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Building Winning Teams and Revolutionary Products with Bryan Wagner | EP276 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Bryan Wagner: I think the best team has to get trained, has to build rapport, our winning culture, we spend a lot of time on to ensure the team gets the best training in the whole industry. And by doing that, in developing the team, by developing the individuals, one of the first places you start with is becoming a product expert.
• 1:10
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:21
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition.
• 1:37
  Tim Montague: We're here at inner solar San Diego, in the chimp Power Systems booth with none other than Bryan Wagner, the president of CPS America.
• 1:43
  Tim Montague: Welcome back to the show, Bryan, thank
• 1:47
  Bryan Wagner: you, Tim.
• 1:47
  Bryan Wagner: Appreciate you being here. What a great show. It's been it's
• 1:52
  Tim Montague: always good to see you and the team. What a team, the team at CPS is the key differentiator, in my opinion, and the opinion of your customers, as I've been talking to them today. So Bryan, you've got some cool products here in three phase string inverters.
• 2:08
  Tim Montague: You now have a single phase string inverter, and you've got a very new CNI storage product, aka Gonzo. What are the things that your customers may not know about, that they should really know about your product line? I would
• 2:27
  Bryan Wagner: say the hardest thing about launching new products and even new categories is everything's a priority. I think, as a company, you mentioned having the best team, I think the best team has to get trained, has to build rapport, our winning culture, we spend a lot of time on to ensure the team gets the best training in the whole industry. And by doing that, in developing the team, by developing the individuals. One of the first place you start with is becoming a product expert. Start with the products that do sell, things like our 5060, kilowatt or 101 25 the workhorses of our business. Last year we did over one gigawatt in the 600 volt category. This year, we're really excited about our 250 600 volt, which we got UL on in November. Our skidded string is really, I would say, game changer. No one else that we know of is doing this, meaning we're putting a 250, kilowatt, 600 volt string inverter in a centralized string approach, because we offer two options, distributed or traditional string inverter and centralized string inverter and the centralized what's nice is you can put the remote DC combiners out in the field, which we make, all that we make those, or we're launching that product as well. We'll make the remote DC combiner. And then you can have all of your inverters, you know, it on one pad. You don't even have to lay like there's no wiring needed, because we factory wire everything now, so that'll come and drop in, very much, ready to finally compete with central like, from a labor perspective, with that product, I would say, truly, that's right up there with Gonzo, in terms of my interest level and how big we know that business can probably go from one to even maybe double the business this year, gigawatt wise. But Gonzo is a category that, if you look at string inverter, probably from 10 years ago, when we got into it, I think that's where CNI ESS is today. Can you make the complex simple? Can you make a bunch of parts and pieces? We used to have a PCS and a battery cabinet, two separate pieces, double the shipping, double the logistics, double the labor, and now it's all in one, and so we call it the all in one. And I feel like we can, we have capacity to make over 3000 units this year. We're talking the growth in that category will be tremendous. We just want a job where it's 25 car car dealerships, and in our whole history, probably in the last five years, we've only done 20 to 30 energy storage projects.
• 4:51
  Bryan Wagner: Now we have one single customer that has almost the entire install base, and it's starting to scale. So I'd say seven, eight, maybe 10 years ago, it's similar to that. Every project in California that's new now for new builds gonna add storage. So we're excited that
• 5:07
  Tim Montague: car dealership portfolio. Is that in California by chance? Yes, yeah, I figured.
• 5:10
  Tim Montague: And we have an upcoming webinar on the 13th with alexity, great partner of yours in the building management space. I think I heard you say, Bryan, that you now have delivered over 10 gigawatts of inverters in the US market. Yes,
• 5:27
  Bryan Wagner: we had some minor errors and calculations, and so we did the math. We finally worked with overseas team, came up with the final results is approaching 10.5 gigawatts. So yeah, this year will definitely surpass probably 1213, gigawatts deployed. We're aiming for 15 gigawatts deployed, probably the next big milestones, 20. That would sound cool.
• 5:49
  Tim Montague: So if you're working in. Commercial, but not doing large commercial yet. You may not even know about CPS, but they are the number one three phase string inverter manufacturer for large CNI. So reach out to me at Clean Power hour.com. I love talking to EPCs, installers, developers, about large CNI and solar and storage is the peanut butter and jelly, of course, and with things like nem 3.0 and frankly, this trend is nationwide. Bryan, right, the value of solar electrons is being devalued by hJS and utilities, and it's okay, because we have batteries now you can store those solar electrons and use them at a later time. Batteries are so valuable, there's a stack of value in a battery because a it works 24/7 unlike solar, we love solar, but a battery works 24/7 if it charged up and it provides grid services, it provides reliability in the case of an outage. So tell us a little bit about the Gonzo, and that you talked about how the container is now a single container, right? There's this constant push towards making products more cost effective, Money Talks. Tell us about the Gonzo, why you were able to go to a single container on this it's a 250 260 61 261 61 kWh.
• 7:14
  Bryan Wagner: It's a 125, 125 sorry, 261, kilowatt hour battery all in one, and meaning the PCs and the battery cabinet, which used to be separate, are now combined in one. And so it's simple for shipping, for installation, labor is one last thing to install. And I think what we're excited about, we launched CSPs, our chintz smart power services brand, so we'll be offering a service package with the battery. So like long term service agreements come along with the package, and you get a company like Chint that's been around a long time, but yeah, it's a really, it's it's not a light product compared to what we're used to in string. It is about 2000 pounds. But we just got creative. We were at one of our partners this week, and we said, hey, can you skid this? And so now we can. We're thinking we can pair four of them make a one megawatt hour offering, and American skids. We make the product overseas. For right now, we make everything into the pack, the rack, all the cooling. It's liquid cooled.
• 8:17
  Bryan Wagner: Everything's from us. And the only thing that really we source in that product would be the cell. What I'm excited about for storage, commercial energy storage, especially more so than for commercial solar is, I love real estate, and I feel like commercial building owners have not really thought of their commercial building as a true energy asset like they can in the future, meaning you can actually look at energy arbitrage when you want to sell things. We have software and hardware combining with electricity that can you know, using algorithms predictions from the past to predict the future and take advantage of all the different load profiles that exist in the different buildings that are out there. And if you think about all the data center and all the things happening in AI and all these things that are leading into this perfect kind of next decade, the Clean
• 9:09
  Tim Montague: Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over eight gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand and is America's number one choice for solar plants, now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chint Power systems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more.
• 9:56
  Tim Montague: We love technology, sustainability and people, but as we started this interview, really it is the people that make the world go around in our last few minutes together, Bryan, tell us about your approach to team building and making sure that you're providing the absolute best service of any company in America. You
• 10:22
  Bryan Wagner: really have to train your your team and your individuals on the team as if they're your number one customer. They're certainly your number one asset, your people.
• 10:35
  Bryan Wagner: But then how the interaction works with the team is really important. So I'm a former athletic background, so I think of it very much as any good organization. You have to be able to think of that player that may not be on the field, contributing Day in. Day out, but wants to be I was talking to one individual in particular.
• 10:53
  Bryan Wagner: They felt underutilized, and they had a great engineering background and things. And so what do you what do you want to see your career progression? To do? It sounds very basic. It sounds very simple, but I think people fail to be human and realize you got a human you're working with. Everyone has a special talent. Sometimes they don't know what that potential is inside themselves, and you got to look for that talent that maybe you know the business a little bit better than they may be more experienced. So how do you tap that talent that gets that out of them? And I've been here almost 10 years, just like breakthrough, we look for ceilings. How do you find that ceiling and break through that ceiling and unleash that kind of energy that you have to grow yourself? Right?
• 11:39
  Tim Montague: Indeed, everyone has their special talent. I'm Tim Montague, check out all of our content at Clean Power hour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. And Bryan, how can our listeners find you
• 11:52
  Bryan Wagner: they should listen to clean power hour. And I do think you do a tremendous job, and we're super thankful for all the hard work you put in for educating the solar plus storage audience out there. So that's certainly one way we have a lot of good team, Evan and Joe and Kelly all on your show. Good way for your audience to engage with us, but also chin Power systems.com, like all the normal social outlets, you can find us.
• 12:18
  Tim Montague: I truly couldn't do it without you. So thank you for the partnership. I'm super grateful. We're just getting started. It's true. And with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague, thank you, Tim. Hey man, thank you. Yeah, you.