Solar Hits $500/kW - 27 Years Early (Full Breakdown)

In this episode of the Clean Power Hour Live, Tim Montague is joined by John Weaver (Commercial Solar Guy) and Evan Upshur (CPS America) for a roundup of the latest solar, storage, and clean energy news. Fresh from the solar industry's biggest trade show, RE+ Las Vegas, they dive deep into the latest innovations, project updates, and market trends shaping the clean energy landscape. From agrivoltaics breakthroughs to the rise of robotics in solar, this episode covers the technologies driving the industry forward while addressing the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Episode Highlights

• RE+ Vegas Recap: The trade show has grown so massive that walking the entire floor is no longer possible in three days
• Chint Power Systems Unveils New Tech: Launch of 100kW string inverter and CNI battery system at RE+ Vegas
• Solar-Over-Canals Project: California's Turlock Irrigation District celebrates the state's first solar over canals pilot project with clear span design (Link)
• Agrivoltaics Innovation: Mushroom cultivation under solar panels demonstrates shade-loving crops thriving in agrivoltaic systems (LinkedIn)
• Massachusetts SMART Program Success: Commercial solar project achieves 3:1 DC to AC ratio with planned 1.8 megawatt hour battery storage
• Solar Price Projections Study: Research reveals solar costs dropped 27 years ahead of expert predictions, now at $500 per kW globally (PV Magazine)
• Meyer Burger Financial Crisis: Premium solar panel manufacturer faces bankruptcy despite quality products and clean sourcing (PV Tech)
• Vermont Balcony Solar Legislation: State lawmakers plan to consider 1.2kW plug-in solar systems following Utah's lead (VT Digger)

Transcript

Tim Montague: 0:53

Tim, welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your host, welcome to our bi weekly roundup of the latest solar, wind and battery News. Today we are going to geek out on Re. Plus, we were just in re in Vegas, and I want to welcome to the show. My co host John Weaver, welcome.

John Weaver: 1:12

Hey everybody, Vegas was cool. It was very exhausting being an east coaster who wakes up really early and then you're three hours to the west, and now you're waking up at 2am and you're trying your best to socialize, because, you know that's what you do at conference. Means that you sleep like two to three hours a night for two or three nights, and that's just a Oh, exhausting. I think,

Tim Montague: 1:35

I think I remember you texting me at like 6am

John Weaver: 1:38

Tim, I don't know what you're talking about. Getting home. I don't know what you're talking about. I did have one night, so that did contribute to the broader problem. Let's admit to that, but, uh, but still, it's rough. He tried to go to bed.

Tim Montague: 1:50

I don't, I don't want to know what you were doing all night, Long John, but it was fun. I got to lose to John and darts like really badly. So that was a lot of fun.

John Weaver: 1:59

That was fun. So all the people from next tracker, yes, that was nice.

Tim Montague: 2:03

And we'd like to welcome a new guest to the live he's not a new guest to the Clean Power Hour, but welcome Evan Upshur from chin power systems.

Evan Upshur: 2:12

Yeah. Good afternoon to the east coasters, and morning to everyone else.

Tim Montague: 2:19

We got to we got to hang out quite a bit you and me, Evan in the Chint booth, Ari but and I got to hang out a little bit with John too. So that was great. It's always great to see people that you don't see, you know, but a couple times a year, that's one of my favorite things. And then, of course, meeting a lot of new people, which I did lots of, and geeking out on all the technology. I didn't get to do enough of that, but I would love it if, if we'll start with you, Evan, give us a high level takeaway from the show. And I know that you went to one of the big parties also, I think in the stadium, right?

Evan Upshur: 2:58

Yeah, yeah, I made my way around just to, you know, continue networking and everything high level for me was, you know, just, just great to see a powerhouse of, you know, an industry congregate like they always do. You know, it's no no mystery. We've had our ups and downs this year, just in terms of of policy. And you could say, you know, uncertainty, but didn't slow anyone down. Always great to see everyone there.

Tim Montague: 3:28

Yeah, a lot of good energy. How about you, John, what were what were your takeaways.

John Weaver: 3:33

You know, the residential people, they have some complexities going on with what's going you know, what's going to happen at the end of the year, certain markets are going to be a little different, you know, like in the Northeast, where we have high retail costs, maybe solar will hold on a lot stronger. Probably will. There's going to be a hump, because we're going to pull a lot of demand forward to the end of the year. So next year, we'll see what happens for us in the CNI space. It's just kind of not a difference other than maybe a little more intense, because we know we have two years to finish most of our projects, and then our world is going to change all the big folks, you know, they're talking things like fioc, safe, harboring things like that. It's a little bit outside of my wheelhouse in terms of nine to five work. You know, I'm writing about it, talking about it with people, with PV, mag and stuff. But, you know, I'm not really feeling it. But, you know, I guess similar though, the energy generally is broad. People are positive, lots of just it's getting bigger, you know, it's getting harder to walk the floor. Now it's really impossible to walk the whole floor and have casual, consistent conversations. I think you officially have to, like, fully vet your time if you're going to spend two and a half days on the floor, meeting random plus interviewing. I'm saying myself as a PV magazine guy who has, like, an obligation to shake hands and know people, and I didn't get through all the I usually walk every aisle. I did not do it this show.

Evan Upshur: 5:01

And that's, I don't think it's possible. It

John Weaver: 5:04

might not be anymore. We may, yeah, we may have crossed that precipice. So it's so be it. But that's, that's cool, that's good and bad. Good and bad.

Evan Upshur: 5:12

Yeah, I would agree. I think, I think for anyone who hasn't gone to that show, it's, it's good advice to to maybe map out your objective, because the scale that that show is at now. I mean, not only is it multiple buildings and floors and everything like that, but the those buildings and floors are so huge. I mean, you have to go there with a game plan and and nail it down, or else you're, you're gonna, you know, leave, you're gonna leave and be like, Oh, I missed, I missed a few things. Yeah, I

Tim Montague: 5:41

didn't get to hang out on the forum very much. I spent one afternoon there for a few hours, mostly in the Venetian It was great seeing some. Some people that I hadn't met face to face. Shout out to the team at celesco, who John and I talked about last week or last last episode. Power field, a unique racking product, which we've had drew their CEO on the show. It's it's flat to ground or not flat to ground, but the racking sits on the ground. It's a tub that you fill with gravel as ballast. So it's very simple. And anyway, that was cool to get to meet the team and see the tech. And I spent hours and hours in the Chint booth talking to Chint customers and Chint staff, of course, but those customer conversations for me are a favorite, getting to hear them talk about other, you know, power electronics versus Chint, pros and cons. And you know, if you're if you work for Chint, this is my message to the Chint team. If you work for Chint, don't freak out about fioc, because you guys have a significant advantage in terms of product quality, the team and the service. It's, it's the that tripartite, that is your secret sauce. So Go Team Chint. That's my plug for Chint today,

Evan Upshur: 7:09

though. I mean, you know, a lot of folks you know nowadays are really, you know, focused on, like, you know, where are things made and, you know, what's the ownership of the company? But you know, the one thing that stayed tried and true with us is just our American workforce. I mean, we have so many people in the service and field that I don't know, I don't think it's matched by anyone. I mean, that that's a lot of American jobs, though, that are, you know, actual boots on the ground. So it feels good to have that support, right? I mean, you could, you could manufacture in the states all day long, but if there's no support out in the field, it's, you know, not really a winning package

Tim Montague: 7:43

customer service, period, like the full wrap. You guys have a very good culture of service. So keep stick to your guns. So what else? What? What unique technologies Did either of you see that you, you know, were surprised by or excited

John Weaver: 8:02

about, I would say the fact that I'm considering three micro inverters on a three phase 40 volt roof top from en face. There might be some technical reasons for it. I'm working my way through it. Could end up with some string inverters. I looked at a couple of agrivoltaic racking systems. These are needs that I have for projects coming up. And so solar geek was one of them. I've spoken with him before. There's so many new there's new module makers that are coming. I stopped by the cleaning Tim. Tim, I can't remember his last name right now, start the letter L, and he's got a solid set of cleaning hardware. And robotics are now expanding. There's there's robotic grass cutters, there's module placers and module movers, so to get them out to the field, and then we have the pile drivers. So I definitely seeing robotics expanding big time. Yeah, your what's your team? Your gentleman that you work with, Tim, that I met in Boston, he was, yeah,

Tim Montague: 9:11

luminous, you met, you meant you met Jay.

John Weaver: 9:14

Jay doesn't Jay have a big project. He's actually doing in Australia.

Tim Montague: 9:19

Like, yeah, he's working on like, a 300 or 350 megawatt project in Australia. They want a grant from the equivalent of NREL in Australia. I don't, I don't know the acronym, but so they have several robots deployed on on site, on utility solar projects in Australia, which is kind of cool. One of the cool things for that company is that now they have technical staff in both the US and Australia, and so they can they do what's called a 16 hour cycle. So they have an extended work day because of the team in multiple disparate geographic areas. And that's accelerating their product their product development, actually. So that's really cool, but they weren't exhibiting, unfortunately. But I just think that the time is ripe for robotics. We see this really, like, take off, happening now there's, there was probably half a dozen robotics companies exhibiting at least, and that's brand new. Like, if you went to inner solar, there was, there was two or three, and now there's half a dozen. And you know, next year there'll be a dozen. They're coming

John Weaver: 10:31

robotics, lots of modules, just lots of, Oh, and, of course, I mean, it's still happening. This is I really saw big happening in Munich, maybe last year. But batteries, batteries are just growing and growing and growing and that. And it's just not stopping. So batteries, batteries in the new solar.

Evan Upshur: 10:51

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think it's a, you know, a trend that we're, we're used to expecting happen, which is just everything getting more power dense. You know, not, not only just the batteries that you mentioned, but, you know, modules, everything's gaining efficiency. We unveiled our largest 1000 volt string inverter to to date. It's 100 kilowatts. So it's in addition to our 50 and 60 that were, I mean, uber successful, I mean, deployed pretty much everywhere, and that came out in 2016 though. So this new 100 kilowatt is the first inverter larger than it since then. So for a company, you know, CPS, when we were number one market share, it's a big deal, you know, it's, it's hopefully, an inverter that will kind of throttle us into the future. And felt good to unveil it at a show like that. It's pretty, pretty exciting.

Tim Montague: 11:46

And there was a lot of energy around the Gonzo, your CNI battery. I think this is a, what is it? 262, kilowatt hour, or something like that. The CNI battery space, I feel like is, is really heating up. No pun intended, but the the moniker to remember around batteries, the value of batteries, is, earn, save, protect. So just learn those three words, earn, save, protect, if you're drinking from a fire hose on batteries, geek out on earn, say, protect. It's, it's a thing. We learned this from intelligent generation. I'm about to have Jay marhoefer drop on the show. I've already done the interview. He's the founder of intelligent generation. He's a real thought leader in storage. He got into storage in the early 2000s before anybody was doing batteries here in the US. So what else?

Evan Upshur: 12:38

Yeah, storage. Storage was huge. You know, John, John mentioned that too. But man, storage is, is everywhere. I mean, it's the it's the key. I mean, every year we get more pushback from the utilities and batteries and storage is kind of like the opposite effect of that to combat it. So it's good to see, you know, it's giving the consumer more freedoms and options to becoming, you know, energy independent, rather than just being subject to whatever these utilities want to do.

John Weaver: 13:07

Yeah, I think hearing people talk about, well, lots of people are talking about the loss of incentives and dealing with it, but there's also people looking at the price of electricity going up, and that kind of jives with me, because that's what I keep thinking about. So I'm when I hear somebody confirm my prior held beliefs, it makes me feel slightly less insane. And so I heard a few people mention that, and I was like, I you know, I feel bad about it for everybody else, but we need it. We need a little more expensive electricity. But I see in the news that, you know, price oil is, you know, potentially going to slip into 50 bucks per barrel next year. Price of gas might fall because China is importing less. You know, it's, it's interesting to watch and listen to people. Listen people think about what's going to happen the next few years as we evolve. As we evolve again in our industry, as we keep evolving. So that's just big floor. I sat down with SIA. I'm gonna have a story about with the boss. I sat down with a neat little round table of 12346, ish journalists. I got to meet Billy from solar power world online. He's really tall. He's like, 646565,

Unknown: 14:16

he's taller than me. Tall guy. Tall

John Weaver: 14:17

guy. It's cool to see him, because I read his stuff. I read everybody at solar power world every day. Got to see Julia, Julian Specter, two guys from s and p5 100. It just people, solar builder. You know, just, it was just cool little table, like six people who do nothing but write about solar. I read all of you people every other day. So it's just kind of neat to see them as well, which is different than seeing gear. It's, you know, journalist people. So it's kind of fun.

Evan Upshur: 14:46

Yeah, it's, it's, it's cool. You mentioned, you know, just the the walk of life, you see, you know, there's new companies like Abbott that are making waves and, you know, battery recycling. I saw some Tesla shirts there. I mean, every corner of the industry. I mean, you might not know who you're talking to, but it's, it's amazing the level of personnel that's there. Felt like

Tim Montague: 15:12

I saw quite a few Tesla people there. I don't know if they were exhibiting. They're famous for not exhibiting, but they were definitely there. They exhibit at a big booth and a big booth. Okay, was that about storage primarily, or

John Weaver: 15:27

one half of it was Mega Pack shirts, the other half was residential. That's at least. That's how I saw the people labeled when I went in there to ask questions, because I had questions on both sides, yeah, and there were a bunch of people with Omega pack and power wall. No, it didn't have power wall. It said residential. That's the way the shirts were labeled. So it wasn't, it wasn't Tesla Energy Storage. It was just a Tesla booth. They didn't have a car this year or anything. They just. Had Mega Pack on the right side. That's if you're facing the booth, Mega Pack was on the right and resi solar was on the left side.

Tim Montague: 15:59

I noticed that Honda had a booth. It was kind of lame. I have nothing against Honda, but their booth was lame, and they didn't even have a pure EV in the booth. It was a hybrid ice battery car. I'm like, This is so yesterday, I don't know. Anyway, should we get into the news?

John Weaver: 16:22

Sure we like the news. We do that sometimes.

Tim Montague: 16:25

All right, so we got a cool project of the week. Turlock Irrigation District celebrates State's first solar over canals pilot project.

John Weaver: 16:36

Look at that thing. Look how big it is.

Tim Montague: 16:39

Let me get this on screen. Is this in California?

John Weaver: 16:42

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So California started a solar canal program. And this is amazing, first unit. Yeah, there's a few pictures you can zoom around it, so, you know, check out the picture on the side. But look how just big and chunky it is. And I don't know, I just saw it and thought it looked cool. I mean, they think it could save, you know, if they cover their many millions of miles of canals, not millions of miles. I don't know what I'm talking about, but they could save like, a half a percent of their water. It sounds a lot, but it's really a small amount, but still half a percent, saving it from irrigation. Probably useful. Yeah, it was just neat looking at the size of this thing. I mean, it was just like this big, big, solid chunk of gear, and it just kind of looks cool. It's different than the ones I've seen in India, where they sit flat over their systems, and they had infrastructure underneath this one looks like you could put a boat down underneath it, so I guess they had different technical requirements or something. But just say, Cool span. Yeah, so clear span. I don't know what clear span is, but sure.

Tim Montague: 17:52

I mean, where there's no there's no like, there's no legs sticking down into the into the canal.

Evan Upshur: 18:01

Oh, sure, sure. Alright. Yeah, interesting. I mean, yeah, they must have some type of technical requirement that that doesn't allow them to do, like a floating I think the floating would probably be better from like a build perspective, but then you can't transport anything. But if it's just for irrigation, it'd be interesting to see what their use cases for that.

John Weaver: 18:23

I'm pretty certain a bunch of that water is going to LA just to because they're in a, you know, they're in the middle of a desert.

Evan Upshur: 18:31

Yeah, yeah. Unique project. I've never seen anything like that. Though, it's a good pick.

John Weaver: 18:35

It's first one in the United States. So unless you've been to India, they have it. That's the only other place I know of Canal solar. I'm sure China does it casually, but India has a big push on it. So, yep,

Tim Montague: 18:51

all right, mushrooms, plus solar power.

John Weaver: 18:55

Agrivoltaics is my continuing enjoying of agrivoltaic innovation stuff. So solar on top of food. And this one just showed a guy picking the mushrooms. But he has a cool YouTube slash LinkedIn page where he goes to all the work. But this one, I just thought looked neat because of the volume of mushrooms that he pulled off, like, I don't know, not a lot of logs that he had there. So it seemed pretty, pretty cool the volume of food he got out of there.

Evan Upshur: 19:26

Yeah, it's neat. You know? I feel like you know what we just looked at for the the canal project and agrivoltaguex. I mean, they kind of have something in common, right? The water is used for, you know, agriculture, right? And, and then, on the other hand, you have, you know, solar being integrated, you know, into a landscape for agriculture. It's interesting how those worlds meet. I mean, would you consider, would you consider, like DC water pumps, agrivoltaics? Or is that kind of its own thing?

John Weaver: 20:02

Now, I mean, that's interesting thing. It's a farming use without a doubt, right? But I would not call it agrivoltague in my limited definition, because in my world, I look at grid electricity plus food, but that seems partial, you know, yes, this is if it's pumping water up from the ground, that's super important, too. So yeah, I

Tim Montague: 20:29

yeah, I would say this is agrivoltaics For sure. Oh, this, yeah, yeah, yeah, on a crop. Sorry. It took me a little while to get that on screen.

Evan Upshur: 20:39

Sometimes, that's me. So he's growing those just right underneath the solar panels, because they they thrive in a shading environment.

Tim Montague: 20:48

I guess they like the shade. I.

John Weaver: 20:51

Yeah, I once saw a mushroom system in Japan that was much more complex looking, and it had an inside of a metal structure. And it looked costly. It looked like its own gear you'd have to deal with but, but this one, it's just throwing down some logs. And he knew what logs to place, of course, and maybe he seated them. But it's just for sure, pretty cool, pretty cool to

Evan Upshur: 22:04

watch. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. I think agrivoltaics is something that you know needs to be talked about. I think there's probably a lot of people don't even know what agrivoltaics is. But, I mean, I think, you know, growing up in more of a rural area, you know, you're, you're affiliated with, you know, and aware of, you know, the farmers and there's a natural, you know, push and pull with, you know, using farmland for solar. Farmers kind of like it because, you know, it's an additional income stream, you know. But then, you know, some other folks think, you know, it's tying up land for too long. And a lot of people don't really realize that there is a world where, you know, agriculture and solar can kind of work on the same field together, which is pretty interesting.

Tim Montague: 22:51

So it looks like we've got another agrivoltague project here with a commercial solar guy project, huh?

John Weaver: 22:56

Yeah, this is much earlier. I wasn't really talking about the agrivoltague as much, but where we are in our interconnection process and how we're moving. And so we just got our interconnection agreement yesterday after applying, like, three years ago, Timothy and Evan, and is even after we shrunk down our AC connection, because we we're going to do some batteries, we're going to have a 200 KW AC, but we got about 117 grand and in in utility cost. We're probably going to spend a quarter of a million bucks easy on grid upgrades, which is kind of disheartening, but

Tim Montague: 23:34

it's a very high DC to AC ratio. What is that about? Yeah.

John Weaver: 23:37

So this is a in the SMART program of Massachusetts, where they pay you about three to five cents per kilowatt hour for their for using batteries. So any extra capacity that comes out of our system will get paid an extra four to five cents. And so we have in order to maximize the revenue per kilowatt hour, we stayed under 250 kW AC, because that's the way the program is structured, but really we had to go under 200 because we knew what the local grid issues were, and we still had to wait for substation upgrades, but we snuck in without any extra, extra costs. And so now we have a three to one DC to AC AC ratio coming, and we plan on having an estimated up to 180 or 1.8 megawatt hour battery. And that's because if we had three to one, we clip 50% 60% of our electricity, you know, we'll, we'll hit the max output at like

7: 24:35

45am, 9am I don't know what it is, nice and early.

Tim Montague: 24:39

Well, your generation curve is very square, right? Yeah, it's rounded.

John Weaver: 24:44

Yeah, it's not going to be rounded, at least relative to the AC output. But if you look into the bigger output that includes the battery, our generation curve is still going to be the same. We're going to have single access trackers, so that will help a little bit, but sort of square it off a tiny bit, but with the batteries. But really, we're going to be outputting until midnight come the summertime, you know, we're gonna have six hours of output after this system finishes,

Evan Upshur: 25:10

like the the direct current coming from the battery once the sun sets.

John Weaver: 25:14

Yeah, that's what's driving that. Yes, is that the batteries are going to be full during the day, because there's no complexity with the output on this system. It's, uh, just general, pure output whenever you have excess. And so we so it's just scheduled for the kWh to go out. Now we may get into another program, connected solutions, or something else with our battery, and so that may adjust how we output. But we're figuring that out. We'll figure that out. Tell us about the battery. So we haven't chosen any battery yet, where do

Tim Montague: 25:44

you know, like the basic specs? Is it kWh or 500

John Weaver: 25:49

kWh or so? It's going to be about 300 KW which is one half of the DC sizing, and then about six hours, five to six hours, this is going to be, this is driven by the incentive structure. So the SMART program first that's one incentive. So you look at your DC, and then your battery inverter relative to that is one variable, and then the second variable is your number of hours. And so the curve goes up strong until, like four hours of battery. Then it slows down a little bit in terms of increasing rate, but we need six hours if we're going to really maximize this site and make up for all this interconnection costs that we have to pay for. So hopefully the extra revenue balances out when we start getting into this ROI stuff.

Tim Montague: 26:39

So it's on the order of 1500 kWh, right? It

John Weaver: 26:43

an annual 1.8 right now. So 1.5 to 1.8 Yeah, 1500 to 1800 somewhere in that range is current projection, so that we got to find the right inverter so I can have the proper DC to AC ratio.

Tim Montague: 26:58

I know somebody help you with that.

John Weaver: 27:00

I know CPS does have some high DC thumbgirl has, I've seen it in the past. Selectria has. So we're getting closer. We are going to be aiming for domestic content, though. So we have to really try and tune our hardware, everything. It's going to be hard to make it domestic content, but we really gotta. We really want to,

Tim Montague: 27:22

and I totally appreciate that. And so it's, it's the thing that you okay, if you're a developer, asset owner, you have to think about CapEx versus OpEx. And yes, if you can hammer on the domestic content, you can drive down the capex, but careful, because there's some gotchas potentially there on the back end, on the OPEX, so just be careful, right?

Evan Upshur: 27:50

Yeah, looks like an awesome project. Seems like maybe a future candidate for project of the month, right?

John Weaver: 27:58

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's been on this document already once or twice, so yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, whenever I need, whenever one of our projects have a cool milestone that they meet, I get a little excited. I gotta tell Tim, yeah,

Tim Montague: 28:15

alright, and you've got a story in PV magazine. John solar price passes pessimism quantified. What's the story from September 11?

John Weaver: 28:25

Yeah, so this was just covering a research paper. You know, I covered four or five articles over the last couple weeks, but I was just covering a research paper, and I, you know, let's go to the first graph. I think that's really going to be the best one to show it. So here's, here's this graph. Zoom in on it a little bit, if you can, and the portion around that 500 number, because this is really the crux of it. So if you see that solid black line that's in that graph, it starts just over 2000 and it goes down to, yeah, you got it right there, Tim, and it goes down to, like, that's the year 2023, and you can see the price per watt fall, the price per kilowatt fall. And that's the real number that they see happening now. All these other lines, and you can see them all on the right side. Those are all different price future projections starting, you know, 2015 2000 what? And they say, Okay, this is what we see is going to happen in the future. And you look at all these curves going out to the far right. If you look at that, that's 2050 and look at where those prices are, some of those prices are $1 per watt, and all the way down to like, I don't know that little green one at the bottom, maybe it's 25 cents. But if you look at half of them, roughly half of them are higher. They're 2050 projections, then today's price, today's 2025,

Tim Montague: 29:50

gentlemen, don't know what is today's Real Price about

John Weaver: 29:54

for this document, global, 50 cents per watt. 50 cents per watt installed is kind of the number that they look at. Yeah.

Evan Upshur: 30:02

What? Are these colors represent the 500 $500

John Weaver: 30:08

per kilowatt. I think it's kW AC, but yes, okay, and the different colors are just different models, like from NREL, from scientists, people predicting the future. These are projections, cost projections, going forward. And the interesting thing is, if you look at that $500 go all the way to the right again, this is a 2023 price. So the pricing of 23 was 27 years ahead of the pace that a bunch of these people projected. And that's why this is solar price projections quantified, or solar price pessimism quantified. Yeah, like people just are still, I mean, the smartest people on Earth, and some of them are enroll our best friends, the best solar people in the whole United States, everybody that works at NREL, I will buy you a beer. All you gotta do is show me a little tag, or you can even lie to me, just if you know the word NREL, I'll buy you a beer. I once saw somebody with a laptop sticker with NREL and and then an NREL t shirt. I just felt so happy seeing that. But you know, even NREL is behind because of the change that has occurred with our industry. And so the purpose of this paper was just to be like, holy crap. Look at that. These numbers are just, I mean, we knew it, but now here's seeing it all. These people need to adjust their numbers and figure out why they were wrong. And the same thing in batteries. Look, go to the next chart, very last one. You can see it happening with batteries right there. No, no. Pop up right there. You can see that these projections, but you see that little, tiny red dot underneath everything,

Tim Montague: 31:53

actual, 2025, $58,

John Weaver: 31:56

it's, what are the Evan and Tim, you and I need to go into the projection business, because we can just throw stuff at the wall and then be like, here's our thing. Give us some give us a paper with our name on it, so I can show it to a pretty lady and be like, Hey, I'm published. Because that's because this is like, Oh my gosh. So batteries are below projected cost of 2050 Yeah, that's incredible. Our pace, our movement, our acceleration, is just, yeah.

Evan Upshur: 32:29

So it's interesting, too. I mean, you know, we're, we're operating in an industry that's, you know, parallel with the car industry, which, you know, has a huge demand for energy storage right now. And you wonder, I mean, back around, like 2020, when, when the EV, I would call it EV, boom, was really happening. It's, it's interesting to see how things can really accelerate potentially. You know, I have a feeling that that some of that technology and just the overall supply chain has to accelerate some metrics like that red dot there. It's pretty incredible.

John Weaver: 33:02

Absolutely. I like whenever I see our new text coming on, like hydrogen, batteries, perovskites, particularly whenever there's a parallel industry to ours, I'm like, I feel more optimistic because there's more scientists, more research, more serendipitous views of what's happening and and if you think about batteries, what made our battery industry happen, our laptops and our phones, these are the things that set the market so that once Tesla and BYD said, Oh, look at this existing tech. They had a massive base of battery manufacturing. They had scientists research, people trying their best. And so batteries, our batteries for our grid, are being developed at a nine to one ratio. So car batteries are like 80 to 90% of the batteries that are manufactured globally. Grid is 10. So we are massively benefiting from the parallel industry that we get to piggyback on and and that's great. So anyway, price quantified. That was, that was my, one of my happy stories of the week.

Tim Montague: 34:11

Well, this is not a happy story. And Evan, if you need to leave, you're fine to leave, but if you want to hang, hang out, we're all good. It's totally up to you.

John Weaver: 34:21

Certainly, we got three more links to cover 10 minutes. Max, yeah,

Tim Montague: 34:24

we'll go for another 10 or so. Here, we got a story about Meyer burger, which is near and dear to me and John's heart. Meyer burger unlikely to survive under provisional debt moratorium. I have some ideas about this company, but John, what is the basic story here?

John Weaver: 34:42

They made a push to grow and they're just they're probably going out of business. They're in BK, they shut down their solar cell factory, and in Germany, they really only have two collections of people working right now. They have two businesses, and they're

Tim Montague: 35:00

give our listeners some background. This is a company that made solar panel manufacturing equipment, originally, right? And then they got into solar panel manufacturing, brought that to the US. But there were some false starts, never fully opened. I mean, this is a picture of a plant in Arizona. Looks like, right?

John Weaver: 35:20

Yeah. So first they were a watch glass maker, right to the earliest that I know about company, yes. And then at some point, one technology that they got into was the they made diamond wire saws, I guess, that cut the watch faces the glass, and that ended up being integrated into solar panel, solar cell and solar wafer cutting. And then at some point, they kept moving up the supply chain, making cells, making wafers. And then over the last few years, they tried to make a push into the US, assembling modules. Now they were making modules in Germany and and they were a few 100 megawatts that they started pushing into, yeah.

Tim Montague: 36:05

And it was a premium panel. It was a very nice product, right, yeah. But it's a question of, how competitive can you be, right? Making panels in Northern Europe

John Weaver: 36:13

and and only making a few 100 megawatts. And, yeah, you know. So they just, they, you know, they made the push into the US, and it just, it just didn't come through. And this is their they had two facilities they were doing. They had the Arizona Goodyear facility, and I guess that's what this one is. And then they had a facility for cells that they were working on in Colorado, and I think Colorado city. And so both of those facilities have gone and it looks like the US. These facilities. Michael, to worry, which is cool. That's an Indian manufacturer. They're pretty big. If they're going to make use of those factories, awesome. It's at least, at least it's going to get taken care of so or get made use of. But it just breaks my heart, just because I just was. I just like their glass, glass technology. I like their clean, their clean poly silicon sourcing. It was good to have global competition. You know, the Chinese are really awesome making solar panels. But I'm really happy seeing India and China now competing because and the US and Europe as they can go, because it's just good to have different sets of eyes. It's just like the battery stuff. You want learning curves. You want different people, different visions. And literally vision sometimes just saying, Oh, I see this differently. So yeah.

Tim Montague: 37:32

So I have another theory, and that is that they were out competed by China because guys like Dean Solon at create, who's building a solar module factory in Tennessee will say publicly, the best equipment for making solar panels comes from China. Yeah, he's waiting for equipment from China. Meyer Berger stopped selling their equipment because the Chinese were copying their equipment and stealing their IP But China's no longer just copying others technologies. They're truly a powerhouse of R and D and invention themselves, right? Things have changed. So anyway, I don't have any validation of this theory. That's just my theory that the world has changed, and they didn't change fast enough with it, but we'll be sad. It'll be sad to see them go. If they go, uh, hopefully they'll find an investor.

John Weaver: 38:34

Oh, I don't know. I don't think they are. Yeah, not gonna stick to it anymore.

Evan Upshur: 38:39

Yeah. Certainly come a long way. It'd be great to great to see a dive and catch, if you will,

Tim Montague: 38:44

dive and catch all. Right, there's a story about Vermont. This is our last story, I think, isn't it? Sure? Oh, yeah, Vermont lawmakers plan to consider balcony solar next session.

John Weaver: 38:57

That's it. Nothing magical. They're just considering allowing you to plug in some solar. They got a little bit of volume, uh, the KW number, I saw it earlier.

Tim Montague: 39:07

I mean, we've covered a couple, a couple of states are rolling out balcony solar laws, right?

John Weaver: 39:14

Well, so far, the only place where I've seen a law explicitly was Utah, yeah, yes, yeah. And so these people are looking similar. It's also 1.2 kW, and has very similar details as the Utah language. So I just thought it was neat to see a second state going balcony solar and and I also think it's smart for a northern state to do it, because most balcony solar is at a more aggressive angle, and Vermont is, you know, we're way north. They're Canadians, and so, you know, having balcony solar up there, smart,

Tim Montague: 39:49

lot of trees up there, though, absolutely.

Evan Upshur: 39:52

Is this something you guys see, like, like, actually being, like, implemented a lot? Is this something that a lot of folks want to do? Yeah, I

John Weaver: 40:00

wouldn't say implemented a lot in the US yet we're just at the early edges of it. Yeah, you guys need to get yourself a 1.2 kW inverter with rapid shutdown that's UL certified to isolate the solar system in case the grid goes down and somehow it's got to have smarts reading on the circuit so that it can tell what's happening on the circuit and not overpower this circuit. Because, you know, you can have solar coming in at 20. This is the hypothesis of the challenge. Sure you have the grid coming in at 20, you have the solar coming in at 20. Now, generally, that wouldn't the way electricity works if you were plugged in correctly, and you're talking about 20 amps. Yeah. 20 amps. Okay, yeah, sorry, sorry, if you only had 120 amp item plugged into the wall properly, then the solar would make it so that the wall wouldn't draw and so everything's cool because you have a 20 amp circuit, 20 amp wires, but the hypothesis is you have consumers who are going to plug in 220 amp things to the same circuit, and now you have the solar coming in at 20, offsetting it, and the grid pulling another 20. So hypothetically, there's 40 amps happening within the circuits. But I don't know how that really works, but they're really talking about that how to manage it. So that seems like the magic little nuance of keeping these cheap, if we can figure out how to get that circuit protected without having to upgrade the electric panel and bring in an electrician where you can just plug it in, that seems like the cool way to do it. So yes, yes, Evan, it's it's not implemented a lot, though it's not worth the money today.

Tim Montague: 41:37

Well, I say yes. I said yes to that because it is a thing more in Europe, in northern Europe. Balcony solar is a thing, and you know, this is something that can be implemented by renters, right? Or people that don't want to put it on the roof, or have a shady roof, like my house, I have a big tree in my backyard, but I could put balcony solar on my back deck, coming off the rail, if I could do something simple, like plug it into the outlet, and

Evan Upshur: 42:07

so anyway, yeah, it's a cool topic, you know, it's, it's, it's little solutions like that that I feel like breed other similar solutions, you know, I feel like with something like that, you know, it's, it's not huge, but that also means it's probably a little bit more accessible. And, you know, I think that's going to be the true breakthrough of this industry, when people are able to, you know, buy these things, you know. I mean, solar is still expensive, you know. I mean, relatively speaking, so is electricity. You know, that's kind of been the classic argument. But hopefully we'll see something like balcony solar, transition into something like, you know, porch solar and personal carport solar,

Tim Montague: 42:52

backyard solar, yeah, I covered a, I can't remember the name now, but I covered a carport that's made to be portable, like it comes with wheels, so you could roll it into your garage if there was a storm.

Evan Upshur: 43:09

Yeah, I saw, you know, kind of maybe tying back the whole conversation too. I remember, you know what? I think it was, re plus Chicago, Tim, I was walking the floor, and I came across a small little company. I don't know their name, we could plug them here, but they make a small little inverter enough for one or two solar panels, and it actually ties directly into a water heater. And it's just kind of a sort of piggybacks off that simple way to, like, figure out a way to integrate solar, but there wasn't any interconnection needed because it wasn't going to back feed at all. And so I don't know. It's an interesting type of field that I think we'll see happen, you know, maybe develop a little bit more over the next few years.

Tim Montague: 43:54

I found the episode. It's episode 100 gizmo. Power is the name of the company. Check out my interview with Antonia Ginsburg clemt. Very interesting young woman, I think she's in grad school now out west, but very cool. Product, Gizmo, power, awesome. All right, Tim, I think we should wrap it up. I know you had one more story on the docket, but

John Weaver: 44:18

always new stories. Tim, always something to talk about. Yeah, well, we'll

Tim Montague: 44:22

see if it stands the test of time. We're coming back on the 26th so I want to thank Evan Upshur from CPS America for joining us today. And as always, the commercial solar guy, check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review, but more importantly, tell a friend about the show. There are many people that don't know about the Clean Power Hour, so tell a friend and connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. John, how can our listeners find you?

John Weaver: 44:52

Best place is just commercial solar guy.com, my website and and that's really it. Commercial solar guy.com, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on blue sky. But if you really want to see some of the stuff we build and what's going on commercial solar guy com, we have a contact page and all kinds of stuff.

Tim Montague: 45:09

And how about you? Evan up, sure,

Evan Upshur: 45:10

yeah, usually making it around to the local trade shows and conferences representing chin power systems. And of course, I'm on LinkedIn, so happy to connect with any listeners there? Fantastic.

Tim Montague: 45:21

I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks so much, guys, awesome. Thank you. You.