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Treasury Safe Harbor Changes and What They Mean for Solar Developers · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: John, welcome to the Clean Power Hour live bringing you the latest in solar, wind and battery news every other Friday with my co host. John Weaver, welcome to the show, John. Hey Tim.
• 1:03
  John Weaver: The the world is still turning and burning, and we're still here, still working.
• 1:08
  John Weaver: So nice to see you. I hope everything's all right,
• 1:15
  Tim Montague: and life is good.
• 1:15
  Tim Montague: I'm glad that the heat of the summer has passed. We had a very hot summer here in central Illinois, and now it's cooled off a little bit, and hopefully that'll stay that way. I'm not a fan of 90 plus degree hot and humid, but anyway, that's really my only major gripe, is it's been hot.
• 1:36
  John Weaver: That's not too bad.
• 1:36
  John Weaver: No,
• 1:38
  Tim Montague: there are worse things. There are worse things.
• 1:41
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I mean, well,
• 1:42
  John Weaver: it depends how hot, because that's part of our career purpose, that too hot is going to be bad. But yeah, yeah.
• 1:48
  John Weaver: So yeah, it's actually just hitting the cool, perfect weather here around I'm trying to figure out whether wear shirts or long sleeves. Windows are open. AC is a non it's wonderful. I'm sure the duck curve is in hardcore work today in New England, because the weather is just perfect. So, but, but, and it's good construction weather, which is wonderful. So solar is getting built this summer.
• 2:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it is interesting that there tends to be a pulse of construction in q3 q4 especially q4 which gets tricky because the weather gets nasty in q4 in November, December. But it's just the way of the world. Things come together later in the year, and it's messy, so we're going to talk about the tax
• 2:43
  John Weaver: credits. No, technically not tax credits.
• 2:46
  John Weaver: This is federal treasury guidance on safe harboring.
• 2:51
  Tim Montague: Safe Harbor, yeah, yes, yes, yes. Sorry.
• 2:54
  John Weaver: Well, yeah, it's, it's start of construction related to tax credits. So that's my my headline there was written badly for you because I just went with the PV magazine, but some of the key items here is that the Treasury was nicer to us, and many thought, but there's some nuance and some creative stuff. I actually had a great interview yesterday with a law firm based out of Dallas.
• 3:13
  John Weaver: I'll, I'll remember their moment name in a moment. But looking at some of the Treasury guidance, what has to be done, it's, it's something interesting and and what came out was helpful, like so for people like me, that projects that are under 1.5 megawatt AC, no rules really changed. We have this 5% safe harbor. If you purchase stuff, you're safe you're moving forward. For the bigger folks, the 5% rule is gone. Now they have to have something called continuous construction. And obviously it could mean that you're on site building things that's the cleanest and easiest way, however, continuous construction can occur off site.
• 3:58
  John Weaver: So if you start purchasing hardware today, and your transformer takes three months to make, well, you need a second component that starts construction before the three months of the transformer finishes. So you need to have hardware lined up so that you always have something being assembled somewhere. And that's kind of the fundamental for the big folks that they have to now start figuring out how to do, is how to show and prove that they are having continuous construction starting like today. You know it's going to be, it's tight now, I think there's a cut off at September 3, fourth, September 2. Yeah, you can see it right there. So there's this, there's there's rules, there's dates and but I guess the biggest thing out of here is this transition from being able to spend 5% of the projects cost on modules and gear and just toss it in a warehouse to now having to be smart enough to make construction start little building blocks somewhere far away from the site. So you can show true work occurring continually.
• 5:05
  Tim Montague: But the real point, you know, I think my our core audience here is the DG, installer, developer, financier, service provider or prosumer,
• 5:20
  John Weaver: and some big players on this actually, Tim.
• 5:22
  John Weaver: People walk up to me and say, John, I listen to you and Tim.
• 5:25
  John Weaver: And it's like, holy crap. You guys spent a lot of money. You should give us a call stuff like that randomly.
• 5:31
  Tim Montague: And it's like, nice. You're talking about utility developers, or absolutely
• 5:34
  John Weaver: lots of people listen to us who are across the spectrum, size project, size wise, you would be surprised people that walk up to me,
• 5:41
  Tim Montague: Well, I certainly try to bring content to a wide audience in the clean energy transition. But anyway, so there's. There's these two worlds, right? The sub multi megawatt world of DG, and if you just procure 5% of the equipment a safe harbor, then you're good, until what is that? Cut off now when, like, four years. Okay,
• 6:12
  John Weaver: if you Yeah, if you safe harbor, you have, like, three or four years. It's some really long number. Absolutely,
• 6:18
  Tim Montague: yeah. So it was good news. People were expecting this to be perhaps worse. I'm not going to kid anybody the OB B, B, the O, triple B is tough, and it is forcing a lot of companies to reinvent their future. You can no longer be just a solar installer. You have to be a solar battery and maybe something else. Solar battery, EV infrastructure, maybe heat pumps. I love heat pumps.
• 6:47
  Tim Montague: Electrification of HVAC is a thing. If you can install batteries, you can install heat pumps. It's a little more complicated. There's plumbing involved, but it's doable. But I'm curious. You know, in your conversations about this, John, how people are you know, reconsidering their lives and their and their futures because of the O, triple B. That's that's the clear signal for me, is batteries and micro grids.
• 7:20
  Tim Montague: But what is it? What is your takeaway?
• 7:25
  John Weaver: Well, I can tell you what we in house are doing.
• 7:28
  John Weaver: We're going to double down our focus and solar distributed in New England, specifically mass in Rhode Island, because they have strong incentives, expensive electricity. But the second thing, and I've mentioned this in prior weeks, we're moving forward on a battery EPC arrangement, where we partner with a pretty we're hoping a smart integrator, pretty soon we might be able to talk about it, and they're going to bring in the hardware, the design, the modeling, the pricing, you know, get around, manage fioc and everything else, and make sure we bring in good hardware and we're going to build it. And that's part of my game, is we're going to have to learn how to build batteries. So that's explicit right there. When it goes to residential. Man, I had a call with a guy who works for Sun run. He's been there for a while. He's got a family. They were paying pretty well. They started chopping back heavily on incentives, on commissions. And I told him to go look for a small local shop, yeah, and figure out what their red line is, and tell them, Listen, guys, you got to get down to two bucks a watt. And let me sell a 260 something like that. People are still looking, but it's about to hit. You know, a bunch of resi people are going to lose some
• 8:43
  Tim Montague: work, yeah. And one of the, one of the things about batteries is this VPP phenomenon. Some states have incentives for E, P, P, S, California, Massachusetts, and imagine I just did a interview with AJ Perkins that'll be dropping in the next couple of weeks here. But he's a he's known as the micro grid mentor, and he works in Hawaii, in California, he's done some work in Alaska also, but he's involved with these large, large residential projects where they're putting a battery in every home, and sometimes a bigger battery, like a 40 kilowatt hour battery, for for two purposes, resiliency locally, for the home, but also then the community functions as a VPP, and you know, you take a bunch of 40 kWh batteries and all of a sudden you've got 20 megawatt hours of batteries, and that's really good for the grid operator. And I think this is an opportunity for installers and developers who can narrow in on these types of opportunities. So you need to work with developers that these are real estate developers that are building tranches of homes or retrofitting tranches of homes and and then, you know, there are financiers that will finance these capex projects where a third party owns the batteries, provides it as a service to the consumer, so the consumer doesn't have a big out of pocket, but it's still a construction project for you.
• 11:12
  Tim Montague: Mr. EPC, I think that's also something to really just have in your awareness. As a solar company,
• 11:25
  John Weaver: the agree with it at all. Yep, it's going to be work. It's going to be hard to get through this stuff. You know, my residential company, we're essentially just going to run it the back end with the commercial group, and we're going to be really light on the front end. And that's going. Be key to having low cost install.
• 11:42
  John Weaver: We're going to do small amounts of outbound marketing based only on installations that we've done. We're not going to have a massive door knocking campaign paying, you know, dollar per watt incentives. It's it's gotta be reasonable, it's gotta be fair if it's going to work, because at least that's my initial model. You know, not all of us are Sun run who figured out somehow to get their residential projects to have like a four year Safe Harbor like so they probably just bought 30 gigs of modules, put them in a warehouse, and now all their resi projects, they have three to four year window. Think about that. Normally, a resi project can't use safe harbor effectively because it takes two weeks to build it. No, let me rephrase that, two days to build it, one day to build it. But Sun run with the legal ease and the magic is going to be able to still keep doing distributed solar, residential solar, well after 2027 so they're going to do something special and different. They're going to make the resi market still exist somehow, to some degree, but it's going to be third party in their model, and they integrate VPPs, and they integrate batteries and and they integrate the Ford, what's it called, the lightning. And now they're working with Tesla. So I think we're going to maybe, you know, if you know, if you want to buy some solar stock, buy some sun run, it's probably risky, but, you know, they had the crap beat out of them already. I mean, I know everything go lower, but
• 13:11
  Tim Montague: that sounds very risky to me. I can't recommend that. But, I mean, I love this work in the angles. Okay, you got to work the angles. I love that. What concerns me about companies like sun run is in my own neighborhood, I see homes where they're putting solar on the north facing slope of homes in central Illinois where it's fine. In the summer, you will get, you know, photons to electrons off that north north face. But in the winter, no bueno, right? You're going to get zero off the north face in the winter, and what that means is the ROI is less, but they're all about the capex and the ITC, and they're and they're juicing that, and that's interesting.
• 13:56
  Tim Montague: But is it sustainable? I don't know. That makes me nervous.
• 14:01
  Unknown: We'll find out. We will. Well, let's
• 14:03
  Tim Montague: talk about EV infrastructure, or EVs. Okay, you found a story on blue sky.
• 14:07
  Tim Montague: Huge news out of the IRS today.
• 14:12
  Tim Montague: What's the story?
• 14:13
  John Weaver: Essentially, you can do a down payment and sign a contract on your EV today and take delivery through the end of 2026 so a year and a quarter away, and still get the $7,500 tax credit so that.
• 14:37
  Tim Montague: So if you were going to buy an EV, you already own an EV. John, in case you hadn't noticed, but if you were gonna buy an Eevee today, what EV would you buy?
• 14:48
  John Weaver: I'd buy another Hyundai IONIQ five for my company. Or, if it's not for a company, it's for somebody wants a little finer living Tesla Model Y, yeah, for for middle class home. That's my brother just bought he just got to use Tesla Model y for under 20k with like, 32,000 miles, needed new rims in the back. They had a little wobble, but he's got four kids. They all fit in the car.
• 15:12
  John Weaver: Tim, four kids and his wife all fit in the car. My goodness. So that's pretty cool. He got the back row, so he got the third I guess there's three rows, front row, middle row, background, and it's two little ones fit in the back. So Ionic five is what I bought for my company. It's what I own personally, and what I pushed my brother toward was a Tesla Model
• 15:33
  Tim Montague: y I heard that Ford, Ford has launched a$30,000 electric truck. Now I don't know if it's for sale yet, but they've announced it, right?
• 15:40
  Tim Montague: So it's basically an electric version of their Ford Maverick truck, all right? And I don't know what the range is, but that's interesting to me. I was a big fan of my model. Why I was sad to see it go when I went back to the ice because of my camping trailer and now my boat.
• 16:01
  Tim Montague: I sold the trailer, my camping trailer for my boat, and I tow it around the Midwest and and I've heard horror stories John of the range that you get when you're towing a trailer with an EV but that aside, I'm a huge fan of EVs. It is the future, and this isn't this is great news, because it was painful to lose the $7,500
• 16:23
  John Weaver: it's the current Tim, not the future. It's the current, yeah.
• 16:31
  Tim Montague: Well, 20% of new cars in new cars are in Cala are sorry, 20% of new cars are EVs in California. Yeah, in the US, in China, in the US writ large, it's 2% so we have a long way to go, but you gotta, gotta start somewhere.
• 16:55
  John Weaver: Gotta start with a$7,500 rebate. It affected my solar or my lease payment so much. When I bought one for the company, I got 2500 bucks in mass. No, 3500 in mass. 7500 federal applied directly to the lease payment. Wonderful, cool.
• 17:14
  Tim Montague: So you found a story in Wired magazine. I used to read Wired Magazine, no longer. But anyway, might need me to share it? No, I have it on screen here. I'll share it in a sec. It says Africa is buying a record number of Chinese solar panels. Yes, the whole world is buying a record number of Chinese solar panels, not just Africa. But what's the story with Africa?
• 17:39
  John Weaver: Well, Africa's growth is happening now. Is what the story is. You know, last year it was Pakistan that blew everybody out and surprised everybody this year. Well, end of last year, we started to see it in Africa, q3, q4, and then this year it's starting to pop.
• 17:53
  John Weaver: They set a new record for the month of May, 1.6 gigawatts for the continent. There was this particular line. Let's read this line less developed countries such as Chad, so these are countries that don't have as massive an infrastructure have imported enough solar panels to replace their country's entire power generation capacity. This.
• 18:24
  John Weaver: You know that leapfrogging phrase they used to talk about what cell phones are like, ah, Africa is going to skip landlines and go straight to mobiles. And they did, yeah, and then, ah, rural society might go straight to Starlink and skip a lot of infrastructure for wideband. That's maybe happening right now. Maybe we'll see if, if that can happen. Well, it just happened with solar in these countries. We just saw LeapFrog. Everybody kept saying, oh, let's get some SMRs. Let's get them some gas. You know, none of them delivered. Nobody delivered to Africa. You know, who's delivering solar, solar from China. And there's another article. I didn't include it, but one of the massive battery companies are now moving into Pakistan to complement their solar because now they have the marketplace to put the batteries in to capture the excess. Yeah, that's happening in Africa next.
• 19:11
  John Weaver: And this is a billion people in Africa, dude, and they have zero infrastructure. They're just they're not going to have any of the stupid interconnection issues we have. They're going to build their grid around solar, solar and batteries, and they have a grid. You know, Nigeria is one of the most biggest countries. What
• 19:31
  Tim Montague: is it? But though, what is it that has happened in Africa that is causing this? Do you think this tipping solar,
• 19:36
  John Weaver: solar panels at six cents a watt?
• 19:39
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I mean, I in the back of my mind, I go, Well, yeah, it seems like China is really trying to embed itself into Africa in terms of infrastructure. They're building ports.
• 19:52
  John Weaver: And that's not what's driving this. This is price. This is the mass population. Think so it's pushing though. This is soft power attempts. Yes, that's, you know, but what's occurring now is called secular market. So the politics, push, push, push, but now the demand is starting to pull it's going to yank it up.
• 20:12
  John Weaver: That's what's happening. You can only push so far with soft politics, soft power with, you know, subsidies, but there's a tipping point that's occurring United States, our modules are 40 cents, so it can't fundamentally occur with us.
• 20:26
  John Weaver: It's almost occurring at the utility scale if solar is beaten stuff. But so
• 20:31
  Tim Montague: if we didn't have tariffs, we could get solar panels for six cents. Well,
• 20:36
  John Weaver: we wouldn't want the ones at six because those are from the cheaper Chinese companies with the crap warranties. We'd want the ones at like 14 that's just finance, dude. My people won't buy those panels. I'd put them on my house.
• 20:48
  Tim Montague: Do you think? Do you think the six cent panels are truly, what's going into this story?
• 20:55
  John Weaver: Absolutely, absolutely. I've read, I've read about some of the companies and who's getting products there.
• 20:59
  John Weaver: There's some nice product going there too. In the bigger projects, you know, long G Tong, Wei, Ginko, the big companies, I have micro grid stuff talk about for those areas.
• 21:09
  Tim Montague: And if you buy, if you buy a six cent solar module or solar technology, how do you, how do you tamper your or temper your expectations? What is that?
• 21:19
  Tim Montague: Is it going to degrade faster?
• 21:24
  Tim Montague: Is it going to stop working?
• 21:24
  Tim Montague: What's going to happen?
• 21:28
  John Weaver: I mean, it should work fine. Maybe it'll be a 20 year panel with cheaper back sheets instead of a 35 year panel, yeah, because that's what you get with those cheaper panels. You got it. You got some trade offs, you got some thinner glass. You got some heavier you know. Your rail isn't as strong, maybe your back sheet is thinner. You don't have a warranty. You can't guarantee that Chinese company is going to exist, because those middle and lower size Chinese companies fight and they're fighting Ginko, and they're fighting long G and the biggest, most challenging market on Earth. So you just gotta recognize it's complex and just be happy with having electricity for 30 bucks.
• 22:09
  Tim Montague: Yeah. Okay, so you want to move on to Indonesia.
• 22:15
  John Weaver: Well, this is kind of the opposite of that Indonesia is doing. You mentioned micro grids a minute ago. So they have 80,000 villages that they want to give a one megawatt solar four megawatt hour microgrid to wow.
• 22:34
  John Weaver: That's like the biggest procurement ever, first off 80 gigawatts of solar, and then a 320 gigawatt hour battery project to distribute little tiny power plants. This is the future right here, dude, like little tiny power plants across their country, one and this is again, another example. Where's all the SMRs? Everybody kept telling me, everybody's going to get a two megawatt 24/7 Nuke, small modular reactor. I don't see one on Earth, except in submarines underneath the Arctic. Yep, you know. So right now I got my SMR. This is a modular fusion fusion reactor.
• 23:12
  John Weaver: It's coming from this, straight from space. This is the SMR, yes, sir, right here. And there's gonna be 80,000 of them deployed in Indonesia, and we're going to gain some beautiful expertise. The species will learning how to do this. So and then they have another casual 20 gigawatts of centralized solar, awesome. But the what I was really psyched about was 80,001 megawatt micro grids spread across the country. That is something, that is something.
• 23:46
  Tim Montague: Do you know the backstory here? How did, how did somebody convince Indonesia to do this? This is very cool. I have to say. Coal
• 23:55
  John Weaver: is expensive, and they're trying. Indonesia is like the third, third largest country on Earth, like 700 million people. Wait, no, Indonesia population 280, 3 million. That's like fourth. I think that puts, you know, we got India, we got China, we got the US, we got Indonesia. Tons of coal. But, you know, coal is expensive nowadays, solar is cheaper getting he can't build a coal power plant in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the jungle. They got a million islands down there. Man, you can't build power lines across that. Not when cyclones and, you know, ships have to move those very populated, very, very complex areas to move stuff through infrastructure. So this is like the ultimate for a massive island nation. Yeah, they have energy goals, so I don't know who pushed them, but I think China being a strong partner and just the way the world is going is my favorite story of the week, to be honest, maybe favorite of two weeks.
• 25:01
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's a good story. I'd like to learn more about it, so thank you for bringing that to our attention.
• 25:08
  Tim Montague: Good story. All right, we're moving on install of the week, prefab carport, 250 kW prefabricated solar racking carport, done overnight,
• 25:21
  John Weaver: overnight. The racking the foundation was already in place. So let's, let's vet that one. Let's say that real quick. But they came in with some cranes, and they dropped 250 kW of prefab modules into place, strapped them in overnight, and the pictures look cool. That's what I liked about it,
• 25:41
  Tim Montague: too. Oh, this is in Australia. Okay,
• 25:43
  John Weaver: yes, sir, yes, sir.
• 25:43
  John Weaver: Yeah. I felt some self esteem challenges here, Tim, because my carport installs are nowhere near this cool man, I don't do 250 overnight. I got human beings attaching modules, and they believe 3x faster, 3x productivity, doing it their way. And you know what, with the way challenge, how challenging it is to deploy labor machines consistently on site. Yeah, I believe these guys.
• 26:11
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I like this concept of a prefab carport. You can see how those, you know, those tables, call them tables, right? You can prefab a table, and then you're just craning that onto the structure and bolting it on instead of, I mean, today, what they often do is install the well, they I've seen two approaches. One is installing panels on the ground and then lifting the table but on site. And then two, I've actually also seen where they're done. Doing individual modules, running around with these scissor lifts or similar. That's
• 26:50
  John Weaver: what I do. That's what we generally do. We got lifts and we we got a series of two or three machines. You got one holding the modules, another lift in the module, bringing it up to the guys, and then another installing. You go to and they move fast.
• 27:05
  Tim Montague: Well, you can't move faster than you can move in a factory. No, of course not. So why is this so new? Why haven't others done this? I'm
• 27:16
  John Weaver: sure others have.
• 27:16
  John Weaver: If you click the PV magazine Australia link, there's another nice image. This image, yeah.
• 27:23
  John Weaver: Well, there's a second one on the hat. Who cares? Oh, there it is. There it is. That's the image. Yeah. Oh,
• 27:29
  Tim Montague: that is cool. Yes.
• 27:29
  Tim Montague: Are they called tables, or are they called something
• 27:34
  John Weaver: else? The we call them tables on single x trackers, on trackers, we call them tables. I don't know what this would be called E, call it a table, yeah, and call whatever you want. Tim, it's your show.
• 27:46
  John Weaver: They call them pods. So from the post, they call them pods, 36 pods, okay,
• 27:57
  Tim Montague: 36 yep, that's
• 28:00
  John Weaver: what they deployed.
• 28:00
  John Weaver: So about nine kW each, or Yeah, it seems a little strong. Maybe 36 parking spots covered, something like that, but they mentioned the pod number in their article. So it's pretty cool. I like it.
• 28:20
  Tim Montague: Did they say what the installed cost was? Oh,
• 28:22
  John Weaver: of course not. Come on, they never give us good data. Gotta go fight for that.
• 28:26
  John Weaver: Now you're interested. I could tell I interested you in something
• 28:33
  Tim Montague: you did. You did well, both these stories are great. I mean, all the stories are good. I'm just it's, it's all relative. I'm a huge fan of prefab. It's just so smart, so much more efficient. All right, EIA, US Energy Information Administration, us developers report half of new electric generating capacity will come from solar.
• 29:04
  John Weaver: That's cool, but that's not actually the article I wanted to highlight on scroll down a bit. They have a second chart in this article, and what I'm really interested in is that this year, we'll officially set a new record for energy capacity deployments in the United States, and we'll break the like 5060, gigawatt record of the early 2000s which was mostly gas, but this year will be it, bam. Check it out right there.
• 29:30
  John Weaver: That's it. And it's actually a little bit bigger, because that doesn't include distributed solar, so another four or five gigs AC. So gaining on 70 gigawatts of capacity will be deployed in the United States this year, and that's it. That's just cool. Still got some jobs and energy, plenty of them.
• 29:54
  Tim Montague: Yep, yeah, I don't, I don't see, I don't see the federal plan to revive coal, gas and nuclear, working for grid operators. Frankly, if I'm a grid operator, I want solar batteries and wind, because I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors, whether I'm public power or or private. IOU right, Money talks and and the thing that keeps coming up is solar, wind and batteries are cheaper and faster, and speed matters when all these data centers and all this electric vehicle infrastructure is coming online like you got to be able to deploy this stuff in three to five years, not five to 10 or five to 15 years in the case of a nuclear power plant, right?
• 30:52
  Tim Montague: Yeah, just not. This is,
• 30:58
  John Weaver: you know, this looks at, yeah, this looks at, you know, solar and storage, both as generation. And I believe that storage should be considered a generation asset, because that generation wouldn't have existed otherwise. And so while it may come from another source, I guess that generation would have existed would have come from gas. But when it comes to solar, batteries that charge from solar, it wouldn't have existed because that solar would have been curtailed. You know, we talked about it last show about California's curtailment being limited by batteries, which is great. I believe batteries should be considered a generation source as they are.
• 31:38
  Tim Montague: Yep. And you know this. Uh, points. Points out that Texas is a huge part of this phenomenon. And I was looking at the ERCOT dashboard for July. 50% of Texas's grid power came from solar, wind and batteries. That's so cool. Um, now it'll be less in the winter, but, yeah, it's solar. Wind and batteries are a major force now in the ERCOT grid and Texas installed 11 gigawatts of solar last year. Most states in the US are lucky if they install one gigawatt, right? There might be 15 states in the gigawatt I call it the gigawatt club. How many states per are installing more than a gigawatt of solar? John, I'm
• 32:32
  John Weaver: gonna say 21
• 32:36
  Tim Montague: Whoa. You think?
• 32:36
  Tim Montague: Let's see
• 32:39
  John Weaver: as of early 20 Okay, so the Google,
• 32:42
  Tim Montague: we better perplexity this one? Yeah,
• 32:45
  John Weaver: I google told me 33 No, but have more than one gigawatt of capacity?
• 32:51
  Tim Montague: No, I'm talking about
• 32:52
  John Weaver: per year. Yeah, that's a good number. Yeah, I don't know that's a good question. So
• 32:58
  Tim Montague: it's too bad that it's so hard to say perplexity, but perplexity is a way better search engine. And so maybe the term is plexig it. Maybe you need to Plex it instead of Google it. There are six states that are installing more than one gigawatt per year as of 2024 California, Texas, Indiana, Arizona, Michigan, Florida and New York,
• 33:24
  John Weaver: I was more than six. It sounded like 1234567,
• 33:29
  Tim Montague: it lied. It said that was six. All right, you gotta check, you gotta check the facts. But
• 33:36
  John Weaver: all right, let's ask chat. Let's Okay. Chat. How many states in the USA installed more than one gigawatt AC of solar. Let's see what the chat says. Well, 33 states have broken.
• 33:54
  Tim Montague: Yeah, that's the install base. 33 states. And that's good, because just a few years ago, that number was more like 10, the number of states with an install base of over a gigawatt so,
• 34:07
  John Weaver: so, uh, a link to SPC global said, uh, 13 states at a greater than one gigawatt of solar in 2023 how's that for you? And that's a chat GPT, and it always gives me a link, because I demand it with all answers that it ever gives. How many states? 13 states added over one gigawatt of new solar capacity in 2024 according to energy global.
• 34:32
  Tim Montague: Don't believe it.
• 34:32
  Tim Montague: I don't believe it for a second.
• 34:36
  John Weaver: I got a lake better. It's better than perplexity. Who couldn't
• 34:39
  Tim Montague: even say that number is twice the perplexity figure. Hey, all right, we're gonna have to report back next week. We'll do a deep dive, and we'll we'll report back. We'll find the real numbers. Great, great. All right, let's talk about hurricanes and solar, because sometimes solar doesn't survive the extreme weather. You have a story in PV magazine, field tested hurricane survival strategies for solar I'm sure this is referencing our friends, arrow,
• 35:14
  John Weaver: B, E, R, Y, l was the hurricane, Hurricane barrel, something like that, yeah. But who wrote the report Rmi, Rocky Mountain institution, yeah, but isn't Chris
• 35:27
  Tim Montague: Rosalind, Chris Needham.
• 35:29
  John Weaver: Needham, Needham, I don't know if he still works there. Maybe he does. He was just in Alaska, though, we should get that guy in the show sometime. I mean, he's got his own show, but, yeah,
• 35:38
  Tim Montague: Chris Needham has a show. Think so
• 35:41
  John Weaver: maybe, maybe not. I don't know much, all
• 35:44
  Tim Montague: right, I'm gonna put this on screen. I do like go down to the I like looking at photos of failed solar projects.
• 35:52
  Tim Montague: It's a strange view. Yeah, look at that mess. That's what hurricanes do to solar arrays.
• 35:58
  Tim Montague: But, you know, they do that to all kinds of infrastructure. So it's like, well, yeah, duh. The the wind was over 100 miles an hour. What was the wind for this photo? Do we know?
• 36:10
  John Weaver: Well, I don't know this photo, but I know this storm was a category five. So, yeah,
• 36:16
  Tim Montague: that's 150 plus.
• 36:19
  John Weaver: So the key thing about this article, I think it gives explicit lists. Here we go. You get these common faults.
• 36:24
  John Weaver: What breaks the most common thing are cheap clamps, mid clamps. You need to through bolt, and that's really the fundamental the thing that caused the most damages is how you bolt your modules to your racking structure on in these regions. That's number one. So if you do a through bolt, meaning you. Put the bolt into the solar panel, and then it goes through your racking, and you put a nut on the back that is your strongest and then you got to do it a quality now, it's got to be stainless steel. It's got to be tagged. It's got to have something going on and and so get through bolting. But there's an interesting thing, if you scroll down modules that are too thin, they'll rip off that through bolt. So not only do you have to through bolt, you have to through bolt, it with a piece of metal that's strong. So that's just important,
• 37:16
  Tim Montague: yeah, um, I need to scroll down. Okay, yeah, you
• 37:21
  John Weaver: just see a nice picture. Keep going a tiny bit.
• 37:23
  John Weaver: Keep going. Keep going. Right near the end. Little farther right there. That's a through bolted module. Good policy, good practice. That little metal that's coming back is what's left of the module after was ripped off because the frame is too thin and cheap. Thin frames are great in the desert, but not in 150 mile per hour current hurricane region. Yeah, have multiple your weakest link will be found.
• 37:56
  Tim Montague: So Chris Needham has been on the show. I thought he had his company is called azimuth advisory services, and yeah, he is one of the authors of this report. Oh, check out episode 247, of the Clean Power Hour. Him and his partner in crime, whose name is Frank oudhuizen, ood Houston. He has a Dutch name. It's a it's pronounced, tricky to pronounce.
• 38:21
  Tim Montague: But anyway, Frank and Chris, they're the real deal. They are racking geeks, hardcore. They do these studies on failures in the field. And if you're an asset owner, you want to hire these guys and look at what, what racking you're using in your solar projects, if it's in a territory that might have hail or hurricanes or tornadoes or what else, that's about it.
• 38:55
  John Weaver: Well, tornadoes, I don't know, man, solar system,
• 39:02
  Tim Montague: yeah, good luck.
• 39:04
  John Weaver: Yeah. I mean, hurricanes are, I mean, I guess, you know, lower speed tornadoes are the same thing as hurricanes. And, you know, high speed hurricanes, you know, because low speed tornadoes get up to 1/5 you know, start in the 130s 140s but I don't know, tornadoes just seem so much more violent than a hurricane. It just, it just seems that way.
• 39:26
  John Weaver: So,
• 39:29
  Tim Montague: should we do another story or what? What do you think? All right,
• 39:34
  John Weaver: how about, uh, how about we go to the last one?
• 39:38
  John Weaver: Well, yeah, we do the one before that cool looking building. You know, I talk a lot about new energy storage capacity, you know, it's, it's, it's growing Canada's dominating capacity deployed. So energy storage capacity deployed globally might reach pumped hydro soon, yeah, share this building time. This is, isn't it cool?
• 40:01
  Tim Montague: This is a cool photo. Yes.
• 40:06
  John Weaver: So it's a tall structure, yeah, check out this photo. So is that real? Yeah, there's a document in within the blue sky linkage that it goes back to the original document, and they actually have pictures of the construction of it, and some good a couple of neat this
• 40:22
  Tim Montague: is like balcony solar on steroids. Yes,
• 40:27
  John Weaver: absolutely, yeah. I mean, and it seems reasonable, like the you could clean it. You don't want people putting food and planters on top of it or something.
• 40:39
  Tim Montague: Yeah,
• 40:40
  John Weaver: but it's neat. I love this idea. This is just so cool. It's shade. It absorbs. It seems accessible. It's a lot of capacity.
• 40:51
  Tim Montague: And this is China, right? I think Germany. What?
• 40:56
  John Weaver: Yeah, yeah, close it, yeah. I think it's Germany.
• 40:59
  John Weaver: From what I read, the source is a gentleman I follow. It's one
• 41:03
  Tim Montague: of the only people. It's got some cool east west rocking on the top too.
• 41:06
  John Weaver: Oh, I didn't even notice that. Didn't even notice that. Look at that. That's clean,
• 41:11
  Tim Montague: yep.
• 41:13
  John Weaver: Just just cool looking building. I just was really when I saw it the first time. Yeah, you get to see some up close stuff, yeah. So this is definitely
• 41:22
  Tim Montague: real, man. Like, I like to say, if you want to see the future of solar, go to Northern Europe or China to both. Absolutely, I'm not in a hurry to go to China, but someday
• 41:35
  John Weaver: I'll be there. Next June, I'm going to go into snack. Oh yes, wow. That's their big soul. That's the biggest the world. Biggest solar conference.
• 41:42
  John Weaver: So slowly, go in the snack.
• 41:45
  Tim Montague: What? What's, what's, what's the the impetus behind that,
• 41:50
  John Weaver: it's China. It's gotta go. I mean, PV magazine is heavy in China. You know, the guys that I've met, Victor and, oh my goodness, I've just forgot his name, Curtis, they're so awesome. The guys that write for PV magazine, and they're based in China, okay? They know they're just great guys to talk to. And, you know, hanging out at PV magazine, and I hear that there's like 12 rooms, and each one is a conference of its own.
• 42:16
  John Weaver: And even the professionals, you only get through, like three or four, one per day type of thing.
• 42:19
  John Weaver: I you know everybody's exaggerating, but it's the place, so you gotta go there.
• 42:26
  John Weaver: Gotta go there once. I'll be there next June.
• 42:29
  Tim Montague: Cool. I love it.
• 42:29
  Tim Montague: Can't wait to hear about that trip. Wow, we'll tell you all right. Well, let's wrap it up.
• 42:37
  Tim Montague: Check out all of our content at clean power hour.com, we're on YouTube. We're on audio, Apple Spotify. I'm on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. Love to hear from my listeners. How about you? John, where can people find you?
• 42:51
  John Weaver: Commercial? Solar guy, calm, really. Best place you know, LinkedIn, all over.
• 42:54
  John Weaver: Check out our post there. Try to be educational, but commercial.
• 42:58
  John Weaver: Solar guy.com, 5084, 99, nine, son, I forget my own phone number sometimes.
• 43:08
  Tim Montague: And when you call that number, does a human pick up
• 43:12
  John Weaver: first? It goes to Craig. He's our sales guy. So, yes, okay, yes, human being will pick it up. Human
• 43:16
  Tim Montague: in the loop. Yes, sir. All right. All right. Well, thank you so much. John Weaver, commercial solar guy, and we'll see you in two weeks. Have a great one. Let's grow solar.
• 43:27
  Tim Montague: You.