it's just because of the wires, it just does a better job. And I talked about generation and how the wires might affect it. They say, Listen, we run our numbers with it so we know, we know what the numbers are. But this wire, he called it, a suspension bridge like system to keep the modules in place, and it, he said, it saves a 1000s of pounds of steel to hold it up. So it's,
• 18:10
  Tim Montague: uh, yeah, this is a system called Apollo, yes, from a company called solar flecked energy. You know anything about solar flecked?
• 18:20
  John Weaver: So solar flecked is actually northeast based, New Hampshire, Vermont based. They They are essentially not a spin off, but they're this dual access tracker has existed for the residential market for close to 1500 installs, and they decided to make a different solution for charging cars and parking lots. And that's what the goal of this is. It's to allow you to drop your charger into a car. They have level two chargers, and the the hard sell.
• 18:49
  John Weaver: And I spoke with the the Chief Operating Officer. I believe his name is down here somewhere, Rob Adams. The hard sell is that it's all look at that. Look how beautiful that is.
• 19:06
  Tim Montague: It's a little video here showing the tracker moving over the course of the day.
• 19:12
  John Weaver: And you can charge up to four cars during a day without connecting it to the grid, and it just smoothly works.
• 19:22
  Tim Montague: And you need a portable I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's portable too, not that you would be relocating it often, but it's completely self contained, right? Yes, you set it up, it sits there. It's got chargers. It absorbs solar radiation and converts it into charging for your Eb, pretty slick, yep.
• 19:47
  John Weaver: Now there are some physical attachments to the ground. So it does have a little bit of a attachment, but nothing's permanent. There's like the stakes that go into the ground. So, so that, yeah, but otherwise it's portable,
• 20:05
  Tim Montague: stabilized, yeah, the base. So do those spread very far from the base? Do you know how far from the base to those guy wires spread?
• 20:14
  John Weaver: I The guide wires connect to the base. It's not guide wires that hold it, it's stakes that are part of the base. So if you look at the base, it's
• 20:23
  Tim Montague: like, you mean just the pole has, like, a square base on it, yeah. So if
• 20:27
  John Weaver: you look at the base, there's actually a four legged base that's very heavy.
• 21:20
  John Weaver: It's concrete base that's pre cast concrete, and it has holes that are in the base. So you'll just kind of hammer a stick down into those holes. So, yeah, so that's it. That's the only attachment that's just to give it a little extra building per i don't know if I. Yes, that's a good one. I should have asked that one. That's, yeah, I, I'm not certain. I mean, I You're not connecting it to the grid and you're just dropping it off in the parking lot. What is there to do? But I would argue.
• 21:52
  John Weaver: I'd argue against it. So, so, yeah, it's a pretty cool unit.
• 21:59
  John Weaver: It's movable. They've been testing them in New England. Oh, Tim's Tim's cameras. Tighten it up. He's gonna come back.
• 22:06
  John Weaver: They've been testing in New England. They've been installing them for years for houses, and now they're moving to this field based thing and and the main goal is to let people charge while at work. And that's really the goal, just let you charge all day purely from the sun. So, so that's, that's my cool story there. So when Tim comes back, we can talk about it. Oh, Tim's back. Timothy, how are you?
• 22:36
  Tim Montague: Oh, boy. Oh boy.
• 22:36
  Tim Montague: That's all you gotta do.
• 22:39
  Tim Montague: Unstable internet, let's, let's move on. Though, John, we got, Yep, we got more news to cover,
• 22:45
  John Weaver: tons, tons. We'll talk about my next article. This one, this one. Got some questions about my title, Suniva tariffs, yes, yeah. Click on this article and read the title out loud to everybody.
• 22:59
  Tim Montague: Solar tariffs kill Americans. By John Fitzgerald Weaver, holy. Mo, that sounds, that sounds scary. John, why such a scary title?
• 23:09
  John Weaver: Because it's reality. Timothy, how's that? So this story is two part. First, if you want to skip to the second half, we could, we could talk about it. So there's, there's two things I covered in this story, the first half, or the first the second half of the story is showing research from proper scientists. You know, people who know how to do math.
• 23:29
  John Weaver: And the research says that solar imports have actually saved American lives by importing solar panels. So you got to keep going a little further. Keep going a little further in the article. Yeah, that's my portion. Yeah, we go down to these guys. So these guys say that there have been almost 600 preventable deaths in the United States. Oh, look how you size that so perfectly. Tim, almost 600 preventable deaths in the United States due to imported solar panels over a 10 year period. That's awesome. They ran the math. They looked at how much we saved in terms of burning gas and coal. And they showed like how it would work, and they even broke it down on different states and different regions. And so they had some nuanced analysis, and they worked, and they said, listen, solar panel imports have helped America, America,
• 24:18
  Tim Montague: and this is, let's just be clear, the the lives being saved is because we're reducing air pollution by Greening the Grid, right?
• 24:24
  John Weaver: It's straight up air pollution. That's like 98% of it. It's Yes, and so
• 24:30
  Tim Montague: when we push back on clean energy with tariffs, we're killing people. It's not the argument.
• 24:38
  John Weaver: So now scroll up and let me show you a very explicit answer that I did some good math on. So first, this chart shows an estimate of deaths per terawatt hour associated with an energy type.
• 24:51
  John Weaver: You look down, you see brown coal, regular coal, oil, biomass, natural gas, hydro, and then you see at the bottom the terrific trio, whatever the word is, of wind, nuclear and solar, just trivial, nothing, and and you so you get, you get this first you have this in your head. You know, air pollution kills people. We know this. It's bad. It causes lung issues. You know, if you're already unhealthy, it's just going to knock you over the edge. So you see this chart on our screen showing coal being terrible, oil, biomass, everything. Now if you want to scroll down a tiny bit, you can start to see the math the Suniva tariff from 2017 Sia, the Solar Energy Industries Association estimated that 10.5 gigawatts of solar wasn't installed because of the Suniva tariff. So I did the math for the year 2022, only. So this is just one year. Tim, 18 terawatt hours were replaced with fossil fuels because we didn't install solar. Tim, that led to 39% of that electricity being gas, and 20% being coal, 7.7 terawatt hours of gas, 3.6 of coal. You do some math down at the bottom, that extra burning of stuff, 19 deaths from the gas, 86 from the coal in one year. Somebody wrote me back after this, and they said, John, both of my kids, and they're from Illinois, they say both of my kids have asthma because we think of the nearby coal power plants. And it's, it's like, it's real. I mean, it's like, scroll up a tiny bit, little, tiny stat right above that pretty image. There's a plant, a coal plant, you got to keep going just a little bit more. Sorry, Tim, there's a coal plant that sold. Keep going in Pennsylvania. It just closed down tiny bit. And it showed right here three years after Pittsburgh. Yeah, coal processing plant closed in 2016 researchers showed a 42% drop in local emergency room cardiovascular emissions. That's your lungs. It's your heart.
• 27:14
  John Weaver: Explicit evidence that shutting off fossils helps people, and by not installing solar panels, you're hurting people, you're killing people, yep, and that's just a blunt truth.
• 27:28
  Tim Montague: This is why we can say with great confidence that we are creating a safer, healthier future for humanity by accelerating the clean energy transition, we are literally saving lives. And there are a few things so good that you can do in your life then save future lives, right? So get on the green energy train, people, let's roll we got to make the energy transition get to net zero, and then we got to decarbonize the atmosphere, which is a bigger problem, but it's also solvable with ocean iron fertilization. Check it out. All right, should we do another story?
• 28:08
  John Weaver: Plenty. We got lots of stories. Tim could never stop talking about stories.
• 28:16
  Tim Montague: Wind projects leads to better local schools and lift neighboring property values by about 3% according to a surprising new piece of research out of us this week.
• 28:28
  Unknown: Hmm, cool. How's that?
• 28:33
  Tim Montague: Renew economy? The title of the story, it's wind farms, lift rural property values, study fines and boost local schools. All right, I'll get this on screen, hopefully.
• 28:44
  Tim Montague: Let's see what's the story?
• 28:46
  John Weaver: John, the story is that everything, everybody's always talking crap about being near wind farm, saying, Oh, it's going to lower your property values, is garbage, and those talking points from the right wing monkeys need to be tossed in the trash, because that's just the blunt truth. There is a very clear logic for this.
• 29:06
  John Weaver: What's the reason parents choose to move into a particular reason?
• 29:15
  Tim Montague: Tim, yeah, schools are a good one. Schools safe neighborhoods, I guess.
• 29:22
  John Weaver: And one of the things, what do you hear in every single conference, whenever or not conference, every single permit meeting, they say, What are we going to do with our pilot tax, with our payment in lieu of taxes? How are we going to take care of things? Where's the money going to go? Almost every time you hear this amount of money will be sent to the school district.
• 29:44
  Tim Montague: Yes, a significant amount of money goes to local schools. When wind and solar projects are developed in rural communities, it's really a win for rural communities over over the base case, which is farming, or in this case, look, you've got these hilltops. There's really nothing economic happening on the hilltops. Maybe some sheep grazing, but those sheep are perfectly happy to graze under a wind farm.
• 30:12
  John Weaver: And so what's happening now is that there's extra money that's in the town, and they even showed that student to teacher ratios improved when there's a wind farm around, because they have more money. They have $800 more per pupil in order for each class. And think about that.
• 30:33
  John Weaver: You're going from 20 students, you know, that's 816,000 bucks for a class, eight extra, and now you have fewer. And so it's just, it just goes in the face of all the crap we hear. It's like, I don't want to live near this, but it's not real human being saying that. It's fossil funded funds. Thing you know, citizens for Responsible solar, just every body, just remind you, citizens for Responsible solar is a fraud. Be very careful if you ever see them, they're a false they're a coal funded organization, and this is just wrong. So people saying price drops are wrong. That's just just good thing to say. Not only that, it makes your schools better, and that's why people are moving there. They're like, Oh, wind farms come with good schools. What a nice thing to hear,
• 31:24
  Tim Montague: yeah, that's that is a very happy story about wind, wind development in Australia. And I don't doubt that there's many, many other stories in the same vein to be told, we just have to do the research. Alright?
• 31:40
  John Weaver: You ready to move on? Yeah, yeah, this is an easy one. It's just cool car charger.
• 31:50
  Tim Montague: The Reddit story, Reddit, Reddit, curbside car charging in Germany, yeah, look at that little thing. Oh, yes,
• 32:01
  John Weaver: see, I like everybody. Tim likes it before he's he hasn't even shared it yet. He's made like, five different noises. So, you know, it must be cool.
• 32:12
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that's that.
• 32:12
  Tim Montague: That charging station is built into the
• 32:17
  John Weaver: curb. Yeah. Now, the one thing I heard people complain about was water ingress, but I assume the Germans know how to make something that doesn't leak so, but look at that. It's just built into the sidewalk. How cool.
• 32:31
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that is definitely the future. John, I like to say, if you want to see the future, go to Northern Europe or China. And in this case, we're in Northern Europe, in Germany and and so, yeah, you're just scanning the code and downloading the app and paying for your electrons.
• 32:55
  John Weaver: I like it right then, yeah, I just thought that was neat. That's it, yep. So, so cool charging infrastructure.
• 33:02
  John Weaver: I'm a I have a new charger in my neighborhood. It's a fast charger, and it really changes standards, living standards, because now I can get home and not worry about going home with a with a lot of charge. I get home with 0% because then I could just go to the supermarket around the corner, plug in, and bam, I'm full, and so it's, it's really nice to have a fast charger in town, or not even in town, like four blocks. So having having local charging when you're in an apartment is wonderful. Oh, project of the week. Cool.
• 33:36
  Tim Montague: I've got a project of the week too. So stay tuned for that. That's not you, though. Who is that? Your slower array.
• 33:44
  John Weaver: That is Rochelle Dominique. She is our project manager, developer. If I get hit by a bus, she's the boss. Tim.
• 33:50
  John Weaver: She might be coming on the Clean Power Hour. Just let me know. So Rochelle is awesome. She does all the hard work. I just hang out, go on, you know, talk shows like with you. So, so this is Rochelle. This picture is actually from this morning.
• 34:05
  John Weaver: Rochelle is on site with Benji Bora. He's our general contractor license, and Scott Robbins, he's our new employee.
• 34:13
  John Weaver: He is our journeyman electrician. He's running O and M and a lot of our technical stuff for us to support our construction team. And we got Q Cell modules, 620, watts, as you can see there, we got an SMA inverter. We have four of those 200 KW AC and KB racking for the ballasted racking system, and it's just a nice square system.
• 34:34
  John Weaver: We filled up every inch of roof that we were allowed to build on because of the way the structural was so there were chunks of structural we weren't allowed to put any extra weight on, but we were able to max it out. And hopefully, year one, we're going to be in the 105 to one Oh 7% of electricity offset.
• 34:53
  John Weaver: We'll see. There's a couple of shadows to deal with that we couldn't do anything with, but we have extra wattage because we ended up being able to move up the line in terms of panel wattage as the progress progressed, but just real nice, real clean project. I'm happy that it's moving so fast. We're working with Newport renewables.
• 35:14
  John Weaver: They have an all union labor team, and this customer requested union labor to install the system, and so we we worked with a different installer, and they were great. They just, they just worked really fast and really sharp. I mean, that team was smart. So Thank you Stuart Flanagan and Newport renewables.
• 35:34
  John Weaver: They're awesome. If you're looking for a company, you should look for us first. But if you want somebody else, go to Newport
• 35:39
  Tim Montague: renewables, there you go. There you go. So cool.
• 35:43
  Tim Montague: Well, I'm going to put this on screen. I've got a project that my son Finn Montague is working manager for, win free solar out of Chicago. This is a project called Clary two. It's a 2.6 megawatt DC, 1.6 megawatt AC community solar project in near Danville, Illinois, 45 minutes east of where we live in Champaign. What I learned is, well, you can see the inverter, the inverter pad, so to speak, down here in the lower right corner, so it's centralized layout of string inverters.
• 36:26
  Tim Montague: They're using SMA inverters.
• 36:26
  Tim Montague: They are using q cells, solar panels, and they're using array technology trackers, nice. And the question that I have is the project. Owner, which I have to look up because I don't know that off the top of my head, but I'll find that while we're thinking, it's interesting, shout out to Jonathan Roberts. I believe Jonathan is the project owner, and so John this these 2.6 you know, we have a community solar market of up to five megawatts AC, but in your neck of the woods, they're in Massachusetts and New York.
• 37:15
  Tim Montague: What? What? What is the range of community solar projects that you're seeing built
• 37:21
  John Weaver: similar we go up to five megawatt AC as well, because we're a distribution community solar market, and there are definitely some bigger than, like, some very large DC sizings, because of the batteries that can be coupled dc coupled in Massachusetts. But I would say from 100 KW up to five megawatts AC, very same, probably very similar program.
• 37:43
  John Weaver: You guys max out at two to three megawatts AC. I
• 37:46
  Tim Montague: thought five megawatts now. Oh, five. We used to, we moved. We used to max out at two megawatts AC, but they expanded that with sija Awesome back in 2021, so it was saltage, Jonathan Roberts with saltage.
• 38:01
  Tim Montague: Jonathan is the Vice President of Development for saltage and great company. We'll be seeing them hopefully in Chicago in a couple weeks, here at the ICA meetings and the Midwest, the RE plus Midwest. All right, should we do one more?
• 38:22
  John Weaver: At least trying to kick me off the show. So we're like, all right, which one we're going to pick? We got, we got the Hyundai mega plant, which looks so cool on the inside.
• 38:32
  John Weaver: Man, you should click on that one. We could also talk about, how about this one? In Australia, there's a politician saying that they're going to make all electricity retailers be forced to offer three hours of midday free electricity.
• 38:52
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I saw this story and again, this is from Australia, right? Yes, sir.
• 38:57
  John Weaver: Now there's some negatives here. Giving out free energy means something. It means we're not able to figure out how to pay for it yet, but batteries are coming, and we're going to figure out how to manage this differently. But it's just this is like the weird dream of too cheap to meter too much electricity to even pay for it.
• 39:15
  John Weaver: This is what they said fusion would be, and now it's literally happening in Australia right now in the middle of the day.
• 39:25
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the funny thing, the funny thing about this photo that I love is I know what kind of trees those are.
• 39:31
  Tim Montague: Those purple flower trees are called jacarandas, and they have really funny seed pods that look like turtle shells. They're about that big around. So if you ever go to San Diego, they have Jacaranda trees in San Diego, which is how I know about it.
• 39:44
  Tim Montague: But look at all that solar too, right? The resi, resi solar penetration in Australia is what, John, do you have any idea?
• 39:53
  John Weaver: No, but I do know that in some regions, it's like 90% of daytime demand. And like Victoria, like it's, it's, there's so much residential rooftop solar in Victoria. I believe the province of Victoria, or the state of Victoria, that it can reach up to 100% of daytime electricity demand. So on a national basis, though, I don't know, but they had a lot.
• 40:19
  Tim Montague: I just asked perplexity, because that's the answer engine that you all are, dear listeners, need to be using perplexity.ai. And it's about 40% penetration now in Australia, wow, wow, 4.2 million homes and small businesses now have rooftop solar, and I think it's de rigueur in Australia now to do a battery as well, right?
• 40:39
  Tim Montague: The attachment rates of storage.
• 40:45
  Tim Montague: Are very high. I'm going to look that up now too.
• 40:49
  John Weaver: There's we spoke about this a couple of weeks ago. The storage attachments rate is now exploding, which is driving more solar. It's the first chance maybe we're getting to see solar being pushed by storage. Because of growing storage, it's just pulling solar with it. We covered it last week. It was a residential solar incentive that's just going through the roof, and it's pretty cool.
• 41:16
  Tim Montague: Yeah, they've reached about 30% countrywide on new installs. So you know, we have tremendous variability here in the US, Market to Market, right in in California, we have upwards, I think, of 80% attachment now for ESS and I'm, you know, I'm ready for Illinois to go there. We're, we're probably. Closer to 10% maybe 15 but with this new VPP legislation, I think that's going to create a nice incentive for more ESS and and I don't know if I've talked about it here, John, have you checked out base power in Texas?
• 42:00
  Unknown: By chance? Base power, I don't think so. Tell me about Yeah, so
• 42:04
  Tim Montague: in Texas, in ERCOT, they're installing these 40 kilowatt hour batteries. They they literally are designed to look like an HVAC unit. They're a square design, and base power installs them as a as third party owned facilities, right?
• 42:22
  Tim Montague: So you pay $500 down as a consumer, and then you get a battery, and then you rent it for $20 a month, and in return, they're doing energy arbitrage and giving you some piece of that savings. And then you have resiliency in the case of an outage for some period of time.
• 42:41
  Tim Montague: Obviously, you could have long term resiliency. If you have solar paired with that battery.
• 42:49
  Tim Montague: You don't have to do solar, but you can and but just having a big battery, right? 40 kilowatt hour battery, you can do off grid with a 30 kilowatt hour battery. For many homes, if you have a solar array, like a seven KW solar ray. But that battery is a service industry is coming, and I think we're going to see a lot more markets adopting that.
• 43:13
  John Weaver: So, I mean, all right, it's happening. It's already happening. I you know, there's we, I could fill this whole this could be the battery show. Tim, people wanted it to be if you told me one week, John, let's just do batteries, batteries, batteries. I could do it. Because every week there's there's just stuff happening, technology, there's volume advancements, there's just new deals, new sizings, new everything. Europe's getting its biggest battery now, a one gigawatt, four gigawatt hour facility. So the whole world is about to explode with batteries.
• 43:45
  John Weaver: And you're going to see me come back in the next year and be like, Oh my gosh, record, record, record capacity, factory capacity factor, and it's just gonna, it's gonna be the thing
• 43:59
  Tim Montague: you can imagine.
• 43:59
  Tim Montague: Like, if you're building data centers too, you just build a big battery farm next door.
• 44:04
  Tim Montague: Combine it with wind and solar, and then you don't have to be so dependent on that interconnection. And it's good for the grid, right? Six terawatt hours of batteries.
• 44:16
  Tim Montague: It's coming. Well, I gotta run John, so let's wrap this up. I want to thank all our listeners and encourage them to check out all of our content at Clean Power Hour. Com, tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do, and find us at a trade show, or reach out to me on LinkedIn, how can our listeners find you?
• 44:36
  John Weaver: John? Commercial solar guy. Com, it's a favorite place. LinkedIn, I'm always there. Commercial solar guy calm. We got a nice thing there.
• 44:43
  John Weaver: Got a cool number 5084999, stun.
• 44:49
  Tim Montague: Oh, nice. And if you're ever in Boston, that's where Johnny's in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I just call it Boston. It's easier, but, and you can find me in Champaign, Illinois, also, which is a lovely place. If you're ever in central Illinois, say hello with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks so much.
• 45:07
  Tim Montague: John Weaver, you.