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How the Budget Reconciliation Bill Could Impact Your Solar Business · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague. Your host today is May the 30th. 2020, 2020 2025, and we're bringing you the latest solar, storage and other renewable energy News. Welcome to the show. My co host John Weaver,
• 1:08
  John Weaver: Hey, Tim, 2025 Yes, that is today's year. It was funny.
• 1:14
  John Weaver: Very nice. See you. See you today, enjoying building solar every day and keeping up with it, interconnection stuff flying around.
• 1:27
  Tim Montague: How are you? How are you rolling with the solar coaster? That's what I want to know emotionally, psychologically. It's been a very tumultuous year, and it's it got even more tumultuous with the announcement of the big bad bill, otherwise known as a budget reconciliation bill, which could really be painful for residential solar and commercial solar. How are you reacting to that so far?
• 1:55
  John Weaver: Well, it's challenging. The residential industry is no longer potentially going to have a tax credit, and that means the price of everything is sort of kind of gone up 30% but in reality, people were taking that full payment out of pocket anyway, so yes, and then what's the discount that they get? You know, hamburger today versus a hamburger tomorrow? Is it 10% in their hearts? Is it 20% to tax credit? Maybe it's spread over a couple of years. So maybe we can drop our price 10 15% and put pressure on everyone else and say, Listen, guys, you want us to be able to still sell you need to give us better pricing.
• 2:30
  John Weaver: So I'm, uh, I'm actually hopeful for my company, particularly because we don't do lease products. We do straight cash.
• 2:37
  John Weaver: So, you know, with the lease stuff, um, that's taken a lot of hits. Mosaic, it looks like they're going under as a lease company, yep. And that was a big product. Hearing that from PV magazine, saw it on Reddit a couple of days ago. And so, you know, I feel like we'll be okay as a company, but my company does, like, I don't know, an installation every week, you know, that type of thing. So we're not the market. There's gonna be a lot of pain in the market. There's gonna be a lot of margins tightening, because people are going to figure that out. Because now it's going to be a different price. You have to be somewhere in between 30% I think, I don't think the prices have to drop 30% to keep up, but something, I gotta drop something. Yeah,
• 3:26
  Tim Montague: I wanted to talk a little bit about this, because it is the gorilla in the room, and everyone's thinking about it, and this is how I see it.
• 3:31
  Tim Montague: And we're not done yet. Congress passed this bill. I mean, the The House passed the bill. It go, it's now in the Senate, and that could take several months for them to grind on it. They two things are present. For me, the industry has ups and downs.
• 3:49
  Tim Montague: 2025 was already a tumultuous year. And so, you know, potentially a down year. And then, and then this, and we thought, you know, the Trump administration might take a scalpel to the IRA. It currently is a sledgehammer. That's the expression. I like SEIA, Solar Energy Industries Association has done an analysis, and they think that this bill could mean the loss of 330,000 jobs. 331 factories closed or canceled, and $286 billion in local investments erased. So this is non trivial. Clean energy is a big part of the US economy now, and a lot of these projects are in red states. So that's what I don't quite gather is who masterminded this, knowing full well that this was going to hurt many, many of their core constituents. But good companies will survive. The industry has gone through ups and downs before good companies will survive. There's a lot of bad companies in the solar industry, and they give the industry a bad name. So I would love to see more of those companies go bye, bye. I don't know if mosaic was a bad company, but I don't know many people that are super fond of mosaic. On the other hand, either,
• 5:28
  John Weaver: I didn't know that.
• 5:28
  John Weaver: I don't know much about mosaic.
• 5:31
  John Weaver: We've never really done lease products for a residential company. Yeah, I know in general, the lease companies with the dealer fees, have never had a great general support, but that's just what the market was made of.
• 5:48
  Tim Montague: Yeah? So. So stay tuned the the the advice I give my EPC clients is diversify, lean heavily into storage, check out companies like electricity.
• 6:02
  Tim Montague: They were on a webinar with myself and CPS and a company called Freedom solar out of Colorado earlier this year, electricity manages the building, HVAC system and other systems. So it's kind of like turning your building into a battery. I think the solar plus plus world is the future of the solar industry. If you're a solar only installer, you're in for a world of hurt. If you're a solar battery and other installer slash consultant, I think that there's hope. And you know, you can add a lot of value. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in the built environment, if we get savvy and use the technology that we have.
• 6:54
  Tim Montague: Check out electricity, E, L, E, X, i, t, y, that is my new favorite building management system company. And
• 7:04
  John Weaver: have you had them on the show recently? I'm guessing
• 7:06
  Tim Montague: we did a webinar with Casey Miller, the CEO, back in March, so he'll be back at some point. I interviewed their founder some years ago, but, but yeah, just been learning more and more about electricity, and I think that they're on to something
• 7:28
  John Weaver: I would like at some point to learn more about Home Energy Management. The first system I really learned about was from my favorite battery manufacturer, or residential Sonnen. Sonnen, I don't know exactly how to say the name, but they had a great product that they put out. I think it's the Eco the Eco line, I can't remember, and it has home management software built into it. It continues, contains connections with, I believe it was smart meter switches. So smart breakers, smart breakers from Eaton, I believe the article I wrote, and it's just a nice piece of hardware, and I just like this on a battery. I like their VPP, etc. It's just so, so, yeah, I want to learn more about resi stuff. I'm doing a nice residential system right now. I'll have some pictures of it soon, once we install it, but it's going to integrate a nice a Generac and a Generac generator, a End Phase battery and phase output management, a few other things to make a nice system for this customer, and it just ties together nicely. So, you know, a little more than just solar, as you were saying, that's I was thinking about that as you said it, it's solar plus, because we're tying in two or three pieces of hardware and so anyway, coincidentally,
• 8:58
  Tim Montague: I'm interviewing norm Taff at the Midwest Expo in two weeks on on June the 10th.
• 9:01
  Tim Montague: If you don't know about the Midwest Expo, check it out.
• 9:04
  Tim Montague: Midwest solar Expo. It's now an inner solar show. Inner solar bought the show from the founder Jake rosemary, but norm tough is the executive in charge of generax storage division, and they bought eco be the smart thermostat company, right? And so now they are leaning heavily into the smart home energy space as well. They're well known, of course, in the backup generator space. And then they bought, I can't remember the battery company they bought, but they bought a good battery company.
• 9:40
  Tim Montague: And are, you know, very active in the resi and now expanding into the CNI storage space as well. But electricity, just to, just to be clear, electricity is a CNI service company. See, I call it a software as a service.
• 10:02
  Tim Montague: But,
• 10:03
  John Weaver: okay, okay, so that's commercial, not so I didn't even know, I don't know very many on the or no, too much on the commercial side. So that'd be interesting to listen to. All right, I got good news.
• 10:12
  John Weaver: Okay,
• 10:16
  Tim Montague: good news. What's that? Just
• 10:19
  John Weaver: because there's so many, like, terrible things that are, like, ah, stressful. The first item, actually, I guess now the second item that's on our list over here, waffle house, it's getting fast chargers. Yeah,
• 10:34
  Tim Montague: I love Waffle House. I wish we had Waffle House in Illinois. Maybe in Southern Illinois, they do, but Waffle House is a southern thing. Where do you have waffle house near you? Nowhere
• 10:47
  John Weaver: near me? It's just when I go south to visit my family and go home. Once I hit North Carolina, roughly, maybe probably Virginia too. I bet you Pennsylvania as well. Maybe out west in New York, upstate New York. We'll have to see. I don't know if there's too many in Massachusetts, yeah, I think it's a southern thing. It definitely, definitely a lot more southern. There's the Waffle House hurricane index.
• 11:08
  John Weaver: Are you familiar with that by any chance? Timothy, no. So I waffle houses. No, you know, Waffle House management. They're conscious of hurricanes quite and they prepare for them. And FEMA, it was a joke that FEMA would watch waffle houses for when they opened, for how to rate areas, or something like that, and say, okay, the Waffle House is open. It's now safe for general populations to go back because there's food available.
• 11:37
  John Weaver: But the Waffle House was like the first one, and they always open quickly and aggressively.
• 11:40
  John Weaver: And so there's something about the hurricane Waffle House index. So just you know, if Waffle House is open, it's okay.
• 11:46
  John Weaver: Tim, everything is going to be okay.
• 11:52
  Tim Montague: Apparently, they think EV charging is is important.
• 11:57
  John Weaver: Think about that hurricane hits, you get waffles, you get eggs, and your car charges
• 12:04
  Tim Montague: fast DC, fast charging. Interesting. So who is the Okay? It says EV charging, arm of British oil giant BP, just announced the strategic relationship with American diner chain to bring DC fast charging to a network of Waffle House locations. This story comes to us from electric. Michelle Lewis, May 20, 2025, waffle office is getting DC fast chargers. This is cool. Are they gonna do it at all their stores?
• 12:38
  Tim Montague: Do you think?
• 12:42
  John Weaver: Probably not. I mean, there's so many waffle houses, like there's waffle houses in some places every other stop. So you don't want DC fast charges that often, but no, yeah, probably not.
• 13:46
  Tim Montague: Oh, it mentions this waffle house index too.
• 13:49
  Tim Montague: That's funny. Oh yeah, there it is. Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.
• 13:52
  Tim Montague: So BP is into fast charging.
• 13:52
  Tim Montague: That's, that's that. That's good. That makes sense.
• 13:59
  John Weaver: Makes absolute logical sense. You know, you gotta figure out the money.
• 14:01
  John Weaver: Gotta figure out the revenue off of vehicles. That's where they made their money. Yeah, different form of energy sale, the different form of sale, yep.
• 14:10
  John Weaver: So waffles, that was my good news. I wanted to start off good news just because, you know, everything else is rough. And I got other good news post too, so you can be entertained by all the cool records in California, if you really like that kind of stuff.
• 14:26
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So what's the read us the headline, and then I'll get the story up.
• 14:34
  John Weaver: Solar and battery output records. Solar and battery output records set as California continues aggressive ramp, and the records that are being set right now are kind of fun, concurrently, intertwined, solar is peaking just over 21 gigs recently, and battery output just last weekend or two weekends ago went over 10 gigs for the first time. As well, the state announced that they broke through 15 point something, gigawatts in April of total capacity deployed, which is a healthy chunk. So,
• 15:12
  Tim Montague: yeah, the key of installed energy storage capacity, yeah,
• 15:16
  John Weaver: that's good. And there's, this is probably greater than 3.75 hours of or greater, definitely greater than three so it's definitely greater than 45 gigawatt hours of capacity. I would put money it's greater than 54 gigawatts, because a whole bunch of it all the utility scale is four hours stuff. So like 80, 90% of the capacity is four hours, and then 10% is two to four two to four hours. Maybe some of it's six, you know, but it's gaining on an average of four. So it's really close to 60 gigawatt hours.
• 15:48
  John Weaver: That's what I want, a sales pitch. That's a sales guy in me, yeah. Engineer, yeah.
• 15:54
  Tim Montague: So John is just saying, if the capacity is 15 gigawatts, that translates into 60 gigawatt hours. Potentially, if it's a 4l battery,
• 16:05
  John Weaver: yeah, like, we break, I, this is my article. So like, near the bottom, and I break into the percentage of hours per capacity, type, residential, commercial and and utility, and all the utility scales, the big stuff. So, but, um, but, yeah. So anyway, just California is growing. What's really interesting is that the peak of the solar number is now going up, partially because the batteries are absorbing up to eight gigawatts in the middle of the day. Eight, and that eight gigawatts of capacity would have been curtailed solar. So now we're seeing solar growth as a result of battery growth.
• 16:55
  John Weaver: Batteries are now enabling solar power. Yeah, and I think that's
• 17:01
  Tim Montague: yeah. Batteries are a great way to attack the duck curve. I mean, on this graph, that's on screen right now, you see the battery curve.
• 17:08
  Tim Montague: The Purple Line has somewhat of a duck curve shape, but this is just the generation curves. This is not the demand curves. The demand curves is would show us the true duck well, you
• 17:21
  John Weaver: can see it. You can see it. Look back, you can see the purple during the daytime, how deep it goes? Yeah,
• 17:28
  Tim Montague: right here. This is where the battery's charging, right? Yes, yes, when the solar is cranking, and that's why batteries are great, right? You can store energy when the photons are free, and then release the energy when the kWh is expensive in the evening, and that's how you create value with the battery
• 17:50
  John Weaver: load shift, though, so solar powered evening peak battery records being set. This is the capacity thing, where they show how much capacity from each product utility scale is,
• 18:15
  Tim Montague: I lost your audio.
• 18:15
  Tim Montague: You're muted. You You are muted,
• 18:37
  John Weaver: right? Maybe I'm unmuted. Now,
• 18:40
  Tim Montague: that's good. I don't know how that happened.
• 18:42
  Tim Montague: Sorry.
• 18:43
  John Weaver: Well, it goes to do to do so anyway, on and off. So that utility scale, that 13.2 that is probably 98% four hours.
• 18:54
  John Weaver: The commercial is probably three to three and a half hours, maybe two and a half to three and a half. The residential, probably similar ish two and a half to three and a half. So that's, you know, that ratio probably comes up to like 55 gigawatt hours.
• 19:07
  John Weaver: And then on the right side, that's the goal by 2020, 2045, right? Now, what's interesting is that the rate of growth here is that we could blast through 30 gigawatt hours or 30 gigawatts in like five years. In fact, there's a scientist who says the rate of growth that's been going on would suggest, like a year and a half more 1.2 or 1.5 years. So we're growing really fast. Our own ambitions at this point are now. What would stop California from deploying enough batteries?
• 19:47
  John Weaver: Because we can do 30 gigawatts.
• 19:47
  John Weaver: We have the costs, we have the technology. It's really about optimizing the deployment. I think we're in a different phase now, I think with the collapse of battery pricing, as long as these stupid tariffs, and we could talk about stair tariffs after this, but as long as these stupid tariffs don't say don't stay stupid, we should be able to whip California's solar plus storage question like, right now we could do it. We're now at that stage. It's going to keep getting better as we deploy it for 10 to 15 years. But right now we have the technology done, like, you know, whatever cool soundtrack we can do it. We have the batteries, we have the solar. We're done. How do we how we do it? That's the next question. That's the real question, I guess, because that's the one that's going to be answered.
• 20:39
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the technology adoption curve really does work. You know, I think the stat is, as you double the adoption of a technology, the price falls by, I don't know, 40% or something, some big amount. And so it's a good thing, and we're going to see a lot more storage on the grid in CNI and residential right now, a lot of it is utility, as you could see there in that graph in John's story. But that's changing. Also. What's next?
• 21:23
  John Weaver: Tariffs? We talk about the whipsaw tariffs that are ongoing,
• 21:28
  Tim Montague: so brutal. This is an article,
• 21:30
  John Weaver: yeah, this first article is about two weeks ish old, and then the second one is like yesterday and still being updated, like it's live, ongoing entertainment. Timothy, yeah, yeah. If politics is now fun. So the first articles shows China and Trump, which is the major source of batteries. So my mind has a lot of batteries on it these days as having a 90 day tariff pause. And so the tariff for batteries fell to 30 or for to China in general, fell to 30% and that means to tariff on batteries is somewhere in the 40 to 60% range, which is reasonable. If batteries are now going to cost 100 bucks per kilowatt hour, we can manage it.
• 22:15
  John Weaver: We'd like it lower. This would put it back to 2023 prices. We prefer it in 2026 pricing. But it doesn't it means California can keep going with their revolution. Is really what I would want to say. I don't know exactly, though, because I'm not in the battery world, the big battery world, but I think, based on some math I've done, at 40 to 60% tariffs, batteries in California can make it happen with their expensive ass grid is really the key. We'd love to see it go much lower, though. We'd love to be buying some shipping containers at 70 bucks, 60 bucks from China, and then doing 40 to 60 on that. But we'll see.
• 22:58
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So the US and China have announced a 90 day pause on their huge reciprocal tariffs while they continue negotiations with the effect of terrorists on batteries more than having to around 60% you know, there's also emerging news, John that the courts have started to conclude that Trump's executing tariffs without Congress is not legal, and that's
• 23:28
  John Weaver: the second article that's right here is exactly that, and it's whipsawing. So the court has, as of yesterday, said, Hey, Trump, you're not allowed to do this. This is not your purvey. And specifically with this one, it wasn't the court thing. What they said is that the executive order, the enemy Act, or whichever thing he picked to use as a logic wasn't allowable. So a trade court, the International Trade court, said, Hey, you can't use that law to do this. And so they said, You got to pause it. Trump then went to the next level, appeals court and said, Hey, we're changing our reason, or something that appeals court said, All right, you can continue. So this is now the current status Trump's tariffs. Can continue for now.
• 24:17
  John Weaver: Appeals Court says, so this is that ongoing thing, the next layer of the whipsaw. So they're going to come up with some logic, maybe to say, Hey, this is why we're going to do it. And then it's going to continue or not, or at some point, it will hit the 60 day window, or, I don't know exactly, but this is our ongoing question, for me, for my financial model, what all this means in the real world is that if I'm really going to do a battery, I'm going to have to put it at 60% tariff on top of it, because all this stuff that's below it. I have no idea what all this stuff means. It's moving so fast, it's so nutty.
• 24:59
  John Weaver: Even the experts have different tariff ranges. I don't know. You know, can I buy this component here and buy this one here? And is there a combo tariff if I assemble it here versus there?
• 25:11
  John Weaver: I'm just, you know, I'm just watching and having fun, reading, posting stuff on blue sky, because all kinds of terrible entertainment. Yeah.
• 25:17
  John Weaver: Okay, so this video is half cool and half annoying. Okay, it's half annoying because it's like two minutes of fading in and out, of barely showing anything.
• 25:31
  John Weaver: But then once it gets going, it's not bad. It's just another panel, pair of panel robots.
• 25:36
  John Weaver: It's a combo. Rosen has built something similar to the group that you work with. Their name luminous Rosen has developed something similar to luminous.
• 25:48
  John Weaver: They have a two combo robot, one for carrying and one for lifting. Yeah. So you'll start to see it come into place, but it's just kind of annoying. Like play this at double speed or triple speed or something. So we can get through this till we get to the good stuff. So there you go again. Nice robot there, going on. There we go. Good to do. Pretty cool. That's your panel there. Now you're starting to see the arm robot, just, just gonna lift the modules, put it right up there. You go, wonderful. Up down. And it's just a nice combo. So the key is, with Rosen, if they're using it, there's they're doing it scientifically. They're a big company. They have a lot of labor, they have a lot of data.
• 26:34
  John Weaver: They have a lot of professionals who know how to do the science and the math to determine how these numbers actually work.
• 26:41
  John Weaver: Work out what kind of labor it means, attachment, breaking stuff, you know, what's the work that these people are doing, and how's it going to turn out? So I like the fact that Rosen and is doing it. There you go. Nice, clear image of the whole
• 26:55
  Tim Montague: structure.
• 26:55
  Tim Montague: Finally, some good lighting.
• 26:58
  John Weaver: See, told you, it wasn't just me who was complaining, right? I, you know, I like to complain. There we go.
• 27:03
  John Weaver: Look at that. That's the best view right there. It's like, don't do left, right, left, right. You know, there's a lot of guys watching. So you don't know how many people there to actually work, but I think you need two people per row for one machine, and it seems like they can just blast through it. Now, all you need is a third person who's dropping the pallets on the back of that back machine so it never runs out, sure, and just now the article, the purpose of this article is not actually this, well, I guess it was to show off the robot, but it was specifically to say that Rosen is thinking about selling rights to it or something, and they want to share it with the industry, and maybe they think they, you know, they can only save so much money, and they think they can make more by selling to all their partners.
• 27:50
  John Weaver: But I thought that was interesting is that Rosen is going to put it out there. I was really more so interested in just seeing the unit. I don't really care if they sell it, because I know other people are doing it so, but awesome if they're doing it. But I like that Rosen thinks they have it because that rosendin thinks they have it because that's just a big company who I always thought was pretty awesome,
• 28:11
  Tim Montague: big electrical contractor in California. Like when you're in California, you see the Rosen offices around, but I don't know if, if they're working across the country, I don't see a much in the Midwest.
• 28:25
  Tim Montague: I
• 28:28
  John Weaver: think they're all across the Southwest, probably into Texas, and they're probably going to do projects bigger than 25 megawatts, yeah, AC, if there's not a if there's not a substation included in the project. Don't call them,
• 28:48
  Tim Montague: yeah, exactly, utility scale. Only should we talk about cold to solar?
• 28:55
  John Weaver: Oh, yeah. I mean, I've been listening to VISTA claim a lot of stuff for so long, cold solar and they but what is this? Is this a because you know this better than me, so you're gonna have to talk about this. This is local to you.
• 29:07
  John Weaver: VISTA is a big Southern Illinois company.
• 29:10
  Tim Montague: Well, vistra is, I think, headquartered in Texas, all right, but they operate, they operate power plants out west. Also, they've done some of the largest storage projects in the country period. They
• 29:26
  John Weaver: have the battery that's that caught on fire recently, that one that's at Moss Landing,
• 29:31
  Tim Montague: that's landing is a VISTA project, yep. But anyway, Southern Illinois,
• 29:35
  John Weaver: they have a lot of coal and a lot of solar. In southern Illinois, they're big time there.
• 29:39
  Tim Montague: Yeah. Illinois is a coal state. And, you know, we, we got this legislation in 2021 called Seija, the climate and equitable JOBS Act. Sandwiched inside of that was what I think many of our colleagues would refer to as an astroturf bill for vistra, which operates a fleet of coal plants, which gives them really juicy incentives to convert these coal plants from coal to solar and batteries. And so anyway, this is a story about those projects.
• 30:11
  Tim Montague: They are actually coming to fruition now. They're getting built, but they're hitting delays because vistra cannot acquire transformers and switch gear. There's a huge backlog globally for transformers. Go figure John. You know, here we are. We're tripling the grid.
• 30:32
  Tim Montague: We're electrifying everything, and somehow we can't build transformers fast enough. I don't know why. We haven't figured this out, but it's a thing. So we've got a photo here of a 700 megawatt, 780 megawatt coal fired Edwards power plant in Bartonville, Illinois. And on Tuesday, they asked the Feds for a two year extension on the interconnection deadline, because they want to interconnect this 546, megawatt solar and battery farm to the infrastructure there, but they need new gear, and they don't have the gear. So it's a problem. I didn't expect to see this story, but here it is. I guess I should have expected to see it. This is a reason to be very careful about where you source your transformers if you're doing utility scale work, I guess because some companies have better supply than others.
• 31:33
  Tim Montague: So just be careful.
• 31:40
  John Weaver: Wow, man. Two. Year interconnection extension for a pretty big facility, a lot of batteries, 833, megawatts. Total interconnection of looks like 546 megawatts. 106 batteries, 44 solar, big plant, lot of solar.
• 32:02
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I mean, I've been watching these projects, and I don't chase utility anything anymore. I was, at one time, trying to be a utility scale EPC business developer. I failed miserably. But these were on my radar, and they're, it's a good story, you know, it's the coal industry is pretty much struggling because it can't compete with natural gas or solar, batteries and and so coal, you know, coal companies are coal companies are going out of business, and The utilities are shutting down the coal plants, and it's just not economic. We you know, Illinois is a coal state. My grandpa ran the Black Diamond in Chicago. It was a coal industry magazine.
• 32:55
  Tim Montague: Literally, my family was in the coal industry because Illinois is a coal state, and now it's a solar, wind and battery state, it's okay. This is, this is life, right? We go through these energy transitions. We used oil, we used whale oil. Sorry, we used wood, we use coal, we use whalo, we use fossil oil. Now we use wind, solar batteries. Just so
• 33:20
  John Weaver: I thought, I thought, an interesting thing about this is that their their interconnection agreement is set to August of 2028 so it's still three plus years out. They're asking for the extension on that by two years. So they're asking for 2030 so it's not even like it's a nearby issue. They're saying it's they're specifically talking about certain breakers, instead of them being 12 to 18 months. Now it's gonna take three plus years. So then three years would get you to the August, and then you need a little chance to turn that system on and make sure they work. So wow, man, that's an expensive breaker, and I get it.
• 33:57
  John Weaver: I mean, I get it because I have challenges, but, uh, yes, as a supplier, cannot it be expected to deliver them until the fourth quarter of 2029 for one of the transformers. So that's still a fast turnaround, taking that transformative and flipping the system on. They're gonna have to have everything in place just sitting there accruing interest on a loan. Oh, that kind of hurts a little bit. So interesting. Man, maybe I should cover this. I should research a little bit and cover it for PV magazine, good source in there too. Yeah, that's a risk. That's a big risk.
• 34:35
  Tim Montague: Should we talk about? Longy, yeah,
• 34:38
  John Weaver: well, you know, it's, it's really, it's just a retirement of a famous person or a person that should be famous, um, Lee, Zen,
• 34:47
  Tim Montague: wow. Good job.
• 34:47
  Tim Montague: Zen. Guo, I'm not sure I
• 34:50
  John Weaver: have no idea. I don't try to say names, man. I mess up everything from every language. It
• 34:55
  Tim Montague: doesn't matter.
• 34:55
  Tim Montague: Why is he famous? He
• 34:58
  John Weaver: is the CEO of long G like he's the one that brought them from whatever to being the coolest. Like, if I were to buy some panels, it might be from them, like they're just up there. They are the third largest, second largest, maybe the largest solar company. It's them, it's tongway, it's Ginko.
• 35:17
  John Weaver: You know, they're doing all kinds of super research. This guy's an engineer CEO, and he's brought the company to being, you know, they're, they're maybe as consequential. They're not as consequential as an oil company yet. But I remember reading something that said the amount of energy they now produce is more than oil companies with their hardware, and that their annual production is getting so big that it has a significant effect. And so I just wanted everybody to know that long G's president. He's no longer going to be the day to day CEO type, but he's going to be focusing on the CTO type of stuff, how to run the r, d, how to develop new projects, products. He wants to stay in that side of the arm.
• 35:59
  John Weaver: And I also wanted to point out that He kind of broke my heart a little bit. And he said perovskite silicon is still an immature product and its feasibility remains technically unproven. Yep, and I don't like reality sometimes. Tim so whatever.
• 36:19
  Tim Montague: And he also the story also references back contact products, yeah, as being superior. So their long G is not long on top con i gather, no,
• 36:35
  John Weaver: no, they're not.
• 36:35
  John Weaver: They do have top con product, but that's not really where they went. They went to a back contact and they are the efficiencies are greater. Here the front side, they're starting to do by facial that that contact as well. They've been able to take the sun power technology that kind of languish, I guess, with not enough R D, and bring it to the next level. Yeah. So I'm happy, happy to see that having happened. I
• 37:01
  Tim Montague: think we have too many stories here to cover. But do you want to always do Tim?
• 37:03
  Tim Montague: You want to do one or two more?
• 37:07
  Tim Montague: What do you want to do? What?
• 37:08
  John Weaver: All right, let's do one or two. I'll do the fast.
• 37:10
  John Weaver: Let's do project of the week, because this is an awesome little system. Oh,
• 37:14
  Tim Montague: I don't know if I'll be able to get it, because
• 37:18
  John Weaver: this guy, we don't like blue sky. It
• 37:19
  Tim Montague: shows there. It showed up here. All right, high tech. All right, what's the project?
• 37:25
  John Weaver: It's a, well, it says 16. It's actually 11.6 kilowatt residential installation in south coast here of Massachusetts. And I just wanted to show off my little residential company, and just to clean, clean looking modules.
• 37:45
  John Weaver: The just the system. It was a nice one. We'll get through the final picture. It's really cool.
• 37:49
  John Weaver: But there we got a nice tie in the photo. Or, oh sure, we don't have to. Now we can see these.
• 37:56
  John Weaver: These, you can click on this shows just some details of the racking. I like seeing this.
• 37:58
  John Weaver: This is solar edge optimizer.
• 38:01
  John Weaver: You can see the distance from various from our flashing feet, about four feet, 48 inches, this. This is a snap and rack.
• 38:14
  John Weaver: We use snap and rack flashing.
• 38:14
  John Weaver: Oh, well, no, it's a quick mount flashing with snap and rack. You could probably click on it and tell click on that third image.
• 38:22
  John Weaver: Maybe zoom in on it, or go to the prior image, one to the left. Let's see if it, uh, you can't really see, but this is, you know, just a nice, clean residential system. You know, you can see the degrees we the roof is tilted at. And then the final picture just looks nice.
• 38:44
  John Weaver: We fit up his roof really nicely, and the setup was just clean. I like the look of it just because the house was red and the tree behind it had a little red color, but it's just a nice clean, yeah, South looking system. Our pricing is in the mid to upper twos right now, but we're getting a little bit better and a little tighter.
• 39:05
  John Weaver: Yeah, we're
• 39:07
  Tim Montague: $3 resi solar in Massachusetts. Where is this?
• 39:09
  Tim Montague: Rhode Island? No
• 39:11
  John Weaver: mass. We're all mass. South Coast, definitely, definitely under three bucks.
• 39:14
  John Weaver: All of our proposals, unless you have a premium module and en phase, we're holding them below three. So that's a project of the week. So I liked it. It's just kind of interesting to learn getting a little we're getting a little better as a team, moving through residential as we relaunch whaling city, and it's kind of nice. So we get in a sad note, or we could end on that beautiful note we get. We could end on a happy technology note, a sad note, you're talking
• 39:44
  Tim Montague: about Meyer burger,
• 39:46
  John Weaver: damn it. Tim, you brought it up. Well, we've, we've always
• 39:49
  Tim Montague: been fanboys of Meyer burger. No, I don't, I don't think it's the end of Meyer burger in the US, but it's, it's, it's, it is a sad day. They announced that they're going to close their solar panel factory in the US. You
• 40:03
  John Weaver: want to go take it over, Tim, maybe they'll let us do it. Yeah, right. I mean, they, they got Meyer burger hardware there for make first assembly modules. We got trained staff. They've been deploying some modules, I believe, got 100 million bucks.
• 40:24
  Tim Montague: Yeah, right. And no, yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it is sad to think about all the money that's getting invested in the United States, in the solar panel factories, battery factories, and a lot of it may not see the light of day, or may get shut down after it's producing, yeah, because Congress kills the IRA. I mean, it's very good industrial policy. We want manufacturing back, and the solar and storage industries are a way to get manufacturing back in the US. I don't, I don't understand that.
• 41:02
  Tim Montague: It boggles the mind. So we'll be, we'll be back with our live news roundup on the 13th of June. Mid June. It's, it's starting to be middle of summer.
• 41:20
  Tim Montague: And with that, I want to say, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. By all means, there are so few people, in the greater scheme of things, who know the Clean Power Hour exists. So tell a friend. Oh, we now have merch on our website.
• 41:36
  Tim Montague: So if you go to cleanpowerhour.com you can go to a shop or. Link, you can get a nice Nike polo, all kinds of shirts, hats, jackets, bags with a clean power hour logo. How can I listeners find you? John
• 41:56
  John Weaver: commercialguy.com, that's our main website. That's where all the good stuff mostly gets shared. Then there's our cell phone numbers, which you can call us any time of the day, because we like to hang out listen to our cell phones constantly. Yeah, you know, I'm on blue sky all the time on LinkedIn. You know, we have an office in New Bedford, commercialsolarguy.com, that's the easiest, easiest, quickest place. I'm John at commercialsolarguy.com
• 42:26
  Tim Montague: There you go. And
• 42:28
  John Weaver: you know, that's it. So we like to build stuff.
• 42:30
  John Weaver: It's really nice. We like to build solar carports where we just know the process, you know, pieces of it, big pieces of it.
• 42:39
  John Weaver: So,
• 42:40
  Tim Montague: all right, we'll see you in two weeks. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Take care. John Yep.