Great to chat with Carson Weinand, Senior Project Developer at CVE North America, about recent changes to solar development as well as the importance of GIS data. We discuss:
And much more!
Paces helps developers find and evaluate the sites most suitable for renewable development. Interested in a call with James, CEO @ Paces?
Great to chat with Carson Weinand, Senior Project Developer at CVE North America, about recent changes to solar development as well as the importance of GIS data. We discuss:
And much more!
Paces helps developers find and evaluate the sites most suitable for renewable development. Interested in a call with James, CEO @ Paces?
James McWalter
Welcome to build repeat a paces podcast. Hello, today we're speaking with Carson Winant, senior product developer at CVE. Welcome to the podcast Carson.
Carson Weinand
Yeah. Hi, James. Thanks for having me.
James McWalter
Right. To start with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at CVE? Sure.
Carson Weinand
Yeah. So first of all, I want to say thanks for having me again. And cool getting to know you over the past nine months. And congratulations on everything you've done with paces. So I think it's super impressive what you've built from scratch, I've seen you hustling extremely hard nonstop. And you guys have built a very powerful product. So that we love using a CV that were customer paces.
James McWalter
That is that is incredibly nice that you mentioned and it Yeah, I mean, just because you mentioned that, for the audience. I was myself and co founder paces Charles, we were ideating on what became paces. And I think I called message you Carson 912 months ago and just was like, Hey, what's your product developer, we're kind of thinking through what eventually became paces, and you had like a really positive impact in terms of like just telling us all the kind of problems that you had experienced in the various roles you've had in this industry? And so that was like, Yeah, you know, like people who take the time to like, really tell folks are trying to start something their problems is just like super powerful and very, very appreciate it.
Carson Weinand
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's great. It's fun to be a part of it. I wanted to help. But your level of execution is really impressive. And I also want to help because I had a similar platform that I tried to build, I guess it was in like 2016 2017. It was called property owl. It was a web based GIS mapping application aimed at helping developers find the best sites more quickly. And I think I was a little naive, a little green at the time, not set up for success, but learned a ton. We were able to launch I guess, like a version 1.0 of the product, eventually had to shut it down. But it's cool to see somebody take that I the same idea all the way through and have success with it. So and also
James McWalter
you were talking to us about property at the time. And we were I remember the early conversations we're having, and I guess like to kind of go back to that. What do you think? I guess were some of the trade offs. And some of the reasons why sometimes things like this work, and sometimes they don't.
Carson Weinand
Yeah, so I got the idea. I was a solar side originator working in Massachusetts, for the asterik to program at the time, in 2013 1415. That was my first job out of college, in Massachusetts, at the time have one of the best state run GIS mapping resources available. It was called all over. I don't know what they've done with it since. But that's sort of where I fell in love with GIS and saw the power of GIS, saw how useful and necessary was for finding good sites quickly. And the the core idea was, there's a ton of wetlands in Massachusetts, the core idea was, Wow, if I could filter by parcels, based on percentage wetlands, I could get to the good sites a lot more quickly. And it grew and grew from there. And I took a big leap of faith with the little savings that I had. Very confident myself at the time, I didn't know how to code and work with some freelance developers to try to put a flat platform together and it for looking back with the resources I had, you actually did a pretty darn good job. But also looking back wasn't really set up for success. So you know, I didn't quite know I was I was young, you know, I was 2526, didn't quite know how to set up a team around me, didn't quite know how to recruit people that had the the skills I needed, didn't quite have enough capital. I didn't know how to code myself. And ultimately, when we launched in the product just wasn't quite good enough to actually make a sale. And I ran out of money and ran out of energy and had to move on, unfortunately.
James McWalter
So I had an identical situation with a previous startup attempts. So in 2010, probably around the same time period to 2015 2016. She started a startup in the fitness space with my brother. And we spent six months using outside engineering contractors to build the v1 was basically kind of like an Uber for personal training, right? So find a person using an app. And my brother, kind of well regarded personal trainer. So you know, he knew the industry very, very well. And yeah, I'd worked in software, but never on the product side before and so that was like, Oh, we're you know, great pair of brothers. We're going to figure this out. And, you know, we made a very, I think it is a lot of folks will make the very common mistake, which is outsourcing the product development from a coding point of view, and you can definitely get to an MVP, so we did get to an MVP wasn't really used, and then we ended I'm adding a third co founder who was a software engineer, Peter, who's an incredible software engineer. But he had to literally start from scratch. Like he couldn't even work off the thing. So the thing we had worked a little bit and it kind of sounds somewhat similar to the stage, you guys would property owl. But we also ended up in the situation. And we were bootstrapping as well. We ran out of money, worked on it for just over a year and learned a lot. But I think as much of what we learned to do, we also learned what not to do. And I think a lot of those lessons impacted, how I kind of think about paces and all the different things we're trying to do.
Carson Weinand
Yeah, when you outsource that, e work, you can't iterate quickly. You can't your eyes don't really, your ideas don't translate perfectly. Every change is very expensive. It's not the way to set up a startup.
James McWalter
And because you've had that experience, and I'm gonna move this conversation a little bit more, kind of more freewheeling, because I think we have that relationship. But where do you think, forget paces? Right? forget anything, any other software out there? You've worked on something that you build it, you're in the industry, you are looking at sites, you're trying to get projects built? What like what does like perfect look like? You know, if there was like unlimited capital and unlimited resources to build some sort of software, maybe there's hardware involved, you know, whatever it might be? What are some of the areas that like, there's just no one's really solving the problem to the degree that could be possible?
Carson Weinand
Yeah, some of the key data that you need, such as zoning designation, interconnection, viability is just very difficult to get. It's very manual. It's stuck in these old world institutions. It's not digitalized. So you end up having to manually reach out for zoning, you have to call the planning department, you have to ask questions, you have to share the property tax ID, you have to review the zoning code. That takes time, you have to do that site by site for interconnection, if you're lucky, you have a state like New York, where there's continuously updated hosting capacity maps that show you the number of projects that are in queue, the capacity of the substation, the voltage of the feeder, you can get a really good sense, you know, within five minutes of whether or not your project can connect to the grid. But in most other states, you have to submit and pay, you know, maybe three, four, or $500, for pre application report that takes two weeks to get back. And there's no consistency across utilities across states, in what information they get back to you. It's really hit or miss those pre application reports aren't crystal clear. So if you can build a platform that somehow solves these structural information gaps, we're talking ideal world, that would be it.
James McWalter
So one thing that we've been thinking about is, Can we can we not just paste this but like, as an industry and so on? Can we like, do a better job of actually like naming and shaming where the the truly opaque gaps are? Now I think at the level of utility, that might not work as well, with the interconnection side of things, because all the folks on the utility side, or at the ISO or RTL level, have been told many, many times of these issues and kind of have to work through various systems to try to like get change, and to half a decade or multi decade process. So those things, I think I've different ideas on that. But I'd love to get your take on that in a second. But on the jurisdictional side for zoning and permitting on the HA side, and one of the things we can think about is if you have like 1000 townships in New York State, and there are a few of these towns and villages, and maybe they're not even anti solar, right, like they might not have the internal capability to, to manage like a lot of solar applications, all that kind of thing. But it's like really opaque about where the actual breakages are occurring, right? So like, you have some sort of like state level, like target of certain number of gigawatts of solar deployed in a certain timeframe. And then you look at the different jurisdictions, and like There are towns, as you vote know where solar goes to die, right. There's like 12 projects attempted there in the last two years. And there's a ton of capacity on the lines there. There's some nice flatlined. Probably the landlord's themselves are super open to it. But you know, it just kind of gets through the zoning and permitting steps. And one of things we're thinking about is like, Should we be surfacing and saying to at the state levels, like, hey, village, A, B, and C is blocking, like this very, very high proportion of solar, and not to just like, say, oh, that they're bad or good, or whatever it may be, it's more to the surface. It's like, okay, maybe there should be state legislation that now can say, Okay, if we had something a bit more streamlined, we could push that down to the individual jurisdictions and then have like a bit of a theory of change around like less opaque related lists would pick data at the level of the jurisdiction. What are your thoughts on that as if that's your approach?
Carson Weinand
Yeah, I think that would take a huge overhaul at the state level, though. That would be great. You're sort of taking away local rights in that case. In New York, they call it home rule. And each locality is very proud of that, that they have full control over their zoning and what they allow into the town. I think New York State has attempted to do that with the utility scale projects. I know they have, you know, few years ago, they introduced the office of renewable energy siting. I don't work in the on utility scale projects or work on community solar projects that are 567 megawatts each. But it seems like that office had the goal of limiting the permitting process for utility scale projects to 12 months it was permitting is done at the state level. There's a streamlined process, the locality can only comment they can't make the decision. I think something like that should be implemented in other states, and may be extended to community solar. That said, I was thinking about, you know, what are the major roadblocks for community solar before this podcast and permitting is definitely one of them. I would say we probably have a 50 60% success rate for permitting at the local level level. So it does kill some projects. But I think the real market killer for community solar is one, just a community solar program existing and being large enough, and to interconnection, capacity and interconnection procedures. So a lot of states don't have community solar programs, or they have community solar programs that are very limited, like Virgin Arizona, Arizona, New Mexico, it's like what are we doing here, the whole industry tries to squeeze in as well. And everybody ends up with a quarter of a project. That's what's so nice about New York. You know, they had they had a six gigawatt target. It was a multi year thing, everybody got a piece of the pie, you could actually build a business around, it seems like that's what's going to happen in California as well, which is exciting. And then interconnection. A lot of these utilities are antiquated, they're slow. They process one application at a time, they have some very unfavorable terms for payment and refunds. There's no great communication with the utilities. There's no great transparency. So I see, you know, site conditions, you need a good site, you need good local zoning. But I think the real constraints for the industry, at least this middle market community solar is the policy and interconnection rulemaking procedures
James McWalter
on the state policy side, because I know you're keeping across different states. Is there. Is there enough communication happening between states? Right, so like, when Ohio is moving their community solar bill through their legislation, do you have any kind of visibility into Are they like looking at states where it's been more successful, like New York or states where we've had, you know, recent setbacks, like in Arizona? Like, is there actually enough like cross state like communication happening? And of course, like in any individual states, right, like, it might just be the makeup LEFT, RIGHT makeup of that state might just block some of this anyways. Right? It just might be the nature of local politics, are they actually making it fair attempt of learning from other communities and other states?
Carson Weinand
Yeah, I think some states are, I think, California, for example, California is trying to near New York in some senses, you know, they're going there, they've modeled a first come first serve program. With a high capacity program, it's not 200 megawatts, you have to have permits, you have to have interconnection, it's not an end, then you have to submit for that capacity. It's not an RFP, like New Mexico, which was a mess. That said, seems like New Mexico didn't learn from the other states. So I think there's some limitation as well, California is copying the theater, totally copying the theater bill, credit rate from New York, which is the rate that they compensate community solar projects at. And they're putting together a calculator for that, which is what New York did, which gives a lot of guidance to developers, and it really helps their financial modeling. But beyond that, I don't have too much to say, you know, I'm not I don't get involved too much in the in the state rulemaking.
James McWalter
So one of the things you mentioned is like, when, depending on the Student Aid rulemaking, like there might be a quarter of a project per developer. How do you think about like competition across development developers, right? You have, especially when there's like maybe limited opportunities. Obviously, everyone's like looking for a competitive edge and don't share like the specific IP of what you could work out. But the more generally, what is the relationship because we're all as an industry again, trying to grow the pie. But then there are also these specific situations where there's a limited piece of the pie and we're trying to individual developers are trying to cut their costs. How do you think about those kind of competitive dynamics,
Carson Weinand
you have to be first, you have to be first in the queue. It helps to be first in front of the, the HJ for permitting Do you have to be first to secure the incentives. So you end up doing more and more work in states where there's not a program yet, or where the interconnection queue isn't open yet. And you end up taking more and more risks in hopes that the market eventually comes together. So this is what we're doing with our pipeline in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and so on, where there's, you know, hope that a program will come together. And that's really the only way to maybe have a windfall of projects one day, it's one of the ways is to really position yourself to be first first first, because you end up if you try to tackle a market a year after it's been announced, you're gonna have a lot more difficulty with landowners, the interconnection queues are going to be clogged, some of the H J's may be fatigued with permitting applications, they may reject your application because three others have already been permitted down. So you got to try to do as much before it's a mass market before the floodgates really open.
James McWalter
And in essence, it is just gonna whack a mole approach, right? Because there's then some positive, you know, white smoke coming out of some jurisdiction. And that's like, alright, let's everyone fled into state A, right in terms of like, trying to pick up some, you know, via mail or campaigns or whatever it might be. And then it's like, oh, there's no set back and the bill won't be passed for an extra six months. So it's like, okay, and then it kind of cools off. And we see this as well. Like, there's just like, incredible activity around some states. And then we hear, it's so funny, like, some developers are like six months later, like, oh, you know, have you heard about the state? Just like, yeah, it's like, some folks who are actually willing to bear more risk have potentially have already picked over like, a lot of like, the good bits, six months before anybody else. And it's a real struggle, right? Because and then you think about the the landowner on off on the farm, or whatever it might be, like, they're just getting these waves of like, inbound like interest, right. And, you know, until until eventually, they, you know, maybe give up and accept some psychic drone and do like a multi year lease option, or whatever it might be.
Carson Weinand
Yeah, exactly. I mean, for example, one of our competitors dimension energy, they were in Virginia in 2019. The bill was finalized in early 2020. CBE didn't react until maybe early 2021. And now dimension is, is very successful in Virginia, they're taking most of the initial capacity in that program. So try to learn from that, and hope that the positive momentum we have in the industry continues that more states adopt this policy. We can do it more places, they have bigger megawatt targets. So
James McWalter
how do you think about some of the carrots you know, we have the inflation Reduction Act, use these other tax credits. And because so much of project success is down to interconnection cost? How do you think about like weighing up? Oh, you know, we might get this extra adder. And so there might have to be at yards of line upgrades, like three phase line upgrades. But the substation is in good shape. So my now pencil out in a way that it didn't before, if we weren't in like an energy community?
Carson Weinand
Yeah, I think the IRA and the new set of rules for the ITC will certainly help build more projects, you know, some of those economically marginal projects will pencil, for example, you know, there's even possibility in New York, of upgrading transformers for projects five megawatt and under all the interconnection costs, are now eligible for the ITC. So maybe you can afford a $3 million transformer upgrade, because it's subsidized that 3040 50%. So it does open up new, new opportunities. And we're thankful for it,
James McWalter
I look, I think about this with things like the prevailing wage as well, like, that's also a complicated step in the efficient production act, where the purpose of the bill right is to get projects built in a certain way, at scale, but also, you know, in ways that can help communities, all this kind of thing. But the actual translation of that text into like, actions that developers are taking on the ground, sometimes it's kind of difficult, right? So like, if you're trying to figure out for given jurisdiction, so if I'm in an energy community, and the transformer, you know, I upgrading transformers might make sense. But then I have to also have a prevailing wage elements to that, you know, you have all these different variables. And so I guess, like, has your internal modeling become much more complicated to kind of take into account all these different factors?
Carson Weinand
Sure. So with regards to the EITC address, there's definitely a little gray area with how it'll shake out, you know, what can we actually claim at COD or, or when it's placed in service with our tax equity partner? I know they're they're finalizing the rules regarding the low income economic bend. Should adder, which is potentially a 20% adder, which is massive. So it's a little frustrating right now when we look at our modeling where we don't know exactly what ITC rate will get, we also don't have 100% confidence in the energy communities layer, we have a really good guess. But that final layer coming from the EPA could shift projects could move in or out of the energy communities layer. And you could have a plus or minus 10% ITC swing. But generally overall, it's not new projects. Regarding prevailing wage, though, I think that's a little bit more straightforward. And that's just coming from our EPC partners. You know, what, what does it cost to get a prevailing wage at or here? What does it cost to add prevailing wage to this installation? We're seeing maybe 1012 cents a watt. Not too bad?
James McWalter
Yeah, just on the energy community maps. So we're in literally daily contact with the DOD and that'll who manage that, that map. And so, IRS guidance has been out like a week, since June 1, and June 9 Now 2023, for those listening, and some of these, some of these submissions are due June 30, and others on July 30, July 31. And there's not actually the confirmed data. So there's gonna be this mad rush, I think across the industry, once we get the final confirmation on the employment based energy communities, we like managing all that data, though, right. So that's, that's, that's, we're refreshing that data and figuring it out. I guess, then just to kind of think through kind of work you do and so on, there's been a big change, I think, in terms of the appeal of renewable development, you know, the types of folks who are now looking at that as potential career. Have you seen any changes? Are you seeing like a different type of person who's now wants to be involved in renewable development, especially in the last like, 18 months?
Carson Weinand
It's definitely more mainstream. I don't really know what that means for the labor market, though. You know, I joined the solar industry in like I said, 2013 2014 was definitely much more niche. At least for community solar, it was RCNi, solar was limited to just like New Jersey, Massachusetts. Now it's across the nation, and employs hundreds of 1000s of people. We're deploying many more megawatts, but and more people know of it just day to day in my life. They know solar energy is a real industry, and they think it's a cause for good change. And they're excited to talk with me about it, which is pretty cool. didn't used to be that way. But I don't know, unfortunately, can't comment on what type of people this is attracting. It's pretty young, I'd say, you know, the CVE workforce is young, young and eager and excited.
James McWalter
Hunters. And Carson, it's been great chatting. Great catching up. Yeah. All right. Leave it off. Is there anything I should have asked you about but did not
Carson Weinand
know I think I got my key point across that, you know, we need policy reform and interconnection reform to really unlock this industry
James McWalter
fully agree. We are fully aligned on this. Thank you, Carson. Thanks, James.
Carson Weinand
Good job with it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai