Latest / Clean Power Hour / Clean Power Hour LIVE | May 25, 2023 feat Tristan Erion-Lorico with PVEL

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Clean Power Hour LIVE | May 25, 2023 feat Tristan Erion-Lorico with PVEL · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague. Your host today is May 25 2023. And we're coming to you live from Nola. I've been at ACP the last couple of days. Please reach out to us on our website clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Clean Power hours brought to you by Chip Power Systems CBS America, makers of North America's number one three phase string inverter, with over six gigawatts shipped in the US the focus on commercial utility with a focus on commercial and utility scale solar and energy storage company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. GPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters from 25 Kw 80 to 75 Kw exceptional data communication, and controls and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. CPS America has offices in California, New Jersey and Texas Learn more at Kidpower systems. Not calm. With that I want to welcome my co host and the commercial solar guy to the show. Welcome, John.
• 2:07
  John Weaver: Hey, Tim, how are ya? I saw your cool pictures from New Orleans. I hope that means you're drinking beers listening to jazz music and taking pictures with when distribution companies because there was a giant crane that was much larger than you were and I thought that was kind of a neat picture
• 2:26
  Tim Montague: that you know, I ended up going up in that lift, they call it a lift, not a crane. But I'm gonna show a photo from 230 feet in the air.
• 2:32
  Tim Montague: They had the baby crane, they had the baby lift there, the big one goes 330 feet in the air.
• 2:42
  Tim Montague: Okay, we're getting there. We're giving rides on the 230 foot version of that. So we get we have that to look forward to.
• 2:48
  Tim Montague: But we have a special, special guest today. He's a repeat guest on the show trust scenario and lower TCO of PV evolution laboratories. Welcome to the show, Tristan.
• 2:59
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Hey, thanks for having me. I was just thinking about those lifts and thought, maybe I'm in solar, because I'm afraid of heights.
• 3:04
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And it's always installed close to the ground. I do not want to.
• 3:07
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: I mean, I guess I'd been up on some commercial rooftops with solar on them, but certainly not that high. And anyway, happy to be here, sitting comfortably on the ground.
• 3:23
  Tim Montague: Yeah, the lift is not for the faint of heart. It was not as scary as I thought.
• 3:26
  Tim Montague: But I knew that I'm not really afraid of heights. So if you if you know you're afraid of heights, you don't go up on the lift. That would be a terrifying experience. But I survived. And I had a wonderful lift operator named Phoenix, and you'll see a photo up here in a little bit when I show some photos of the show. But why are we why are we here with Tristan? John,
• 3:54
  John Weaver: we're here with Tristan because solar panels break and they're worth billions of dollars. And if Tristan didn't break them professionally, or test them, stress test him, he doesn't break panels, he stress tests them. The rest of us would be buying crappy panels that we wouldn't know what was going on.
• 4:10
  John Weaver: And, and so I've actually covered Tristan documents for several years at PV magazine.
• 4:17
  John Weaver: And it's always cool just to see how we test how we accelerate testings and what we do to solar panels to verify that they're their quality. So Tristan says, Now interesting, when a simple minded person like myself says you break solar panels, you want to re wrote No, you correct in our wording. When I wrote an article, he said, No, we don't break panels, and then you gave a proper answer for the, you know, the formal people. So how would you describe what you do?
• 4:44
  John Weaver: And solar panels?
• 4:49
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, so I mean, we we test them through extended reliability and performance testing that goes beyond certification. So certification sets the minimum bar for participating in the industry, but it doesn't tell you as the commercial solar guy, or you, Tim or others, you know, is this worth putting on your roof or putting in the field for 25 or 30 years? That's the question that we're trying to answer at that P bell. And some of the modules failed during that testing. You know, a lot of our testing on the positive side is just to confirm the manufacturer's claims. And we do have a lot of projects that they do quite well across all of our tests. And we, you know, they say on their data sheets and in their marketing materials, that this is a very reliable module and we say yes, we agree. We've done the testing and it is right in other cases, you know, we see that there could be some room room for improvement?
• 5:53
  John Weaver: And very good answer very political response or just like,
• 5:56
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: like, yes.
• 5:56
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: You know, a few years ago, we weren't doing as much hail testing as we are now. And, you know, now we seriously do break modules, you know, before we would cause, you know, in some tests, a higher degradation, and then what you typically want to see, but it wasn't a broken module, you know, now, we have seriously broken modules from from hail testing. So I suppose I would be less inclined to correct your wording this year than in previous years.
• 6:27
  John Weaver: Nice. I've always had a question about 1002 hour accelerated testing. Now, this might or might not be within your window. But if a module passes a 1000 hour accelerated testing, which is where extra pain is being added on to it during a shorter window, like 40, some days worth, is that supposed to simulate what would happen over 25 years? So if something lasts through that 1000 hours of accelerated hypothetically, it should last 25 years? Is that something you can answer?
• 7:04
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, I don't know if you'll be happy with my answer, but I can answer. So that's the certification test is 1000 hours of damn peaks test, and it's damn peak is that 85 degrees Celsius, and 85% relative humidity. So it's not like, you know, 1000 hours at normal conditions, you can't point to a place on earth that is 85 degrees Celsius and 85% relative humidity. So we are, you know, we are stressing the module layers, we're looking for signs of corrosion and delamination and other you know, degradation mechanisms that cause power loss, the certification test is 1000 hours, we double it to 2000 hours. And we think that that provides more of an indication of the lifetime performance. But if you're installing modules in a temperate environment, you know, that 1000 hours might equal dozens, if not hundreds of hours in in the field, or sorry, hundreds of years in the field, it really depends on what are the failure mechanisms. years ago, there was a trend to go to 3000 hours or 4000 hours for that test. And what was happening is the failure modes, from the tests were not being mimicked to what was happening in the field. So then manufacturers started designing their products to pass a test, rather designing their products to perform well in the field.
• 8:32
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And it seemed like, you know, 2000 hours was kind of the sweet spot for extended testing, where, where the failure modes we see in that test mimic what's in the field, as opposed to, you know, you're you're just passing a test for the sake of passing a test, we want to have the testing be, you know, as representative for Module lifetimes, but particularly for that test, it's really hard to, to compare how many hours in the chamber versus yours in the field. It's not, it's not a direct line, like it would be in some of the other testing that we do.
• 9:12
  John Weaver: By the way, for, for those of us who aren't so apt at knowing what 85 degrees Celsius is, that's 185 degrees Fahrenheit, which is probably the hottest commercial hotter than the hottest Commercial Roof I've ever been on. It's also hotter than the highest temperature ever recorded, naturally on the Earth's surface of about 130 degrees Fahrenheit and Death Valley. So, so you're testing is hotter than Earth, essentially, which is kind of cool. There any All right. So how
• 9:45
  Tim Montague: can you fellas been doing this module reliability scorecard for many years now? And do you see any big trends that you can point to in terms of overall quality and reliability?
• 10:02
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, so as you pointed out this 2023 edition of the scorecard that just got released. While we're recording it, it got released this week, on May 23. I should flag it's at scorecard dot P Val PvE l.com. And yeah, it's the ninth edition. And this year, we showed for each of the tests, box plots showing what has been the performance over the past years. You know, previously in scorecards we showed, here's the performance from the from this year versus the performance from all of historical but now we separated historical into the various years. And yeah, I think you can see, here's the scorecard now, like for Let's, let's jump, for example, if you go to TESTS, the test drop down and go to thermal cycling, you're gonna see some of the interactivity here. And for those listening on audio, I'll just describe this scorecard is the most beautiful document you've ever seen. You, your job would drop if you went inside.
• 11:09
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, Tim, if you, if you keep scrolling down here, you're gonna have to go through a couple more sections, we show why the testing matters, the materials assess to keep going, we've got some key key takeaways. And shortly after that, one more scroll down, we got this power degradation for thermal cycling. So here, this is boxplots, showing the range of degradation we see, for each of the years, we've done this testing, going back to 2013, up to 2022. Because, of course, modules we received in 2023, they haven't made it through this, you know, six months worth of testing yet. But you can see that, you know, historically, there was quite a wide range on on the results. And over time, that range has gotten smaller, and the improvements have been made. So you know, in terms of historical improvements, you know, for thermal cycling, you can see that the majority of the modules we're testing these days are above that top performer threshold of 2%. In certification testing, for this thermal cycling test, it's TC 200. So 200 cycles, and you're allowed up to 5% degradation.
• 12:26
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: For our testing, we're doing 600 cycles, so three times the duration, and to be a top performer, you have to have less than 2% degradation. So, you know, the performance is is quite good. The problem, though, is that even though the degradation is improving, yeah, if you scroll down to this, this case study here, here's a module that performed amazingly after TC 200. And had you know, 0% power loss, really good after TCP 400. And then after TC 600, there was an open circuit in one of the junction boxes, and there was zero power output. So, you know, right now we're seeing with thermal cycling, that it's, it's more a test on on catastrophic failures of the module, then how or less I think with, with multi busbar, with half cut cells with new soldering equipment, you know, the the traditional thermal cycling, soldering issues have more or less gone away, specifically for perc and for Topcon. Which are kind of the two main technologies. It has been PARCC. It's it's evolving to Topcon. But the issue that we're seeing is, is that, you know, modules are failing. And here's a test where we've seen melted connectors, we've seen junction boxes exploding, or not exploding, but having a rapid disassembly, as our friend industry asecs would say. So, yeah, we're seeing some some failures. Now,
• 14:12
  John Weaver: so. So the failures are evolving. So we've seen, you know, higher degradation in the past more failures of connection. So, as you said, we're figuring out some things better, but now we're stressing them more, or are these new failures? Or is it that we're working harder and discovering things that already existed? Is this Are we trading off longevity, you know, we got the cells better, but now we lose the module we have a catastrophic versus losing individual cells is.
• 14:44
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, I think, you know, for that particular example, I think what we're seeing is that there's more, there's more current running through these junction boxes, you know, now we've got these higher powered modules with higher currents. And during our testing, we're using those higher currents, and probably a junction box, and connectors that would have done well, with a, you know, 400 watt module.
• 15:09
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Now that we're testing 550 or 600 Watt modules or above, you know, they can't handle these higher currents as reliably as they did historically. Not to say we didn't find junction box issues historically, we've been reporting that in every scorecard, you know, that that continues to be a fairly weak link. So even though there are improvements to the soldering and other aspects of the module, we're still seeing you know, some some issues related to junction boxes are persistent.
• 15:43
  John Weaver: Interest. Have you tested a glass glass by facial module yet? Oh, yeah,
• 15:50
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: that's like 50%, I think 50% of the 53% of our test population, for this year scorecard was glass glass by facial.
• 16:54
  John Weaver: And this is just for personal fascination because I've been reading about some of the very strong Well, a very limited, like Meyer burger came out with some really interesting data on when they stress test their glass glass, and they found nearly zero degradation.
• 17:09
  John Weaver: And its first year or however they tested it. And so they ended up putting out a warranty with 0.2% degradation loss over 30 years, that comes out to be like 93% Plus performance. What do you see with a glass glass from a degradation standpoint?
• 17:37
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: So that's, that's an interesting data point for my burger. What what we generally see and right now Tim's scrolling through the the top performers, if you click on the module, design, that plus button on the left side of the screen, you can actually Yeah, down a little bit tin down a little bit there. Yeah, you can click on and see all the bifacial glass glass top performers. So you can you know, you're able to filter by module design to see how they perform.
• 18:12
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: But in general, you know, that's a question that's often asked, you know, how do glass glass perform versus glass back sheet?
• 18:19
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: On each page of the scorecard, you know, there's a page or like a website, page per test. And we have four key takeaways. One of those key takeaways for each of the test is related to glass glass versus glass battery, because that is such a hot, hot topic you're not, you know, the first one to ask me about that, John. And I think, what what we can report and what we do report is that generally there is lower amounts of degradation for glass glass modules than glass backsheet. On most of the tests, we do so on thermal cycling, and on damp heat, and on PID, you know, those are three of the key tests, we see that the there's there's lower, there's lower power, loss of glass glass, so that would probably justify having maybe longer warranties or lower degradation rates in the warranty. I think if you ask anyone for, you know, technical justification on why they're glass glass warranties are longer. I think they'd be hard pressed to provide something extremely convincing. You know, a lot of the times the warranties have more to do with commercial aspects than they do with technical aspects, you know, the, the results on each of the tests are better. But does that really mean a module is going to only degrade by point 2% per year? Hard to say when you put it when you put it outdoors. And I will note too, that even though the results are generally better for the three tests, I mentioned thermal cycling damp heat PID, we do see higher amounts of module breakage during hail testing for glass glass modules, as well as in our mechanical load testing.
• 20:10
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: You know, glass back sheet modules seem to be more mechanically durable than glass glass. It's nuanced.
• 20:20
  Tim Montague: You said there was there were more problems with hail with glass glass.
• 20:24
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, yeah, the glass glass modules use at least the ones we're testing use two layers of 2.0 millimetre glass, you know, 2.0 millimetre, then the encapsulation the cells and capsule in another 2.0 millimetre, whereas Ross backsheet, use 3.2 millimetre glass on the front, and then a back sheet on the rear. And the thing with that is that you can fully temper 3.2 millimetre glass, you can fully temper a vote down to 2.8 millimetre glass. Once you get lower than that. You can there's there's not enough surface area or not even surface area, but thickness of the glass to allow for fully temporary. So 2.0 millimetre glass would be considered semi tempered or heat strengthened, you're not going to be able to fully temper that. So you know that that's a trade off and with high impact energies, that glass will break more than the 3.2 millimetre glass
• 21:31
  John Weaver: interest interesting. And you still have more glass four millimetres worth versus a three, two, so it's still a heavier product, with a little more complexity deploying So let's I'm big fanboy of glass glass, because it's the new shiny whiz bang thing. And I see some occasional, and I sold a Meyer burger warranty. So I'm like, Oh, this is this is the future.
• 21:52
  John Weaver: But as you show us often, it's a little more complex when you delve into the details of the each of these technologies.
• 22:01
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, I think it depends on where you're going to instal those modules.
• 22:03
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: You know, if it's in a hail region, you, you might want to go with glass back sheet. If it's in a high snow, or a very high wind loading class, back sheet might also be the place what you want to choose. If If neither of those things are concerns, then thin glass glass is probably better, because it will have lower degradation rates, outside of, you know, extreme weather concerns.
• 22:34
  John Weaver: Cool. Very cool. So what was your what's your favourite type of module this year? I mean, we saw a lot of headlines saying Topcon might have some strange degradation challenges. I think with PID maybe. And so people were kind of worried about those testing.
• 22:50
  John Weaver: But, you know, looking at the combo of technologies that are out there, right, now we have perc, we have top con. And then we have h j, t, which is Perkin.
• 23:00
  John Weaver: Top con variances, it seems and, um, you probably haven't even tested perovskite yet, because it's not in the real world. It doesn't exist. It's so sales pitch. But, you know, for what you're working with, which product like, you know, if you were building your house, what type of module would you go? And don't talk about a manufacturer?
• 23:16
  John Weaver: Because you're not allowed to do that. Yeah, what type of product?
• 23:23
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Oh, that's interesting, I think, you know, we are seeing we are seeing some solid results from Topcon. I think from heterojunction, we, we also have some good results, but they're a little bit more mixed. You know, in, in all of our testing, we kind of see, as we saw earlier in the top, on the thermal cycling graph, there's, there's a wide range of results at the start where were you know, let's take Topcon, for example. Some Topcon results are great, others, you know, from different manufacturers, there's room for improvement. And over time, those get better and better. And we start thinking like, Wow, do people even need to do our testing, and then a new technology is introduced, and we started the whole damn process again. You know, that's what we've done with multi busbar cells. That's what we've done with PERC. That's what we're now doing with with Topcon and HJ t. And then once those are established, you know, we'll probably look to doing it again, with perovskites, or whatever, you know, whatever comes up next. I think probably Topcon is far enough in that, in that learning curve, that you can, you can get very reliable Topcon modules, and you get the boost in energy yield. So it seems like, you know, that's probably where to go, if you select your, you know, manufacturers correctly using female data to help select that. I, you know, I think, if you asked me that last year, I would have probably still said perk. Now I'm, I'm a little bit more inclined to say Topcon heterojunction. I think there, there are some, some, you know, reliable heterojunction modules out there, we've we've certainly tested them, but I think they're earlier in that process, there's there's a wider, wider range. Because it's, it's a newer technology when it comes to the cell manufacturing process, and the module manufacturing process, you can't kind of take what you learned from PARCC. And you can fairly easily apply that to Topcon it's more of a jump to apply that to heterojunction. So but, you know, again, we have seen some great heterojunction results. So you know, I think kind of all of the above I also don't know, you know how much of a premium manufacturers are charging for for Topcon and heterojunction versus like their PARCC workhorse. So that would obviously be part of the decision too. If they all cost the same, then probably heterojunction if it's gone through pick up testing successfully, because that's that's going to be the highest energy yield. They're their temperature coefficients are fantastic. The bifacial reality of of Henry junction is is higher than Topcon which was higher than perc but as an example, we tested one, you know glass glass bifacial heterojunction module this year and it was off the charts for its energy yield for Our pan performance testing
• 26:45
  John Weaver: charts has an up.
• 26:47
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, off the charts isn't up like it was,
• 26:49
  John Weaver: which was it will tell anybody which module you'll have
• 26:54
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: to go through the scorecard and won't say, all right. All right. It won't take too much to figure it out. You can choose heterojunction and top performer and, and see see which one? But yeah, those performance gains are are significant. And and if it's if it's made well, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's going to be a step change in energy yield improvements over, at least the top con, we tested and certainly over the PERC we tested.
• 27:27
  Tim Montague: A pure panel maker. Why is PBL testing compelling? And what are the alternatives? You know, I have come over the years to tell my automakers that I talk to or not in the eval programme to get in the programme, because I trust the results of your programme more than for example, be any app to your one. But what is the value proposition from from your side? Two manufacturers?
• 28:05
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, well, I think we've become a de facto standard. And there's enough people like you, Tim, and I thank you for doing that talking to the manufacturers and saying like I, you know, your data sheet looks great, your presentation, you've got a great deck, it sounds like you're using whatever fully automated line and you're doing all these great things. But the proof is in the pudding. And I want to see, I want to see p Val put your modules through their paces so that I feel more confident in purchasing them. So manufacturers are hearing that enough from their customers and their potential customers that by by doing this testing it, it answers those questions, you know, if an unknown manufacturer called you up to him and said, Hey, I've got some modules for you. And you said, Well, have you gone through PBL testing?
• 28:53
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And they're like, yeah, here's all the reports, we've done it?
• 28:57
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Well, now you can just continue that sales conversation, you know, as opposed to you slamming the brakes on you're like, oh, okay, you've done it? Well, let's talk about, you know, your, your pricing, let's talk about your, your delivery schedule, let's talk about all these other commercial aspects, because the the modules have been de risked. And that's really the advantage to module manufacturers. Also, to add to that, you know, this this scorecard, we have 35 manufacturers listed as top performers, historically, our highest number of previous to this was 26. So we've got about a third more top performers this year than our historical record.
• 29:40
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And, and a lot of those companies you might never have heard of, and, and they're, they're either new to PV, or they're new to selling into the US market or various markets, you know, maybe they've been selling hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts, just in China, and now they're looking to expand.
• 29:58
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: But in any case, you know, that they are able to use our credibility in the market to help build their their name, and, you know, some of these companies that that you may have never heard of, once they say, Oh, well, we were a top performer in the scorecard.
• 30:15
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: That's, that's great to help build their brand recognition, and build their credibility. So you know, that's the value add for, for the manufacturers they want to be in. And as we test more, you know, now that there's 35 listed, the ones that aren't listed, it's like, well, what, wait a second, why aren't you in the scorecard? If every, all of your competitors are in there, why aren't you and now they want to be in you know, it kind of becomes a snowball effect where, you know, people will, manufacturers will want to do this because all of their competitors are, and we're seeing, we're seeing that as well.
• 30:59
  John Weaver: Is it by any chance? How soon? The great HjT performing product?
• 31:07
  Tim Montague: Jobs obsessed,
• 31:08
  John Weaver: John, I'm on the website. I'm poking around. Come on.
• 31:11
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: John can do some great research. Yeah, I mean, they must have been awesome.
• 31:19
  Tim Montague: So personally, I have another question before you go. You have you're hosting a conference also in June, I believe. Tell us about the the P though. Conference.
• 31:31
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah. So um, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. I think tickets are still available. I think there's about 20 spots left. This is really PV PV 10 If the conference is called PB module tech last year, well, previous pre pandemic, it was in Penang, Malaysia, and I used to fly to Malaysia, I would be there for a conference for two days and then fly back and wonder what the hell did I just go through. So, you know, now now it's being hosted in Napa. Last year was the first time that, you know, post COVID we hosted in Napa PBL has an Event Centre at at the lab. And we hosted it there last year, it sold out though quite quickly and PB tech that the main organisers wanted to sell more tickets. So we've actually relocated it to, you know, one of the hotels in Napa so that we could get, instead of about 130 people, there's going to be about 200 people. So it's still fairly intimate. But, you know, we're really focused on you know, what is the module supply in the US for 2023 2024, maybe into 2025. But it's, you know, what should we be looking at for projects now, as opposed to, you know, 2025 and beyond, and there's a number of manufacturers module manufacturers presenting, there's also a lot of developers attend, I think over 40 Different developer companies will be there. And, you know, it's, it's quite focused on unlike, you know, you you were just at America clean power, you said, you're still still there.
• 33:21
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: You know, and are you plus, you know, 1000s of people there, and it's, you know, difficult to have one on one conversations.
• 33:30
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: This this event is is, you know, more focused on module modules into the US quality, reliability. Who are the suppliers you should be considering? And, yeah, as you're, as you're showing here, there's quite a wide range of presenters. And yeah, we we were looking forward to hosting it. I see
• 33:55
  Tim Montague: there will be organisation like DNB, University of New South Wales clearway energy q cells National Renewable Energy Laboratory, speedy Americas, we had BD on the show last week or the week before. So it's a it's quite a group of technology experts, manufacturers, developers, lightsource, BP here, Trina, solar, RW E. Looks good. So June 6, seventh, join us in Napa, California.
• 34:35
  John Weaver: So you noted something earlier that I thought was cool. You showed it twice.
• 34:38
  John Weaver: First, you show the graph of degradation from way back in the day through now and it's getting tighter and and lower. So that's shows a general technology improvement. You also mentioned that you can see which was very cool to hear. You can see how the general industry progresses toward better with the various technologies perk, then Topcon.
• 35:03
  John Weaver: Now HjT. I noticed on that list for the PV tech show, by the way, PV Tech is a great publication to read. It's among my top three PV magazine, solar power world PV tech. But I noticed on TV Tech, we had a Donnie and Adani is a new manufacturer to the Solar World, coming from India, I saw a headline recently that suggested India wanted to have 500 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity in a few years. And I thought first off that that number was just beyond comprehension, where I know India is coming from nearly nothing. Have you yet seen the beginnings of the progression toward higher quality product coming out of the Indian manufacturers because it'd be awesome to see them catch up with the leading Chinese ones, because then we would have the two largest countries on Earth, making awesome, huge volumes of panels. And so that kind of gives me a little bit of tinglies that India and China are both going to be swinging deep with model volume and wondering what you see there.
• 36:10
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, well, we've got a long history of Adani who have testing Adani modules they've been in our scorecard. This is the sixth year of them being in the scorecard. Vikram is another one who's been in the scorecard for quite some time. And wiry this is their second year in the scorecard and then we have two manufacturers with the first year in the scorecard from India, MV and Premier. So we've gone from you know, historically it was just Vikram and Adani.
• 36:41
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Then we added worry la Last year, and now we've got two more, there's a couple other manufacturers from India that are, you know, starting to do testing at at p bell. And it's definitely becoming a module manufacturing powerhouse in in India. I think too, if you look, you know, if you were to compare how many tests, those manufacturers were top performers in, over the years, that's improved to, you know, maybe historically, they were a top performer in one or two tests, you know, now we're seeing that for some of them.
• 37:15
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: They're a top performer, and all of the tests are as many that we're ready for, by the time we published. You know, they were top performer and every every test that we had results for by the time we, we released the scorecard. So, yeah, I think, I think the quality is, is world class, it's, you know, is is the same as what we would see from maybe more established names that have been that you would refer to, from from China, you know, at the same time, I don't think anyone gets a free pass, we do see ranges of results from from different regions and different manufacturers. But, you know, generally speaking, I don't think there's a lot of ground for them to make up for in terms of quality. Now, that said, you know, yeah, 500 megawatts is, is mind. I'm sorry, 500 gigawatts. gigawatts, is a mind boggling amount of modules. And, and some of these manufacturers are going from, you know, 300 megawatts a couple years ago to announcing 10 gigawatt plants. And that's, that's a lot. That's a lot of quality control. You know, that's a lot of opportunity for, for failures, I, you know, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I, you know, something like a 10 gigawatt manufacturers making, like 100,000 modules a week, or something. Like, it's, it's an incredible amount of a product.
• 38:55
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And even if you're world class, like, you know, in manufacturing, it's six sigma, that means, you know, you're only going to produce I think, 0.03% defects. Or maybe it's point three defects, I'm going way back and kind of out of my league don't have it in front of me. But in any case, you know, to be world class, your number of defects is quite small. But if you're making 100,000 modules a week, that's still a lot of defects. For years, so, you know, I think that's, that's gonna be the next struggle is just the sheer amount of volume.
• 39:33
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And Tim, you mentioned the Bloomberg list, that that list shows, for all of the, it shows the manufacturer capacity for all of the the companies listed on it. And the cumulative capacity, I think, was over over 500 gigawatts on this quarters tier one list. So we're, you know, we're fastly approaching the like terawatt age for Module manufacturing. And I talked to a module manufacturer who was talking to one of the big developers in in the US, and that developer gave them a test order, and said, you know, we just want to you're new to the scene, we just want to try you out. So we're giving you a test order of 300 megawatts.
• 40:27
  John Weaver: That's awesome.
• 40:29
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: You know, the volumes are, are astounding now. And the problem is like, hey, you know, we're gonna, we also hear from manufacturers that say, well, we're not ready to test our Topcon you know, we've reached mass production of it, but we're not ready to test it. You know, once we, once we've shipped 10 gigawatts of it, then the product will have stabilised and we'll be ready to do female testing on it. And, you know, historically that might have been once it, you know, we're at 1010 megawatts, we're ready to ship it it stabilised but to go to 10 gigawatts is when we're ready to do third party testing. Just like who's who's receiving those modules, when they while they wait for it to stabilise
• 41:15
  John Weaver: 10 gigawatts was like global capacity in the year 2012 Or something like that.
• 41:18
  John Weaver: 2010. So that's interesting to hear. That's really
• 41:24
  Tim Montague: the volume. I noticed. I noticed that jinko made an announcement on Wednesday yesterday, that they're expanding their production in China, in in blocks of 14 gigawatts in
• 41:37
  John Weaver: blocks and blocks and wonder if that sounds logical chunk of poly silicon wafer, you know, they they figured out how many factories and how many trucks and how many this and that like, oh, chunk 14 gigawatts. Wow, what a concept.
• 41:53
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, I'm sure and even, you know, Longy with Invenergy announced their their plant in Ohio at five gigawatts because, you know, they I'm sure they thought like anything less than that. What are we doing? Like that's, that's baby stuff compared to, you know, overseas where they say, Okay, we're gonna do a new plant. And as you said, 14 gigawatts boom, or, you know, tongwei, for example, they were producing seven gigawatts last year, by the end of the year, they want to be at 80 gigawatts.
• 42:27
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that was another story. So and it's 7080.
• 42:32
  Tim Montague: That is,
• 42:33
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: yeah. I've had calls with, you know, one Chinese company that wants to do more exporting outside of China.
• 42:41
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: I hadn't heard of them before.
• 42:41
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And I, you know, so it was an introductory call, Hey, what what markets are you selling into? You know, what's your capacity? And they said, we've got, we've got 20 gigawatts of cells and 40 gigawatts of modules was their capacity. And I had never heard of them. And like, my role is to find these manufacturers and sign up for our testing. And I'd never heard of them.
• 43:09
  John Weaver: What are you doing?
• 43:09
  John Weaver: Interesting, you're at the cottage too much too much relaxing? Yeah.
• 43:13
  Tim Montague: Rarely? Rarely. So well, hey, we're gonna need to move on Tristan. So we're gonna let you go. I really appreciate you coming on the show. And and hopefully, we'll see you in, in a couple of weeks in California.
• 43:27
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, I can, I can share, we do have a 20% discount code for that conference. So I'll shoot you that email, Tim. And maybe in the show notes or whatever you can, you can allow listeners to, to access that. And again, I'll I'll plug the scorecard too, and send you that URL, if you can post that as well. Yeah, sure.
• 43:47
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: Yeah, people checking this out.
• 43:52
  Tristan Erion-Lorico: And thanks for your time. Really appreciate speaking to the two of you, as always.
• 43:57
  Tim Montague: All right, thanks.
• 43:57
  Tim Montague: Interesting. Take care.
• 44:03
  John Weaver: Oh, that's cool.
• 44:03
  John Weaver: You can tell how cool the conversation is because they met he managed trust him to get to 1245. And usually, you cut people off hard at 1230 and 45.
• 44:16
  John Weaver: Yeah, good show. Good show good talks. I like it.
• 44:21
  Tim Montague: And and, you know, our listeners should know that email also does reliability scorecards on storage and inverters. They don't yet do one on racking, which I think is probably not hard in the future.
• 44:32
  Tim Montague: Because trackers are a technology that has the reliability factor. So we look forward to that.
• 44:44
  John Weaver: They they do other work as well as commercial solar guy, and we haven't used their services yet. But we solicited that they will do project analyses to help you project better what your generation numbers will be. So they'll do a piece, a piece of PVC cyst, but a better one, which is done by a third party that a banker will accept. And so they offer other services PBL at one point was part of DNV GL and, and they separate it out and came up with their own show now. And they're just bunch of smart people. I've been talking to him and interview him for a while as PV magazine. So if you need some, all kinds of data related stuff, and if they can't do it, they'll connect you with like DNV GL, or DNV. They're no longer GL. And you know, help you just know stuff in a more scientific manner than prior. So all right, Tim, it's 46 we got like 13 minutes to hang out with people.
• 45:49
  Tim Montague: I want to get some highlights from ACP. My my number one favourite technology that I got that I got to see.
• 46:00
  Tim Montague: And I didn't get to talk to the CEO. Unfortunately, his name is Tim liechty. But, but we'll be we'll be bringing Tim on the show. And it's typical swap robotics and get this on screen and make a robotic tractor for vegetation management on large scale solar farms and we've had renewable robotics on the show.
• 46:23
  Tim Montague: So robots are not are not new to our listeners per se. But this this technology is different in that it, it makes they have an electric tractor right? That uses swappable batteries. And, and thereby, you can run an electric tractor 24/7. So you see that on screen John. They also make a snow ploughing tractor apparently, which I don't know if that's so important for solar farms. But obviously there's there's multipurpose so anyway, shut up this flop robotics, I also got to see a blade crane technology, which I'm going to put on screen here for a second with a company called mountain out of Utah there a EPC. And Mountain is, is using this German, I call it a crane. But it's a it's a truck with a crane mounted on it. If I get this on screen, this, this just really blew my mind.
• 47:44
  John Weaver: Now this show in general, historically, it's been a wind conference, and it's not adding other. Oh, man, these pictures of turbine blades going up a mountain. Oh, my goodness.
• 47:57
  John Weaver: The only way to going out there?
• 47:57
  John Weaver: Oh,
• 47:59
  Tim Montague: yeah, the only way to get these big turbine blades around narrow turns is to raise them vertically. And so that's what this this truck slash crane does. And so they had a demo of one of these brains of the show, which was just amazing.
• 48:18
  John Weaver: How does the I mean, I mean, we know how it doesn't some person who's good at physics, but the the weight of that unit as it sticks out straight. They figured out you know, I wonder if it's just all my gosh, are you serious? You're moving this blade through that thing on a mountain? Geez. How do they figure out the math, I know, whatever I am, I'm very impressed with whoever did the math and figured out the weight of the truck. So that you can have this 100 metre long blade sticking out at weird angles relative to the truck and, and just the there must be a chunk of metal in there just extra straight up for the physics so that the blade doesn't tip the unit over or something crazy like that. Because that looks pretty cool. Pretty
• 49:05
  Tim Montague: simple physics, John. Yeah,
• 49:07
  John Weaver: whatever I did, okay. In statics. I mean, I know it's simple physics. Leave me alone, Tim. I'm a political science major, you know, engineers, I work with engineers. Yeah, when they set up the problem, I can help solve it. I can't set up the word problem. So you know. That's cool. Really cool. That's nice.
• 49:24
  John Weaver: That's all good. What about pictures? You said you were gonna show pictures of you in the sky, really high, being lifted up by Phoenix or?
• 49:36
  Tim Montague: That's right, I got lifted by Phoenix. To the sky, I went 230 into the air on a lift. They don't call this a crane. So there's the there's the lift, fully extended company called blade platform. And they're using this primarily for wind turbine blade maintenance.
• 49:59
  Tim Montague: And this is the baby one, only 80 metres tall. And there's Phoenix. And there's me at the top of a fully extended, there's New Orleans in the background.
• 50:19
  Tim Montague: And there's the convention centre where the show was and there's that there's that lake crane down there with the mountain logo on it. So you get a little sense of how tall how high I am up in the air there.
• 50:30
  Tim Montague: So anyway, that was that was a fun ride and nice view of the Mississippi there.
• 50:39
  John Weaver: That's pretty neat.
• 50:42
  Tim Montague: So let's let's segue I could talk all day about ACP. Got to see some cool solar technology I got to visit those will probably be bringing will finally be bringing Earth onto the show as a flat racking company. If you can call it racking. They don't actually use racking they use cables to hold the solar to the ground. I got to visit with energy balls has pivoted away from the vertical towers.
• 51:13
  John Weaver: It's it's you Tim, you're braver that Facebook user getting up there
• 51:17
  Tim Montague: it really just has to do with tolerance of height if you're not afraid of heights then then going up in that crane really wasn't that scary.
• 51:29
  John Weaver: So Earth Oh send their cables are those and their cables
• 51:32
  Tim Montague: are those and energy vaults. Energy vault has pivoted to a three dimensional gravity structure. I don't know what they call it, but it's like a one warehouse, and instead of just a tall skinny tower, and they're doing hydrogen and lithium ion, other, and then and then consultants. So look forward to having energy vault on the show at some point soon.
• 52:04
  John Weaver: So my, my thoughts, I hope this doesn't piss them off. But wondering if they raised money with the gravity idea. And they fully pivoted away from it. And they're just using the cash they raised, because they've come to realise that gravity might not work out.
• 52:19
  John Weaver: And I've seen a lot of calculations suggesting that the gravity solution isn't as real as we hope to be,
• 52:31
  Tim Montague: because they're actually building a facility in China. And they'll soon be building a facility in. In California, I put the Chinese building on, I have to I have their website, I'll put them on screen. And you'll see what I mean by a three dimensional structure. So that's the project in China. Route on China. And you'll notice it just looks like a building. Right? But it's so it's a it's a block of cubes that go up and down with what I call elevators. Instead of frames. It's under construction in this photo.
• 53:15
  John Weaver: Interesting. Well, we'll see if they build a second one. That's an interesting 25 megawatt for our storage setup.
• 53:25
  John Weaver: g s s gravity energy storage system. Well, more power to him.
• 53:32
  John Weaver: No, they've done a hard shift with their capital into other energy storage products. Let's see if their gravity storage actually comes to exist. So what's what's the one news article that we're gonna give them? Maybe two at most? What are we going to chat?
• 53:49
  Tim Montague: Oh, you told me John, pick an article.
• 53:53
  John Weaver: All right, my most interesting thing was that the New Bedford light and New Bedford got our first shipments in, coming from Europe. In fact, this ship came from Portugal.
• 54:06
  John Weaver: And it's a Dutch ship carrying pieces of the monopile for the vineyard, wind offshore facility, that's, I believe, going to be about 700 megawatts.
• 54:15
  John Weaver: And, and if you we share those couple of images that are from the article, third one down on the document, we can see a pretty big boat. And I actually went down to the site yesterday, after work, and I, I just I took some pictures, I went up near the fence. And so this is the first ship with a heavy load carrier is the definition of it.
• 54:41
  John Weaver: And, and it's just starting to carry turbine parts. And these, what's cool is that they're made in Portugal and New Bedford, because of its whaling history has a strong Portuguese presence. So I don't know I just think that's neat that Portuguese folk are sending when gear to their brethren of New Bedford it's, it's a cool trip across the ocean. And, and I don't know now now in New Bedford, Massachusetts is going to become a wind, something rather terminal to help help build things out. And we got a lot of wind turbines that are gonna get built off the coast of Massachusetts, and Rhode Island as well. But there's going to be like, five plus gigs of offshore wind for the state of mass only.
• 55:29
  John Weaver: And the long game could be in the three to five range. Well, it's definitely beyond 3.6 gigs.
• 55:37
  John Weaver: I think it's going to be close to five, maybe even more gigs of wind. And this is just the beginning of it happening. So it's, it's pretty cool. I was on site. I was staring at it. I felt overwhelmed. It was beautiful. That was that was my excitement yesterday after work.
• 55:53
  Tim Montague: We actually got to see the ship. Yeah, yeah, I
• 55:55
  John Weaver: took some pictures.
• 55:55
  John Weaver: I can't even I could share my pictures aren't nearly as good as the ones in the articles or on their website. But yeah, but you can see the ship. There's a big open parking lot sort of structure they made which has chunks of metal attached to the ground. It's probably for storing the gear when it you know, because because of the Jones Act, you have to bring this stuff to the United States from Europe, you have to unload it off of the European flag ship, and then you load it onto an American flag ship and American manufactured ship and then it can be deployed to the site because we wanted to protect American business somewhere back in the night 1910s 12 type of thing. It's probably for like whiskey or some crap that we made the law but It still exists. So. So yeah, it's just neat. It's neat to see all that setup. And it's happening now, which is cool as part.
• 56:53
  Tim Montague: Yeah, yes, indeed.
• 56:53
  Tim Montague: Well, let's wrap up the show, John. Please check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. And subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can find the link at clean power hour.com How can our listeners find you, John?
• 57:13
  John Weaver: commercial solar guy.com is place number one we've got nice contact us page and we're making our website a little prettier slowly. And then secondly, you can find me on Twitter. My username is solar in mass. And I tweet about all kinds of stuff. And then lastly on LinkedIn, commercial solar guy or John Fitzgerald Weaver under my own profile. And Tim if people are looking for commercial solar consulting, land development, or commercial sales training, how should they get in touch with you?
• 57:45
  Tim Montague: Well, clean power comm is my is the home for all things. Tim Montague or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with listeners and customers on LinkedIn. Tim Montague, there's my name right there on my lower third. So with that, I will say let's grow sold on storage. I'm Tim Montague. We will see you next week John