Latest / Clean Power Hour / Wattch: Revolutionizing Solar Monitoring and Asset Management | EP201

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Wattch: Revolutionizing Solar Monitoring and Asset Management | EP201 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Alex Nussey: There's these verticals. You know, you're monitoring, you hear EMS and, and you hear terms, all these different energy data sort of silos. And I think at the end of the day that the reality is they're all still like so isolated from each other. But these systems, they're duplicative and they don't talk to each other. I think what's coming is, you know, a unification of the monitoring and control planes for all of these assets, solar storage, EV Charging, hydroelectric, you name it.
• 1:18
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• 1:33
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• 1:39
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• 1:47
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, monitoring intelligence and control in distributed generation, welcome to the Clean Power Hour. I'm Tim Montague, your host check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review. And reach out to me I love hearing from my listeners. My guest today is Alex Nussey. He is the co founder and CEO of a company called wattch which you may not have heard of, but you soon will. Welcome to the show, Alex.
• 2:14
  Alex Nussey: Thanks, Tim. Good morning, and I am so excited to be on.
• 2:17
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• 2:32
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• 3:15
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, absolutely heady days in the solar industry. Indeed. I've I guess I've been in the solar and broader renewables industry for coming up just over four years.
• 3:25
  Alex Nussey: Now. It feels like a lifetime in some ways. But I also know that I'm definitely new to the space by by a lot of measures. My personal background is in commercial software as a service. So everything from enterprise enterprise software, CRMs, to autonomous vehicles and different kinds of like application performance monitoring, and I fell in love with solar in undergraduate, I was at Georgia Tech as part of the competitive solar car racing team. If you haven't heard of this before, it's a 2000 mile cross country trip and a solar powered electric vehicle. And I did that really for fun, but it kind of caught the solar bug.
• 4:05
  Alex Nussey: And ever, you know, after leaving the team, it was always a question of when I was going to get into the renewable space professionally, rather than if
• 4:14
  Tim Montague: you're a good person to answer that question, which I get lots of how far can a car go on solar energy?
• 4:21
  Alex Nussey: You know, if the car is light enough, and you give up all of your basic amenities, then it can it can run essentially forever. The American challenges along the Oregon Trail and the national or the international challenges in Australia to the Outback, and the best teams will run at 65 miles an hour, essentially forever as long as the sun shining, but they're not the most comfortable vehicles.
• 4:44
  Tim Montague: Kind of like a spaceship on on the ground.
• 4:48
  Tim Montague: Maybe? Yeah. So what was the what is the origin story though?
• 4:54
  Tim Montague: Wattch, why did you create wattch?
• 4:58
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, that's that's a great question. So we actually got started making IV curve testers, you know, we wanted one for the solar car racing team to measure our solar array and decided to build our own as part of a sort of undergrad design project in college. And, you know, we had a bunch of contacts in the commercial solar world through that team and networking events. And so it's kind of a long story that one conversation led to another and we kind of discovered this hole in the spaces. We saw it in data analytics, everyone had a lot of data, not always well standardized, or normalized, and didn't really know what to do with it. And my like I mentioned my co founders and I met in undergrad and had all kind of gone our separate ways but decided to apply for this DoD program called the American made challenges. It's sort of very earliest Ah funding. I'll plug that for any entrepreneur thinking about getting into clean tech, American challenges.
• 5:57
  Alex Nussey: And they wrote us our first check that $2,000. And that was enough for us to kind of start the business and build out the first MVP of the product and and start finding partners and early customers. Yeah,
• 6:09
  Tim Montague: that's a great program that the do doe runs, you know, it's basically seed money, right, for early stage companies that are making innovations in clean energy.
• 6:20
  Tim Montague: And, and this is a very important role that the DoD plays at many levels of development, actually, not just early stage. But so but what was the problem, I guess, that you saw with the industry and the opportunity?
• 6:37
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:37
  Alex Nussey: I'm the actually first, just to finish my plug on the American made challenges. It's sort of three levels, I would say, across different price programs, not just solar, also hydroelectric. And it's one of the only DoD or federal funding programs at all, where they'll put money in AI ahead of time, so you're not filing for reimbursement. So they'll actually just write you a check up front and really changed the game for our business. Let us get let's get out. Yes. So when we got started, we thought the problem we were solving was a just a question of data analytics. But really, as we dug further into the space, that the whole data value chain for the emerging and most rapidly growing businesses in this space, was we were just shocked at what we found. And I think that providing simple, easy to use and easy to understand intelligence for operators with growing portfolios is what we do today. And we work with clients with projects ranging from 10 kilowatts, up to about 25 megawatts, I'm really anything in that range to help a small team of operations professionals, I would in providers, I manage a very large geographically distributed portfolio. Yeah.
• 7:57
  Tim Montague: So your, your performance monitoring platform at your core? And is there a in most of these systems, there's some kind of a hardware platform, but tell us what are the components and and what are the benefits to the status quo?
• 8:14
  Tim Montague: I guess that's the big question.
• 8:14
  Tim Montague: In most listeners, minds, like today, companies are using also energy, probably 80%. That is the gorilla in the room. So tomorrow, when they convert to wattch what is different?
• 8:30
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, that's a that is a great question. You might not be surprised to hear that I get asked that a lot. I would say that at our core, just to clarify, wattch as a data company, we think of ourselves as a data company first, and not a hardware business or sort of pro service provider. We're a technology vendor. When we compare wattch to other legacy products in this space, we sort of focused on three areas of differentiation. The first is simplicity, we think it's really important for scale, is just repeatability and simplicity and profit in the process of collecting and analyzing that data. So all of our hardware solutions are sort of programmed identically at the factory, it's all self service setup, scanning QR codes, uploading CAD files, tried to make it as easy as possible to monitor your project, well, they're doing the right thing. And that means across the board, selecting the right equipment, being secure, collecting high fidelity data, all of that should be turnkey.
• 9:29
  Alex Nussey: Wherever possible. I'd say the second and biggest what really drives people towards us most of the time is what we can do with that data. On the intelligence side. The sort of core feature, I guess, of the performance analytics platform at wattch is our digital twin. That means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But essentially, we can use the we know that the design of your project to simulate its ideal output at any time second to second at the level of the site, an inverter or you know, a string of modules. And usually when people think of performance analytics in that way, they're thinking in Watson and kilowatts, we're sort of closer to something like a PD cyst, where we're analyzing the sort of ideal voltage and current of every module at the site in essentially real time. And by overlaying that digital twin that ideal output characteristic of every component with the real data can help operators find problems. You know, we say, commissioned a site in the first minute you can find single module stringing mistakes just by looking at the string voltages.
• 10:40
  Tim Montague: And how do you create that digital twin? I'm imagining that you take an as built of the solar farm or solar facility And then you're embedding that information in a piece of hardware, ultimately, but it's a software model of the of the facility. And then you're doing this real time comparison of here's what's happening.
• 11:04
  Tim Montague: Here's what should be happening.
• 11:08
  Tim Montague: And is that Kosher or something is not. Right, right?
• 11:12
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, exactly. So in order to get that ideal output of the site, we do need the as built, we try to make that as easy as possible. If you have a PVCs, you can just actually upload that directly to wattch and will will pull the relevant data out or you can sort of build it in our in our UI in the cloud. itself fairly straightforward, just all the information that you'd expect in a single line drawing. And then from there, that that sort of string and physical layout information is combined with live weather data captured by museological stations on site or to any any weather data source, but we want that live real feed.
• 11:46
  Alex Nussey: And then the third is the performance characteristics of all of the components. So you think of like a pan file for a module or the datasheet. For a solar inverter, we also use primarily to independent test lab data. So CEC as an example, they'll buy modules and inverters and and actually test them on a bench and we use those real performance characteristics rather than what the manufacturers datasheet says, and then run all three of those things through our sort of simulation engine, and you get that exactly that, that sort of optimal output for the whole farm, or the whole installation.
• 12:20
  Alex Nussey: And our alerting system will will point out any deviations from from that that sort of ideal baseline?
• 12:27
  Tim Montague: And how hard is this? You know, there's, there's such a variety of types of equipment. You know, literally dozens of solar panel manufacturers and inverter manufacturers, maybe not dozens of inverter manufacturers, but a dozen, certainly. Can you play with all types of hardware irrespective? Or Are there limitations there,
• 12:54
  Alex Nussey: you're looking at the oldest sort of vintage of solar farms, there may be some availability or compatibility issues, but but generally anything built in the last five years, and certainly, coming up in the future, we like to say we have universal compatibility with new new equipment. Luckily, there's enough of a standards approach, standard human approach these days that we can figure out how to get the how to get the data into wattch.
• 13:20
  Tim Montague: And if I'm, if I'm an asset owner, and you know, today, I've got my system, call it also energy for lack of a better expression, right? And, you know, that system is giving me, you know, a green, yellow, red light, basically. And then tomorrow, I installed wattch, what can I expect? What is the compelling value proposition, I guess, for wattch that makes customers make the switch?
• 13:50
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, so I think the question I like to ask asset owners is, how do you know if your portfolio is healthy? You know, when you're talking about utility scale sites, people on you know, the physical staff physically on site all the time, that's pretty easy to quantify, um, you can go check things. But with a distributed portfolio, how do you know if it's healthy, and that that green, yellow red that you're getting out of, sort of the standard monitoring tools today, the accuracy on that is fairly low. And it doesn't really help you identify the source of that underperformance.
• 14:23
  Alex Nussey: With wattch, we try to we tell folks that if you sort of follow our guidelines, the accuracy on our diagnostics is about one and a half percent, sort of total total error. And at the highest level, what does that mean for our customers, empirically, on average, across our whole install base, and CNI and DG, after customers switch to wattch, we see a average performance improvement, whether adjusted of about 8%, in the first three months. And that's, that's a sort of shockingly high number. And I won't begin to claim that we're actually doing the work of resolving those issues. But you know, these portfolios are growing so rapidly, our our goal is to put, you know, confident information or confident diagnoses in the hands of operators so they can do their job in a timely in a timely fashion and, and make sure that everything is performing the way it should. So
• 15:17
  Tim Montague: how does how does I'm now I'm a little confused.
• 15:22
  Tim Montague: I'm also excited. I mean, 8% and 8%. Improvement is a significant number, but I don't quite follow how wattch can lead to improve performance. Yeah,
• 15:36
  Alex Nussey: I mean, our core client base is commercial scale solar. And increasingly, I DGD sort of front of meter community scale solar as well. But these assets have they vary so much in the way that their hands They'll do different tilts and adds in a solid one roof different string lengths, the traditional approaches to finding small sources of underperformance, it's very coarse grained. So you can easily miss small problems.
• 16:02
  Alex Nussey: And when we bring on these commercial portfolios, we generally find why lots of small issues with the site, everything, but they some of them have been there since the site were built. I'm just stringing mistakes, you know, too many modules on the string, not enough on the string. And these are the kinds of things that they really add up over time, and just helping helping asset owners be more effective in their dispatching. The third set of element I was going to touch on with our value prop is this idea of remote control of our assets. So when you think of utility scale, of course, everyone has full control and dispatch ability on their assets. But as you get down into smaller and smaller sizes, that that capability is generally not found. It's cost prohibitive, and the way that it's traditionally implemented. But with wattch, we give from any project size across our whole sort of service range, you get near real time remote control over these assets. And that can be used for sort of the the obvious things. People think read services when I talk about controls, generally or events.
• 17:07
  Alex Nussey: But you can also do things like clear faults, or run remote diagnostics, or without, you know, leaving your nice air conditioned office. And that sort of, again, leads to the goal of reducing truck rolls, saving time and improving efficiency for these often overworked teams.
• 17:27
  Tim Montague: And can you achieve an installation without going on site?
• 17:35
  Alex Nussey: It's a great question. And so the best data we generally find is collected when customers use our hardware.
• 17:44
  Alex Nussey: But we have a number of different ways of getting the data into our into our cloud.
• 17:47
  Alex Nussey: And we can actually do sort of no touch retrofits, in many, many cases, if the data lives somewhere, we can probably getting into wattch that control component generally does require a site visit. Very fast installation in almost all cases. And we've kind of seen it all in terms of retrofits, but we like to start with new customers, it's bring all of your data from your whole portfolio into wattch from day one. And then as you're building new sites, replacing components and old sites, so to bring the the best of the functionality to your historic portfolio by retrofitting our hardware, does that make sense?
• 18:27
  Tim Montague: Yes, and no. I mean, I, so what is the what is the standard hardware installation that you're that you're making? Yeah,
• 18:35
  Alex Nussey: and I mentioned that we are at our core data company. So we don't actually manufacture any hardware in house. We partnered with a couple of different manufacturers here in North America, predominantly IQ energy, well known for their energy meters, they build sort of, as anyone that's bought monitoring before we'd expect sort of a turnkey das the term enclosure by the rated box with a power supply, surge protection, cellular modem, and our we call it an edge controller, we think of it as kind of a data logger all grown up the data logger with the control capabilities that I mentioned. And that's sort of the only branded piece of hardware in that box, largely open architecture. It's all brands that customers are already familiar with. And then the brain, the center of that system is our first party product.
• 20:17
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And as a data first company, how do you explain this to lay people like, why this is so important? I mean, it's great to have these statistics about, well, we're going to improve the performance of your asset bottom line, right? Everybody wants more kWh out of their asset, that that is revenue, one way or another to either savings, or its revenue, if it's a third party owned PPA, right? You know, everybody in their mother is, is is a data company, also to some extent. So what it what is changing about Software as a Service and our capabilities in data analytics that make you special?
• 21:07
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, I so you said something, which I think is really important. Everyone in their mother is a data company.
• 21:12
  Alex Nussey: And I think, I think to some extent, that's true, I think you any business and solar is going to try and find a data angle, especially with all the the noise and buzz around machine learning and AI. But really, I think part of it differentiates wattches. That's, that's all we do. That's our specialty. And our customers sort of up and down the size range look to us as a partner in data, and then and everything that comes with that security communications.
• 21:39
  Alex Nussey: And then that lets them treat sort of the other parts of the value chain things like converters as, as commodity hardware, if you're not bound to, you know, sort of a walled garden ecosystem of have one sort of hardware manufacturers data data ecosystem, that means that you can have more choice around availability and pricing and lead times. on that on that area. I also think we are able to deliver a service that is easier to use, easier to work with, we're able to be nimble and flexible because of our sort of cloud and software first approach. We have tried to take as much of the complexity out of hardware and into software as possible because it's much faster to change, and lets our customers sort of get to market as quickly as they can.
• 22:30
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• 23:34
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, yeah. So we think of state engineers is some of our best friends was not attempting to replace SCADA. And it's sort of traditional definition. Generally, for our larger projects, we're sitting on top of a of a SCADA system on site and providing that remote observability and intelligence layer where SCADA is enforcing the very low level safety controls. That is not something we're trying to displace. Just to be clear, though, for a lot of our smaller projects, we can solve problems that traditionally we'd use SCADA to solve things like your export control, or economic dispatch of of assets, we can sort of handle that in our product, eliminating the need for SCADA on small small systems. But I think, generally, the thing that are sort of most sophisticated customers like is, how easy to work with we are, like I mentioned, everything comes from the factory from wattch, sort of programmed agnostically. So you can keep a pile of our parts in the back of your truck. And if you're on site, you can grab one of our edge devices, plug it in, and start working with essentially any configuration that you have on site and get that set up in our cloud product. In just a handful of minutes. You're not because everything standardized, you're not dealing with long lead times generally. And you're not shipping things back to the factory to be to be reprogrammed. And then it lets us also solve some of the most frustrating problems that skate engineers face around to networking and firewall configurations in VPNs, our technology can work with almost any networking configuration and control layer and is all handled in our put application layer protocol. So they're easy to work with. I think it's really where we, we try to Yeah,
• 25:28
  Tim Montague: we'd love to be a fly on the wall. As a technician is installing the system's not just yours, but others, right and seeing because it's easy to say, oh, it's going to be a piece of cake. And that I guess that's one of the the gnarly questions is truly how easy is it? Do you have an example for you know, for us in terms of get being on boarded by by a customer in some sizable manner in a way that they were like, wow, this was easy.
• 26:09
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, yeah. I I think you said something really important. It's easy to talk a big game. And the question is always, you know, how true is that? And we really, if this was a sales call, we'd really just encourage you to try it once.
• 26:24
  Alex Nussey: You know, a lot of these players are building sites constantly.
• 26:27
  Alex Nussey: Just give us try on one project.
• 26:27
  Alex Nussey: You don't like it, you know, leave me alone. And that sort of first ones free mentality, I think is is the best way to believe it is to see it and we will We find that once customers tries, once we're generally in the door, I think there's 1001 little ways that monitoring systems control systems can create frustration. And we spent the first years of our business just sitting on roofs and in fields talking to the electricians and technicians that were installing these systems and ironing out every little kink that we could. And when we bring new customers on, I tell them, if you are frustrated with something, I want you to tell me, right, this is not a done the product.
• 27:12
  Alex Nussey: That's the beauty of software, right is it's always improving.
• 27:14
  Alex Nussey: So if you have feedback, we have an email address that goes to our whole product team, all the engineers get it. And we release new features every Monday. So if there is a a burr in your process, tell us and we'll fix it. And I think that's kind of the first bowel movement that a lot of our our customers feel is they do an install, they're 99% happy with it. And they have one piece of feedback into the next week for their next installation that's already solved. And that's we, I think by leveraging the latest and greatest technology, it lets us be agile, even with a small team and responsive to customers needs.
• 27:51
  Tim Montague: So the company started in 2020, with a grant and a handful of people with some good ideas and some, you know, some skills at Where Where have you come in the last four years? And what are your What are you seeing in the market in terms of your, you know, of your future?
• 28:15
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, let's see, for years, like so it feels like a lifetime, sometimes. We get started late 2019, early 2020.
• 28:22
  Alex Nussey: With that do you funding and the first, really the first two and a half years, we're like heads down building, you know, we had a handful of, I like customers that are willing to try things and iterate with us. And we built out a minimum viable product, which is pretty wide in the space, you need to be able to cover a lot of bases. And I learned just a ton from those.
• 28:44
  Alex Nussey: There's three or four of our earliest clients.
• 28:48
  Tim Montague: Tell us about then is there some clients you can talk talk about?
• 28:52
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, I'd say our first customer, I'll give him a shout out Cherry Street energy here in Atlanta, radiant solar is another one very early with us also here in Atlanta. And in that first two and a half years, we were very sort of geographically focused in the southeast, which has some interesting market implications for the kinds of projects we see as you might imagine. But, you know, I just use Cherry Street as an example. They're building large CNI, installations, rooftops, carports, things like that for everyone from the fortune 500 to municipalities and nonprofits. And the portfolio varies widely in composition, capacity technology. And once their team knows our product really well, you know, we'll we can be rolled out on a dozen projects and in one order, and it's all comes on one pallet, their team doesn't need to worry about what boxes go where it's all the identical hardware, and they can. It's that collaborative mindset. I just want to sort of focus on that, again, I think as this industry is changing and evolving. We like to work with people that are forward thinkers so that we can skate to where the puck is going from a technology perspective. And to answer the question you asked about sort of growth over the last four years. It's been about is it for 18 months ago, now, we raised our first set of institutional venture capital funding some great investors from across the energy industry.
• 30:19
  Alex Nussey: And in the last, just urine change, we've gone from a handful of, of early projects in the southeast to got about a just over 1000 sites, 22 states now covering most of the different markets. And I think the trend that we see is pretty here, there's already but storage, it's happening. And anybody that isn't thinking about their storage strategy is behind. And that's sort of the big focus for us, we think we have a really differentiated and competitive project in solar monitoring. So storage is kind of the, the, the next logical step for us.
• 30:57
  Tim Montague: And how hard is that? To, to go from solar loan to solar and storage?
• 31:04
  Alex Nussey: Well, the good news is from a commercial and industrial sort of project perspective, I think, all of these buildings, eventually you're gonna want storage. It's a question of how far down the price curve to this. Does. Your batteries need to come before that makes sense? But from from that perspective, I think we're in the right segment, to be innovating in that area. All of our customers are developing storage strategies. So we learned a lot from working with them. But it's definitely a big jump. I think the good news is this sort of controls enabled strategy that we've taken means that we can roll out storage control features to our customers without adding any new hardware, and I think that's fairly differentiated in the monitoring space. Our data logger is capable of doing everything from reporting data to running sophisticated model predictive control loops on site. And that means that as our customers add, storage, Evie, charging submetering, whatever it is just tied into the intelligence you already have on site and lights up as another little panel in our, our UI. So I think what's particularly challenging about storage is how much it varies based on use case, you know, you have people that are looking for the man in charge mitigation, resilience, wholesale market participation, and a lot of moles to whack. For lack of a better term.
• 32:25
  Tim Montague: Yes, for sure. The value stack of storage is, is very nuanced, and geographic.
• 32:29
  Tim Montague: Check out my interview with David Braun recently from intelligent generation
• 32:37
  Alex Nussey: gets into that this morning, actually, oh, yeah,
• 32:41
  Tim Montague: we love IG here in PJM. territory. You know, I'm, I'm looking at your about page, the the website for wattches, wattch w a t t c h.io. And if you go to the About, you'll see some bios of the leadership team or the board of directors, but scroll down and you see a heat map of your customer base, which is quite impressive for a four year old company, you know, over 1000 installations, 22 states.
• 33:08
  Tim Montague: And yeah, you are heavy in the southeast, but you're in California, Arizona, Texas, New Jersey, Massachusetts, I mean, you're in most of the major Colorado, most of the major solar markets. So kudos.
• 33:26
  Alex Nussey: Thank you. It's been it's been a really exciting last year. And I think the good news is, as the industry is growing so quickly, you know, all ships rise together, or whatever the metaphor is, with the tide. And we like partnering with the forward thinking, you know, thought leaders in this industry and as their deployment grows. So, so desires.
• 33:48
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So what, in our last few minutes together, Alex? Where do you see the industry going? And what is it that keeps you up at night?
• 33:58
  Alex Nussey: This is two questions. I'll start with what keeps me up at night. And that's cybersecurity. I think there are the sort of the big news stories that most folks in the industry see, you know, European Wind Farms getting shut down or inverter backends getting hacked, and, you know, unauthorized users being able to push firmware updates. But as the penetration of these small scale assets just continues to increase. Cybersecurity really, really does keep you up at night. I think there's, you know, you have these NERC CIP, critical instruction protection has cybersecurity guidelines, but those only apply to very large projects. And, you know, these 510 megawatt community solar projects are governed by a lot of the legislation and, and requirements around cyber, and that's up, you know, you don't need 100 megawatt projects, if you can get into enough small ones. So I think that's an another example of somewhere, it's something we take seriously and are working with, again, small team, I'm not going to claim to be the global experts on this, but we want to know who those experts are, and work with them and learn from them. And make it as easy as possible to do the right thing for our customers, you know, if you're an EPC, you probably don't have cybersecurity professionals on your staff. So we want to make the point and click option, a secure and reliable one. So if you have a spreadsheet with usernames and passwords in it, please call me. We'll work on that. And then I was your second, what was the second part of that question?
• 35:37
  Tim Montague: Yeah. Like, when you look into your crystal ball, where's the solar monitoring industry growing, you know, going in, and how is it changing?
• 35:48
  Alex Nussey: Yeah, I think there's these verticals, you know, you hear monitoring, you hear EMS and, and you hear terms, all these different energy data sort of silos. And I think at the end of the day, that the reality is they're all still like, so isolated from each other. You look at a monitoring system, and it's it's almost universally a one way data logger, that's like uploading a CSV every, you know, five minutes, you look at an EMS and it's usually a server installed on site that is running that that control loop it, maybe it reports to the cloud, but it can't take instructions from the cloud. And then you look at something like a derms or whatnot and, and that's meant to be sort of cloud to edge control. But these systems, they're duplicative and they don't talk to each other. I think what's coming is, you know, a unification of, of the monitoring and control planes for all of these assets, solar storage, Evie charging, I Electric you name it, all these ers. And I think the sort of better than the sum of its parts value that comes from integrating these capabilities into one platform is is what's is what's going to be pushing things forward over the next five years. I think it's an inevitability at this point. And it's a question of sort of what what parts get integrated first.
• 37:06
  Tim Montague: Sounds like a hard problem.
• 37:09
  Alex Nussey: Yes, lots of stakeholders, lots of different requirements. You look at, you know, annual investor reporting, versus, you know, second by second energy dispatch decisions and an EMS and, but it's all the same data. And, and I think, if all those different systems should be learning from each other, not being procured and operating in isolation.
• 37:30
  Tim Montague: Yeah. You mentioned learning and, you know, of course, AI broke onto the scene for for the general population in 2023. Is that technology, these large language models? Is that relevant to wattch?
• 37:47
  Alex Nussey: That's a great question. I will start by saying that what we're selling today, we do not use the words, machine learning or AI, our sort of performance models, we talked about the digital twin. It's physics, you know, we've just commercialized 1000s of pages of research from, you know, the best minds Sandia and REL in the space. It is these are deterministic, well characterized the behavior of silicon. Semiconductors is one of the best understood physical properties in the world, right.
• 38:13
  Alex Nussey: So we're just commercializing academic research, making it easy to use. There's no an L and I don't think there should be because you want deterministic, well understood. That's how you build confidence. Where I see the role of machine learning and AI is in the predictive side, on the predictive maintenance, machine learning and then the large language models, which are certainly occupying the public mindshare, right now. It's very interesting to me. When you'd be talking about analyzing, like maintenance logs, obviously, that's a sort of a word of folks do with the insights that wattch gives them they they make maintenance decisions, and they go on site, and they find the real root problem. And as that data set, not just with us, but industry wide grows, I think there's so much those those those records live in disparate systems. And if we can bring it all together and analyze it, I think that there's just so much more that can be done from an efficiency perspective.
• 39:12
  Tim Montague: Agreed. Well, what else should our listeners know?
• 39:15
  Tim Montague: Alex? Anything we didn't talk about that you'd like to talk about?
• 39:19
  Alex Nussey: Thank you. Awesome, great questions. Definitely covered I covered covered the bases pretty well. I think, you know, actually, you know, yeah, I think I think that pretty much covered everything. I really appreciate it. You
• 39:31
  Tim Montague: might be wondering, how do you see an eye solar PPAs get financed? For many it remains a mystery. For others, there's conductor, conductor solar helps hundreds of developers and EPCs. Find investors, close transactions and collaborate effectively.
• 39:46
  Tim Montague: With competitive bids from high quality partners. Conductor, make sure you and your customers get the best PPA deal every time. Free to use for developers and EBCs. Visit conductor dot solar today. Great, well, you can look forward to seeing wattch at many of the regional solar shows. So again, check out wattch.io w a t t c h.io. And check out the Clean Power Hour all of our content is at cleanpowerhour.com. Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And tell a friend about the show. Alex How can our listeners find you?
• 40:25
  Alex Nussey: I think find us it wattch that spelled a two T's two great pon very funny.
• 40:28
  Alex Nussey: launch.io will be it. Like you said all the regional shows NABCEP I think is the next one coming up or distributech next week, this week, and then NABCEP after that. And please get in touch reach out. Even if you're not interested in our product we love connecting with people that are are imagining the future of renewable energy. So don't be a stranger.
• 40:51
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much.
• 40:51
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here.
• 41:03
  Tim Montague: Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about. You are part and parcel of the energy transition whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional.
• 41:21
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• 41:26
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• 41:31
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• 42:13
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• 42:45
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