Masdar 5.2GW Solar Plus 19GWh Storage: World's First 24/7 Solar Plant

In the latest Clean Power Hour Live, Tim Montague and John Weaver discuss major developments in clean energy markets. Learn about the world's largest solar plus storage project breaking ground in Abu Dhabi, how silver prices are transforming solar panel economics, and why residential batteries are creating a feedback loop that drives more solar installations. Tim shares insights from his recent visit to the TenneSEIA market, where LightWave Solar and other installers are building community-scale projects and expanding into battery storage.

Episode Highlights:

• Silver prices exceeded $50 per ounce, making older solar panels worth $30 or more for recyclers and adding $7 to $15 in material costs to new modules (Link)
• Masdar breaks ground on 5.2GW solar with 19GWh storage in Abu Dhabi, delivering 1GW of baseload power around the clock starting in 2027 (PV Tech)
• Australia's residential battery installations tripled after new energy storage incentives launched, requiring VPP compatibility (Link)
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TenneSEIA) market shows growth in utility-scale solar through Silicon Ranch and community solar projects, with Light Wave Solar leading residential installations since 2006
• FlexGen announces hybrid OS software platform to manage both batteries and solar assets, expanding to 25GWh of battery capacity under management (PV Magazine)
• Residential battery demand creates a shortage of smaller 100Ah cells as manufacturers shift to larger utility-scale formats (PV Magazine)

The clean energy sector shows strong momentum across multiple fronts. Large-scale storage projects like Masdar's 5.2GW plant demonstrate the path to 24/7 solar baseload power. Meanwhile, residential battery incentives in markets like Australia prove how energy storage dri

Transcript

Tim Montague: 0:52

Welcome to the Clean Power Hour. Live. I'm Tim Montague, your host. It is October the 31st it's Halloween. John Weaver, my co host, commercial solar guy, welcome to the show.

John Weaver: 1:03

Hey Tim. I hope you have a nice day. It's Halloween. I'm not going to drive anywhere. I'm gonna ride my bike, walk around today, watch all the kids running around, see if I can get some candy. It's good day.

Tim Montague: 1:15

Yeah, it's a good day. It's a good day. I'm fresh on the heels of visiting Nashville, Tennessee, where I attended the Tennessee annual meeting, thanks to Gil huff and his staff for putting on a great event. Tennessee is an interesting market. It is the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority. You know much about the TVA, John,

John Weaver: 1:41

founded in the 1930s as part of the big deal. As part of the New Deal, has a whole lot of clean energy, bunch of hydro, bunch of nuclear. They might be like the cleanest utility in the nation. I mean, amongst them, 80, 90% plus clean. Is that true? Am I right?

Tim Montague: 1:56

I don't think so. Oh, I think it's a I think it's more of a spread between hydro, coal, nuclear and they are in transition, though, it was refreshing to hear how much solar is coming on in the TBA, there's some utility scale projects. Silicon ranch looms large in that market. They are a developer and asset owner, very interesting company, because they own the real estate, generally speaking, and they're very forward about conservation, agri solar, agrivoltaics, cattle voltaics. So there are some, there are some utility scale PPAs happening, and then there are some community scale solar projects happening. It's very early days, though. What was a big surprise for me, though, and this is, I think, typical of smaller markets. There's a very robust group of OGS in the market who've been around. I met a company called Light Wave solar. Shout out to light wave, that have been doing solar since 2006 and they pretty much own the Tennessee market and but they're expanding also into other markets, like Illinois, Illinois, Southern Illinois is not far from Tennessee. When you go down to the bottom there, I'll put a actually, let me put a slide on show on screen. So here's the TVA, the dark green. It encompasses all of Tennessee, but then also parts of Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, and a little bit into Virginia and North Carolina, seven states total. But of course, most of Tennessee and but the transition is happening in in the TVA as well. And that was, and that was good to good to see. And I have this theory, though, John, that when you're working in a smaller market, like the payback period for solar in Tennessee is greater than 10 years because they don't have specific incentives and they have very cheap power. When you're working in that kind of a market, you develop a knack for, you know, really going after resiliency, for example, and and that's true of light wave. They're, they're doing batteries on all their projects now. And I had this, I had a similar experience at Osea two years ago. But, yeah, it was a good, good trip, fun to be in Music City. Got to hang out on Broadway a little bit, catch some live music, and it's good to be back. But I gave a talk about micro grids, also, which I would be happy to share slides with anybody if, if you just reach out to me on LinkedIn or at Clean Power Hour Comm, I'll send you my slides. What's new with you, besides Halloween?

John Weaver: 5:20

John, wow, new working on a cool battery project on an agrivoltaic facility, moving in the winter time and wet time with construction and shorter days.

Tim Montague: 5:38

Yeah, the fall is tough for construction.

John Weaver: 5:40

Yeah, an RFP, come back because the institution decided they didn't want to move forward with a project that. Yeah, in their best interests. So, don't know what that means. Makes me feel like us, like, oh man, we were, we got good bid, but we still weren't good looking something. You know, we were the lowest price bid So, and we didn't get really, a real answer. So, you know, just normal business stuff. So, yeah, lots going on. Just lots going on. There's a, you know, new in the Solar World. I can talk to you about lots of cool stuff there, but business wise, always things moving, yeah.

Tim Montague: 6:22

Well, let's get into the work. Let's get into the news. We have a story about silver prices. Silver went over$50 an ounce? Yes, and that translates into the value of used solar panels or new solar panels, or both,

John Weaver: 6:40

both, both. So, so here's so if you wanted to scare share, scare share that link. I did a little math, put it on blue sky, but the price per ounce of silver is now over 50 bucks, or it's right around it right now, pushed a few bucks over it. There's some I read some neat stuff about why it occurred, and you know, a lot of it has to do with literally, well, this time, Indian internet influencers saying that gold is too expensive. So this year, instead of buying new gold by silver, it's cheaper times, you know what, 1/8 so 50 bucks versus 4000 but that mashed up the value of gold or the value of silver, because now the largest population on Earth is just buying it casually for looking good, and so pushed up the price. It's also been going up for a while because of solar, and it's bigger demand. Solar is like 10 20% of Silver's demand. So two things have now occurred. One, the price, and if you have that, that screen up, yeah. So the price per module of how much silver is now eight bucks to 15 bucks in old timey modules, the price to recycle a solar panel is 10 to 20 bucks. Then they have all these other materials now, because of the silver added in there, modules, older ones are suddenly valuable. If a decent size module is worth 30 bucks, and it costs 20 bucks, 15 bucks to recycle it. That's 15 buck a module profit. And I know some people that make more than that and have a lower cost per unit. So so at minimum, old modules are now suddenly bankable from a professional recyclers perspective. So anybody throwing away a module, a respectable a professional respite, a professional recycler, would be very upset, because that's good module. That's good money for them. And then if you look at new modules, I tried to do the math a little bit further south, you can see what it might cost today to put you can see how much it adds, and it's, you know, seven bucks to $15 when we get up to the 8000 watt modules, if you scroll down just a tiny bit, you can see the net value per per module. So 8000 watt module roughly 15 bucks. But if you run the numbers 15,

Unknown: 9:14

15,000 watt module, yeah,

John Weaver: 9:17

800 800 watt Yes, 800 watt module. That's how many milligrams of silver. But they ends up being almost 50, over 15 bucks, so for an eight cent module, it's now a nine cent module, but silver is 20% silver is now the most expensive component behind the silicon. It passed the aluminum frames. So blue path, I mean, it's the most this is recycle value. But when it comes to initial cost, because silicon is real hard to recycle, but when it comes to initial costs, it's now the most expensive component. So yeah, so that is interesting. It's going to push it's going to push recycling of solar panels, but it's also going to push new technology, like ICO. Ico is a high efficiency module manufacturer. They do back sheets only, and they have a 25% module in the field. You can't find too many of them because they don't make a bunch, but they're out there, and they use copper on the back of their modules instead of silver. So that, I think, is a really interesting story from the manufacturing side, and from, I guess, the O and M side of solar, your solar panels are now worth money, and those recycling companies who are starting to catch up with things they're probably doing well financially right now,

Tim Montague: 10:44

yeah, while you were talking about this, I looked at the relative price of silver and gold and. They are both spiking. Yes, I don't know that you can save money by investing in one or the other, but

John Weaver: 10:59

they are both like, I have one ounce of gold. I bought it just so I can have a chunk, just because it looks cool and, you know, just in case, uh, you know, things go sideways, I can always, uh, skim off a little gold and pay my way out of a situation? Yeah.

Tim Montague: 11:16

I mean, there are people that think that gold is a good way to be a prepper, and I'm not convinced, but I think liquor, cigarettes, batteries, solar panels, more batteries are probably more valuable than gold, but you got to have something to exchange things with, and maybe gold will be a thing. Let's talk about Masdar.

John Weaver: 11:45

Yes, so Masdar is their big Middle Eastern developer that's associated with, I think the Emiratis,

Tim Montague: 11:55

oh Masdar is a community also, so I'm confused. It says oh yeah. It says developer Masdar. So we're talking about the, the the UAE, the United Emirates, right?

Unknown: 12:12

Yes.

John Weaver: 12:14

And which one is this? Which one is this? Is this? Scroll down a bit where, where it's located. So this one's going to be located in Abu Dhabi. Mr. Abu Dhabi. There we go. So, yeah, so of the Emiratis, we are in Abu Dhabi,

Tim Montague: 13:22

but the story is that they're developing or Masdar breaks ground on world's largest 5.2 gigawatt 19 gigawatt hour solar plus storage project. Yeah, now

John Weaver: 13:34

really what they should say this is the world's first utility scale 24/7, solar power plant, because the detail here that's missed in this headline is that the grid connection is one gigawatt. So they got 19 hours of batteries at one gigawatt plus five gigs of solar. 19 plus five is 24 Yep, there you go, one gig of base load energy around the clock. So if you think about that, 19 plus 24 that's, that's, that's what you need, and there's going to be excess solar. So there's gonna be solar filling up the batteries all day long. It's gonna, and this is near the equator, they're probably gonna have eight, nine hours of sunlight per day, and many times and I so this is the world's first base load solar and storage plant, and

Unknown: 14:33

it's all gigawatt plant.

Tim Montague: 14:37

Yeah, it's, you know, here in the US, a very large solar project would be between one and two gigawatts. I don't know if we've exceeded a two gigawatt plant yet for an individual project, but, but yeah, I got to give it to him for going large. And I love the 19 gigawatt hour battery I see, I see it's a jay solar. Was it ja and ginkgo, yeah, ja and ginkgo providing the solar panels. What about the battery? Does it say? I believe?

John Weaver: 15:10

Yeah, I think it's a CA, TL plant. It could be, oh, there you go. Man, how big is that? 20, almost 20 gigawatt hours. There's pictures of it somewhere, of the battery portion starting. It's only like digging out in the desert and putting down rebar into the into the sand, but, but that's the start. I have seen an image or two floating out there.

Tim Montague: 15:37

Yeah, I couldn't find it. It's cool.

John Weaver: 15:40

And any listeners and readers and whatever is you're gonna hear about this, one, 710, 15 more times from us, because this is a cool plan, just neat concept.

Tim Montague: 15:50

Well, it says it's going to be turned on in 2027, so they must be, they must be starting construction, huh?

John Weaver: 15:59

Yes. Well, that's what this article denotes. Is the beginning of construction. So it's just, it's super, super early at it.

Tim Montague: 16:09

Yeah, all right, someone tried to steal $7,000 from our residential solar company. Could tell from the beginning, but it went, went with it cost me $15 plus time. What? What's the story there? Yeah,

John Weaver: 16:27

so I'm gonna write a story for PV mag, but I had an attempt of attempted fraud on my residential solar company, and I want to make sure I tell everybody about it so they at least get a chance. And this is a standard fraud, but, uh. Somebody reached out via our website. The first person that reached out said, Hey, I'm trying to find a good installer for my dad. I was like, All right, that's funny, if you guys are local and you can help us with this address, then I'll have him email you. And then great. Another person followed up started texting with them. They're like, Hey, we're moving into this house shortly. We haven't moved in yet, so we have to give you an extra $7,000 and it's for an authorization fee with the power company. I'm like, All right, and and when you get that extra money and you cash it, please forward me the 7000 I was like, great, that's what I'm gonna do and so I signed a contract. They FedEx me a big check dropped into my account.

Unknown: 17:30

You actually deposited the check? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to see if it worked.

Tim Montague: 17:35

You're a brave man, yeah.

John Weaver: 17:38

So I then they immediately started emailing me, Hey, man, how's the check? How's check? How's the check, how's the check. You want to send me the wire. Here's the wire. Send me the information. I said, Oh, hasn't cast yet, hasn't cleared yet. Bank still checking it out, still going. Just kept waiting. And then one day I logged in, boom, check returned. Took about a week, and I just wanted to bring out to the world what fraud was, how it works.

Tim Montague: 18:04

And the theory is, you cash the check, but the money never clears your bank, but you send them money anyway.

John Weaver: 18:13

Yes, you send the money before. That's the, that's the That's right, there is it. They give you a check, and then they pester you, because you think, oh, man, I got 30 G's. And they say, We need seven back. Great. Send that seven back. And then two days later, their check bounces, and that's what occurred. And so my first solar fraud on the resi company, and it was fun, and there's some pictures down there of it, and and they picked the name of a famous tennis player from Spain, so I'm gonna call him and be like, Hey, man, what's up? What's up with that?

Tim Montague: 18:54

Who's the tennis player?

John Weaver: 18:55

Silvio tedio, something like that. Okay, yeah, I don't, I don't know who the person is.

Tim Montague: 19:02

Sorry. All right, well, I'm glad you didn't actually get defrauded.

Unknown: 19:09

Yes,

Tim Montague: 19:13

Dylan McConnell says, not news to anyone that's paying attention, but pretty amazing figure of what is going on with residential batteries from CSIRO.

John Weaver: 19:24

Yes, so you got to share this

Tim Montague: 19:27

one. What is C S, I R O,

John Weaver: 19:30

that is, I don't know what it stands for, but it's Australia. It's Australia. So we're looking at the Australian market here. Let me see what C S, C S, I R O, Australia. It's a government agency, but now I gotta tell you what it stands for, Commonwealth, scientific, industrial research organization. I can't see the last letter because it's cut off, okay, but what's occurring here is that a new energy storage incentive for residential solar went into place. And as you can tell Timothy, something happened. Oh, now what's really cool, and in a different article, not here, is that another thing is also occurring with the batteries. Two things, three things. Number One, people getting batteries are now adding small three kW ish solar systems, it does something interesting. It allows them offset more juice, or these small batteries that are just really cheap now it jives so it's driving three KW solar installations at the small end, just like couple systems, the author who wrote the article gave a good name about it, then they're leading to the average system size getting bigger that's been getting installed. So the number of solar small solar systems coming out of the blue like never really existed before that tiny class didn't exist. But now the average size is going up from like seven to like 10 or nine. And the thought is that because of the batteries, the economics work better because exported solar, they actually pay for it sometimes, or it's worth zero. So now the battery is making it so daytime solar is worth more. And then the third one, they said that, so you got bigger systems. Oh, current systems are being retrofitted with battery, and they're bringing more solar to as well. So it's leading to more solar. Systems getting installed, smaller systems, bigger systems, and retrofit solar. So there's now a, you know, we got solar, solar, solar, solar, then we got batteries, making the existing solar better, but now leading to more solar. So there's a, is it? Is it a virtuous cycle? This is a cycle. Something's happening here. The solar is causing the grid to need the batteries. The batteries are leading to the batteries and then, but the batteries are now making people say, Oh, the money makes sense for more solar. And so we're now starting to see an Australian virtuous cycle, solar, battery, solar loop thing happening and and that's kind of exciting to see. If you know, you

Tim Montague: 22:27

understand what the incentive is at

John Weaver: 22:29

all, I do. I've seen it, but so many things I read that I forget so many others.

Tim Montague: 22:36

I'm just curious what they're doing. You know, I mean, here in here in Illinois, we have a $250 per kilowatt hour incentive. So there's a data point for you, if you're listening, if you're if you're working on incentives for states, for batteries, that's kind of a good data point. It's a good incentive. It's, it's, you know, the people in the industry think it could be better even, but it's a good incentive.

John Weaver: 23:06

So the first so it looks like it's 30% off, and you get 30% tax credit. So similar up, no upfront discount, there's no tax credit, there's no what's it called, tariffs on batteries over there, and then it has to be VPP enabled,

Tim Montague: 23:27

which is great. All batteries should be VPP enabled.

John Weaver: 23:32

Now, one thing that they have a high motivation of is that they have time of use on residential, I believe. And so this is really big for that type of stuff. Yeah. So VPP, ready? Discounts that? Yeah, there's all kinds of neat stuff. So, yeah, I don't really know it in detail, but I do know it's very I mean, here, let me just phrase the numbers show it. If you look at that sheet, you see something occurred, and batteries were getting installed because they had expensive electricity. But now they're just, they just doubled, tripled in capacity, right, right? Real fast. So, you know, kind of neat. Good job. Good job. Australia. I hope someone else in the world starts to see that happen. That's a great, great curve there. I

Tim Montague: 24:20

mean, I understand how VPPs are good for whoever gets to own the battery and operate it, but if, if it's a hybrid, so to speak, where the consumer is buying the battery and owning it. But there's also, like a grid operator that can access the VPP and manipulate the battery to, you know, charge and discharge at certain times. How does the consumer benefit from that? Is there? Yeah, I don't quite understand it is, is the is the utility giving the consumer some discount when that happens, when they manipulate their battery?

John Weaver: 25:00

So, there's different programs. I know of two of I know one of them very well, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We call them connected solution here. They also have it in California, which they might have just defunded it. But in mass you get in the connected Solutions Program, you get paid per event, and you get paid capacity. So you get paid for existing and then you can get up to one to 2000 bucks a year for your battery, and they pay you per event for how many hours they have a map of when the hours might occur, and for mass, it's demand charge management on a grid wide level. So we're really using batteries as off to offset gas peaking power plants. And our gas up here is very expensive because most of our gas is liquefied, or at least a lot of it's liquefied. That's imported. Bunch of it's from, you know, just pipelines coming up. But we have expensive gas so, so we're offsetting peaker plants with our distributed battery network and and then in California, they have a program where they were paying two bucks a kilowatt hour. And then in Texas, if you're in battery VPP in the Tesla one, and I can find you a picture real quick if you wanted to share it. But, uh, you can participate in the wholesale market. But the thing is that I've seen is that those wholesale headlines, headlines where Tesla VPP, residential people are sharing their big old money, those things are going away because the big grid batteries are taking over, and they're smoothing out the curves in Texas. So it's getting harder to make little pump and dump, you know, pump your battery up and dump it in the evenings, because the competition's getting smart and big and fast. So it's interesting shortly.

Tim Montague: 26:42

Just, I just saw that there's been an energy bill working its way through the Illinois State Legislature called the omnibus energy bill, and it passed last night. It passed and that legislation. I'm no guru on that legislation, but it does include some VPP language, so I'll have to dig into that and report on that on November 14, when we come back.

John Weaver: 27:09

I'll be writing about it, but shortly. But

Tim Montague: 27:11

yeah, just know listeners. Listen. You know, for our listeners, California, New York, Massachusetts, you said Delaware, please. You know, there's a small handful of states that have good VPP legislation.

John Weaver: 27:29

Rhode Island has it. New York has some Utah. Utah has some VPP. California, yeah, China's talking about it. China's talking about a one terawatt hour VPP of here, all the, all the, all the things, one terawatt hour VPP of V to G.

Tim Montague: 27:53

Well, yeah, when you had a bunch of EVs, you could do that,

John Weaver: 27:56

yeah. And so they have in their five year plan. I mean, they installed 50% not installed, sort of installed. They installed 50% of their new cars in the last quarter year, whatever EVs, the volume of capacity of car batteries that are being rolled out into the world are five to 10x Grid batteries. Those are rolling power grid supplemental tools you don't need, you don't need long term energy duration. If you have widespread V to G, how's that? Because I think V to G hold so much electricity in it that we can manage stuff in a different way. So I will see in the long game, but, but, yeah, VPP is pretty cool.

Tim Montague: 28:48

Yeah, if you have, if you have batteries, you want the VPP. I mean, the hard part is getting the batteries, I think in the first place, getting incentives to get people to install batteries. Everybody wants a battery until they see the sticker, sticker price, you know. All right, let's, let's talk about your story on software defined power, flex Gen Z hybrid OS turns batteries and now solar into grid thinkers. Why did you write this story?

John Weaver: 29:19

So I interviewed flex Gen you Scott at re plus, okay, and it was nice. Is just smart to listen. I mean, I know, you know, I'm still new at battery, so I'm learning about the different management system. So you have BMS, which manages the kind of the car, and then you have your EMS, which is kind of your brain that sits on top of the BMS. They both sort of manage the BMS. But like your car turns on, the engine, runs itself and does all that stuff. You also have a human being, which is your EMS, which says, All right, now let's turn the car and let's go faster. So flex Gen is the human running the car sort of, kind of and just interesting to listen to them. They're, you know, they're you Scotty said, though within them, they see batteries approaching, you know, a high quality, high tech commodity item, just like solar panels. And now you got your battery, but now you need a professional to help you maximize the value of it. And solar, we didn't really have that issue as much. We just put the panels up and they blast. Maybe we'll be creative and have east west solar panels or have a tracker, which is what you know the standard is now, but with a battery, you get to shape the electricity flow, and they're a little more complex to manage. So this is that they have an operating system. They call it hybrid OS. Os. It's Linux based, and you have there, he was trying to describe the different layers of how you would run a battery system, as for themselves and your and they they'll build a virtual twin in their laboratory, so that by the time the battery rolls out, they have a comparison, so they can understand if things are booting up well enough, if they're exporting enough. And then you can just kind of see the layers they you don't really have management within the cells, because you can't get gear inside of a cell, I guess, which makes sense. But you can read what's happening in the cell, but definitely within the module, in the rack. You have software and intelligence and hybrid OS kind of touches those places. They don't really sit inside of them, but they could put their gear inside of it and read from inside of it, but they're not actually, you know, within the rack. So to say. But it's just, it's just interesting to listen to. Batteries as they're becoming more professional, and you know, I guess they always were, but now I'm starting to see it more. So it was just cool to listen to flex Jen and hear them talk about battery management. I spoke with another company, battalion energy, and they're helping me design my smaller system. And battalion energy also has a an EMS, an energy management system to help them run the battery and and they're helping me design my project out in my agrivoltaic battery project, which might end up being, like, four hours at 400 so 1.6 megawatt hours. Yeah. So this is a they're kind of an example dashboard of the different items, you can see one key piece of information is state of charge, which is really hard to understand for a battery, because you got to know how much energy you have in there so that you can sell it. And if you're wrong, you can you'll be charged for it. I've read about the state of charge, and it's a weird thing to me that we don't understand how much electricity is in a battery and but it's, I get that it's hard, because you can't, like see it, but you have different ways of inferring it. But it's still not perfect, because your battery could be worn down. So it's, it's just a cool, interesting conversation that I had lots of questions, and really I could, I wish I could have just shared the recording of it, because so many smart things were

Tim Montague: 33:08

said, Cool. And is the is flex Gen tackling strictly utility,

John Weaver: 33:16

it seems like it, yeah, seems mostly utility scale. They might go into CNI. I can't remember. My brain was just, I mean, the main purpose of this announcement was to was for them to talk about how they now help to manage solar assets. But I quickly just kind of started talking about batteries, but, but, yeah, but I think their utility scale, to the best of my knowledge, and they bought power, so power in a big battery company when BK and they bought their assets, so they're helping to manage the power and battery assets now and trying to help that over So, so this company is now going to have like, 25 gigawatt hours of batteries under management. That's, that's a that's a nice size flee. That's cool. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 34:01

Powan was making batteries, right?

John Weaver: 34:06

Yeah, I don't think they were actually making them. They were probably,

Tim Montague: 34:09

I mean, not making the cells, maybe, but they were making containers, okay, um, yeah, they were, they were a player.

John Weaver: 34:20

Yeah, they were one of the biggest. They were one of the biggest in the US Top three. You know, Tesla's number one, of course, but I did great write up on Tesla. Tesla had a pop has had a good year in terms of energy storage. Tim, I don't know if I put it on our list, but we should probably talk about how. I mean, we'll talk about Tesla again soon, but they keep pounding out the batteries. Man, they're growing well, Tesla Energy is cool. Tesla's Tesla Energy profit margins are 31% whereas the rest of the company is 16% so that's interesting to me. Yeah, do you

Tim Montague: 34:58

want to talk about this Mercedes?

John Weaver: 35:01

It's cool looking. Man. Don't you want one? It's really not that cool. Okay, it's just the the the numbers that they put out were kind of aggressive and but they're talking about a paint a spray on. It sounds like thin films. You spray them on. Uh,

Tim Montague: 35:19

Mercedes unveils car with 20% efficient ultra thin solar coating. Yeah, it's it's intriguing. They call it a nano particle solar coating that powers the vehicle, even when off, and uses modules thinner than human, than the human hair. It does sound like thin film.

John Weaver: 35:41

Could be perovskites. We don't really know. Perovskites are sprayed on as well. And I don't know if this is a real car. It's just, you know, it's probably just a cool thing they took a picture of. But if you scroll down, there's some neat stats on it, which I which I thought they were a little aggressive with, but they still look cool. They thought, Oh, let's see, 2500 kilowatt hours a year, roughly 12,000 kilometers. That's like 8000 miles. You know, that's that's a lot of mileage for a car, if you can squeeze out half of it from the sun.

Unknown: 36:17

Yeah. Well,

Tim Montague: 36:20

it's not a bad thing. Where's the number? So the question is, the question John is always, what is it going to cost? Now, if you're buying a Mercedes sports car, maybe money is not an object. So

John Weaver: 36:32

Tim, Tim, Tim, amongst our friends, we don't ask these types of rude questions. Come down. Come down. Talk to your. Uh, talk to your trust fund manager, and let's go get a pair for the weekend. So, so yeah, I just, I want to see some solar powered EDS. Man, come on. Yeah.

Tim Montague: 36:56

I mean, the statistic that sticks in my mind is like, if you had a model Y and you covered it with solar panels, you could get about 15 miles of range per day. So this sounds like it's more than that, but,

John Weaver: 37:11

yeah, this is definitely a little more, but not huge amount more.

Tim Montague: 37:15

What's 15 times 365, that's 5475 miles.

John Weaver: 37:21

Yeah, this. This was covering the whole body in Germany, it was saying 8000 in Beijing, it was over 10,000 it was, you know, 13, 14,000 in Arizona, it's probably 100% solar car. Man, right, go cruising in your solar powered Mercedes.

Tim Montague: 37:41

Dude, I mean, it will eventually happen, just a question of when, you know. All right, so we got one or two more stories. What do?

John Weaver: 37:57

Uh, yeah, we'll do a real quick project of the week that's behind my head. There you go. So this is a, this is a, what's it called? The foundation that we're building at our, our one of our projects, 1073, it's a carport. And here you can see us constructing the foundation. The wood that's the forms. So the forms help us shake shape it the the white thing that's a sauna tube. That's just a real thick cardboard, like about an inch thick slide that down, that fills up with concrete, and it holds it in there, so it can be a nice vertical shape. You can see a bunch of wood on top of it with little pieces of metal sticking out. I wish I could zoom in here. I could probably go find a picture, but those are the bolts that the legs will attach to when you sit the unit. On top of that. And we have, right now, probably five rows of these, ranging from 11 to 15 per row. So I think we got 55 of these that we're building in a section of a of our show, so of our project, which is kind of fun,

Tim Montague: 39:06

and the project is a, how many kW carport,

John Weaver: 39:11

about three megs of carport, 600 KW of rooftop.

Tim Montague: 39:18

That's a big carport, yes, with some batteries too. And who's the host?

John Weaver: 39:26

The host is somebody's parking lot. It's actually old. It's a warehouse. It's leased. It's not our project. We're just EPC, okay, well, EP and, yeah, some some engineering, some

Tim Montague: 39:39

procurement. But is it front of the meter or behind the meter?

John Weaver: 39:43

Stand alone in front of the meter. 20 year agreement with the utility selling 100% in the SMART program. That's what we have here in Massachusetts.

Tim Montague: 39:52

Wow, yeah, to get a carport to pencil for community it's sounds like community solar, right?

John Weaver: 40:00

Well, community solar is an adder. You don't actually need community solar and mass you can just sell it 100% to the utility if you want to do community solar to get, like,

Unknown: 40:09

an extra but for three megawatts, it's chunky. Yeah, chunky Boy, oh, I mean, that's nice, nice.

John Weaver: 40:21

And then the state pays an extra five cents, a kilowatt hour for carports, five or six, like

Tim Montague: 40:26

a 10 acre parking lot, huh?

John Weaver: 40:28

It's helped? Yes, yes, it's a chunk.

Tim Montague: 40:35

I want to see that parking lot. You got another project here you want to show? Should we put this on construction on going at Warwick, Rhode Island.

Unknown: 40:46

Yeah.

John Weaver: 40:49

Share a couple of quick pictures there. I think we should talk about something real quick afterwards. This one, though, one last one. Okay, so this is just a few pictures of what's happening in Warwick. We have a 272 kW rooftop behind the meter. We're using KB racking, Q Cell solar modules and SMA inverters, and this is just the start of it, the very beginning. Us putting down the racking, putting down some bricks to hold down the racking, laying it out. If you look at the first two pictures, you can see some damage from FedEx. That was really just a you can see the hole in the box. And then if you put your head in the hole, you can see that the plastic grating on the inverter was busted. So we had new one FedEx to us from SMA. Thank you very much, SMA, that was very fast of you. And Charlie from Guide. Light distributors. He's the one that turned it around really quick for us and got it replaced. So thank you, sir. And then then, if you go to the next image, next set of pictures that are associated with that are on the on the document, you see a couple more images of the site moving along pretty nicely. We'll actually be done on the roof. And there's another link on the dock, yeah, yeah. Right below it. Right below this link, there's four more pictures, and these are from this past week. And, okay, yeah. And so here's the racking from above. I just thought it looked nice and clean. You can start to see that we got some cabling being run. There is the number of bricks that we got to put at the corner the leading edge. Gotta get four big old bricks sitting at the edge, holding that thing down. You see our nice, heavy safety rail. This is being installed by the union electric team, the 90 IBW 99 and they're under Newport renewables, because we're not a union shop. But this customer wanted union labor. And then here's the, you know, we're starting to pull cable, starting to, there's a lot of modules down now. So you can see it in this image, of course, but we got the inverters out starting to pull cable. And, you know, I just thought it was funny, like, there's a comment. I put it there at the bottom, but solar panels are borderline, some of the most space age cool technology we have on Earth, and we hold them down with bricks.

Tim Montague: 43:09

Yeah, it is kind of ironic.

John Weaver: 43:12

Like, you know, what was the first tool we ever learned about Tim? You know, we got rocks and fire, and we're still sort of working with rocks and fires, except now we're using engineered bricks, and we're turning the giant fireball in the sky into electricity. So it was just a moment of that's kind of cool. All right, super fast. I'll talk fast. Tim,

Tim Montague: 43:35

super fast. What's this? Small batteries in heavy demand.

John Weaver: 43:40

Small batteries are selling out. So apparently, residential size battery cells, there are 100 KW battery cells, probably about this big as the utility scale market has grown develop. Manufacturers have stopped making these smaller 100 amp hour cells, because 300 500 1000 amps, 2000 amps are becoming the new thing, just like how modules had this explosion in size to find this new optimal spacing. Battery cells on the utility scale are doing it, but what they're doing is leaving behind small cells which are more viable for residential and smaller projects. Yeah, and I thought to share this for two reasons. One, inside the article, they talk about how battery manufacturers are expanding massively, like they talk about C, A, T, L, by D, both building big facilities. But they also mentioned, and more importantly is how, how these big manufacturers are leaving behind small battery cells. And it just makes me happy to hear battery people selling out and having a reason to build more capacity. Because, you know, solar right now is funky with its capacity. It's really oversized for a little while. Can take a couple years to catch up. But right now, batteries are ahead, and so maybe that'll lead to some battery price increases, maybe some better profits, but at which motivates manufacturing and and we're in the early s curve of batteries, and just like that screen we saw with Australia, batteries are you know, solar Now means the grid means batteries, and now we're jacking up batteries, which is leading to more solar. And what's that going to mean? Are we getting that? Then we have Masdar. You know, we keep having this dance back and forth, more batteries, more solar, more batteries, more solar. Those Middle Eastern folks are like, all right, all the batteries, all the solar. Bam, done. One Power Plant. None of this dance up and down the power grid. So it's, there's a thing happening right now, and batteries are our next thing. You got, you got to make your brain work like fixed flex Gen. Got a flex Gen brain, and become the brain that runs batteries.

Tim Montague: 45:59

I do say, I do like to say that, you know, creating the value stack for batteries is rocket science, which is why there's very few companies that do it. But, yeah, it's good to it's good to see storage coming on. It's good for the grid. It's good for consumers, business owners. It's good for everyone. All right. Well, we'll be back I in two weeks, on the 14th of November, and you can find all our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. Where can our listeners find you?

John Weaver: 46:37

John, commercial, solar, guy, calm, it's best place. Um. Contact us for him. You can also come to Cambridge. I'll buy you a beer.

Tim Montague: 46:46

There you go. All right, I want to say thanks to all our listeners for being here and tell your friends about the show. With that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks. John Weaver,

Unknown: 46:58

see everybody you.