Next-Generation Solar + Storage for New Home Construction

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Mike Collignon: All right, happy Wednesday everyone. Today is March the 4th, which sounds like an imperative sentence, but it kind of is as today is March 4th. Do something day. Lucky for you, you already are doing something. You're here with us. We're going to be talking about solar plus storage for new home construction. A new platform called Solar Edge Nexus addresses the three biggest barriers that have prevented builders from confidently including solar and storage, installation complexity, insurance concerns, and upfront cost anxiety.

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Mike Collignon: Now, our discussion today will be facilitated by Matt Power. He's the editor in chief of Green Building Media. It's largely because Matt the Green Building magazine was named Best Residential Trade Magazine by the National Association of Real Estate Editors for eight consecutive years. Matt has award winning, nearly three decade career reporting on innovation and sustainability in housing. Now Matt will be joined by two guests, which you see on your screen.

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Mike Collignon: Cameron Stewart is a senior technical marketing manager at Solaredge Technologies. With nearly 21 years in the solar industry. Stewart has progressed from installer and design engineer through utility scale operations to his current role managing Solar Edge's residential storage portfolio and next generation solutions, including that upcoming Nexus platform. Jim Westover is vice president of product at Solar Edge Technologies, where he oversees the strategic direction and innovation of residential energy solutions for the North American market.

00:01:32:26 - 00:02:04:07
Mike Collignon: He leads product development and go to market strategies for Solar Edge's integrated solar and storage offerings. Now our webinar is brought to you by Solar Edge. Solaredge is a visionary leader in smart energy technology, committed to harnessing the power of the sun to create a sustainable future. So Solar Edge is DC optimized technology, maximizes energy production and drives innovation in energy storage and EV charging solutions for both residential as well as commercial applications with a steadfast commitment to innovation and sustainability.

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Mike Collignon: Solar edge is leading the way towards a brighter future. Now, during the course of today's discussion, you can submit questions for our panel. Simply use the Q&A function located in the menu bar at the bottom of the zoom window. I'll review those questions and proposals to our guests after our discussion, and we may even take some as we go along.

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Mike Collignon: Speaking of going along, Matt, you're here to take us away.

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Matt Power: Okay. Thank you. Mike. Hi, everybody. It's great that you could take a little time out of your day to be with us here. What? I like to usually talk about right at the beginning of one of these webinars is the audience, which is you. And we know we have a mixed audience. So some of you are professional builders or architects, appraisers.

00:02:45:01 - 00:03:04:19
Matt Power: But we also know that there's people out there who are, you know, building a home or rebuilding a home. So we're going to try to keep the conversation. Both technical and accessible. So, we'll sort of weave in and out of that as we go. So that's why I kind of want to start at the beginning, and talk a little bit about inverter technology.

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Matt Power: So, solar, as you may or may not know, is, you know, sort of world renowned for their inverter innovation and, and also solar storage and batteries. So, Cameron, let's let's hand it off to you and have you give us sort of an overview of how inverter technology has changed over the last ten years, and then you can kind of segue in with where is Solar Edge taking us?

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Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. So as you guys know, and you heard in my bio, I've had a lot of experience in the solar industry. And when we first started installing inverters, we used a single empty and basically all that is, it's a fancy way of saying we find the most ideal point on a voltage and current curve to harness energy.

00:03:49:13 - 00:04:19:29
Cameron Stewart: And then it turned into two amps. Man, we we really changed the industry there. Because in answer to one, we had to Solaredge has module level. And so now the industry has shifted to realizing that harvesting and maximizing the energy production of every single solar panel is worth it. Especially with the cost of goods going up, you want to be able to squeeze every little penny out of those solar panels that you can.

00:04:20:01 - 00:04:47:09
Cameron Stewart: And so Solaredge again prioritizes maximizing energy on the rooftop from the solar panel at the panel level and funneling that energy down to the ground where the inverters and storage sets. And then kind of within, I'm going to say within the last two years to four years, storage has become a big part of any solar system or any PV system, because you want to be able to save that energy to use it later in the day.

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Matt Power: Right, right. And, Jim, do you want to take us a little, like, little on the technical side, a little deeper into what's actually going on inside the, in the inverters? That's that's a little different now. Like there's more. It seems to me there's more smart features right there. They're integrating with the house in a more complex way.

00:05:08:12 - 00:05:37:17
Jim Westover: Yeah. So. So, Solaredge has been, in the battery business, the residential battery business, since the launch of, Powerwall one. So we have, you know, decades worth of experience working with residential batteries, operating residential batteries. This Nexus product is our fourth or fifth generation kind of foyer into to the solar and storage. I think what we're seeing that's that's become most important for customers is really the efficiency of the whole solar and battery stack.

00:05:37:20 - 00:05:55:20
Jim Westover: As you're using your batteries to make sure you don't export because the utilities are giving us less and less value for the energy that we do export. People are holding on to that energy and powering their home with it. But home loads are typically pretty low. And so, solaredge has a really high efficiency inverter, at low power.

00:05:55:26 - 00:06:14:25
Jim Westover: And so we're able to essentially save the customer more money because we're losing less in the transition from that DC energy to the AC energy. And then the other thing worth noting, and I'm sure cam is going to dive into this, but the batteries are DC coupled. And all that really means is solar direct. So solar energy is DC energy when it comes out of the sky.

00:06:14:25 - 00:06:34:14
Jim Westover: It's captured in the modules or DC modules. It's stored in the battery as DC energy for solar heads. That's all in one. You can kind of think of it as like one wire or one conduit. You know, other technologies have some AC coupling and some multiple conversion. So at the end of the day, like we're really just trying to save our customers the most amount of money, give them the most amount of flexibility possible.

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Jim Westover: And yeah, so far it's been a great journey.

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Matt Power: So one of the things when you mentioned flexibility, I mentioned we on our little practice call, we did, I put in a solar installation up in Portland, Maine, a few years ago, and I had, an inverter. And I remember it being it was about 12 years ago, but it could only do one thing. It was not like it didn't have an automatic transfer switch in it.

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Matt Power: For example, I couldn't switch it over if I wanted to. Now you're Solar Edge, like the Nexus line. They're basically they're essentially hybrid inverters. Is that correct? They can they can do all those things, right? They can run you off grid. They can they can put you over in a in a power outage.

00:07:11:16 - 00:07:39:13
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So a hybrid inverter, just like you said can grid follow, which is when the grid is on and running. That's what it is natively doing. And then when the grid goes away, we isolate the home's electrical system using a switch of some type. For us we call it the solaredge Nexus Islander. But the Islander isolates the home, and then the the inverter is able to grid form, and so it creates its own grid and islands itself and produces energy.

00:07:39:13 - 00:07:43:11
Cameron Stewart: So you can have access to your home's energy when the grid is down.

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Matt Power: Right. And, I think one of the things you're really emphasizing is this ability to size up when you're ready to size up, right, like with this solar nexus system. So you can start it. What is it like for 4.75kW hours or something? You can start real small, right? Yeah.

00:07:59:04 - 00:08:27:15
Cameron Stewart: Battery, five kilowatt hours. And, what's what's interesting about that is like every home is different. Every electrical profile is a different. You know, you talked about your DC mini splits or, you know, you're in Texas and you have these giant five ton air conditioners. So every home's electrical footprint is a little bit different. And the scalability of being able to stack, you know, multiple five kilowatt hour batteries to suit your home's needs is really incredible.

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Cameron Stewart: Instead of like, these big, you know, 10 or 13.5 or 15 kilowatt hour building blocks, I mean, that is way more energy than you should need for a home in Southern California or in Arizona. So just that scalability goes hand in hand with fitting whatever your customer needs now.

00:08:47:27 - 00:09:11:26
Matt Power: And I understand, like I've seen your interface even ten years ago is pretty good. Like your app essentially. Yeah. And, so, you know, even at that time you could do individual panel output. You know, you could see all kinds of stuff going on with your system. And now with the new with the updated app. Right. You have some ability, for example, to do some smart control of the inverter with that, right?

00:09:11:28 - 00:09:34:21
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take this one, Jim, again, sorry. Absolutely. So with the homeowners app, they have the ability to not only, like you said, see what every single module is producing. The system owner, like, even the home builder could see those things if they wanted to. You can restrict that view from the homeowner, because sometimes too much information is bad, right?

00:09:34:23 - 00:09:56:15
Cameron Stewart: So. So, yeah, you can change the information that the homeowner sees as you need. But additionally to your point, yeah, they can tell their battery when to charge, when to discharge, what to do with it. Like I want it, 50% of the capacity for backup in emergencies. And they can also turn on and off their smart loads in my own home.

00:09:56:15 - 00:10:25:01
Cameron Stewart: I can see how much solar energy is going into my electric vehicle. So I know that I'm charging my EV with, renewable energy. And so for me, that's hugely important. But it's not important to everybody. Right. So and I can also turn on and off load. And a lot of those functions happen automatically. So when my system goes into backup, my, air conditioner turns off, and my, the rest of my home is backed up and that happens automatically.

00:10:25:03 - 00:10:30:06
Matt Power: Just a quick we had a quick question from somebody. Can you define empty one of you guys?

00:10:30:08 - 00:10:52:26
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. Empty stands for maximum power point tracker. And if we were to plot it on a graph, one side is voltage and the bottom axis is current. And if you multiply those two things, you get power. And so like it's just a point on a curve. It's an algorithm that a inverter runs to define. What is the most power coming out of a solar panel.

00:10:52:28 - 00:11:14:01
Matt Power: Okay. Let's, let's do it like a little hypothetical. So so I'm a builder. I don't currently install any solar. Maybe I'm not well versed in it or I'm not. It just don't get it. Why? You would bother, right? Right. So give me the give me the builders, the pitch. Why would it be worth putting this in a new home or every new home?

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Matt Power: From the ground up?

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Cameron Stewart: Do you want to start with that one, Jim? Sure.

00:11:19:00 - 00:11:40:00
Jim Westover: Yeah. So first of all, in California, it's obviously mandated. So all of the builders are adding solar, and oftentimes maybe a builder wants to say, you know what? I want the kind of the smallest system possible so I can save some money in the stack for a kitchen upgrade or a bathroom upgrade. And so, you know, with Solaredge, you can use as few as six modules and you can use just an inverter.

00:11:40:01 - 00:11:59:12
Jim Westover: You don't have to put a battery on it, and that's a great starter system. And a lot of builders were also that to their customer is like, here's your system. If you want to upgrade, you can you know, and we have finance partners that can actually offload some of this financing for you. But and then if the customer says, well, maybe I just want one battery, you know, you can start with a five kilowatt hour battery.

00:11:59:18 - 00:12:17:01
Jim Westover: You can click in up to 20 kilowatt hours in a single stack. So and then if you know, if you're in a development and you know, customers have sort of different needs, everybody has solar. And so it's not like one customer has a certain technology. And then the next door neighbor has a different technology and they're saying, hey, why didn't I get that?

00:12:17:04 - 00:12:37:29
Jim Westover: And, you know, in the future, if somebody wants to add a battery, they easily can, you can actually wire EV chargers directly into the inverter, too, if you don't want to pull more circuits. It basically just creates a lot of flexibility. But as far as the pitch to the homeowners that are not in California, you know, I think we're just seeing customers wanting to be more in charge of their own energy.

00:12:38:04 - 00:12:49:18
Jim Westover: Energy independence, energy security. It's all becoming a big topic, especially with this AI, low growth, and you name it. So yeah, I feel like we've got some, some great offerings here, like wherever you sit in there.

00:12:49:18 - 00:13:12:02
Matt Power: So I feel like the, the, the EV, you know, growth of EVs has a major impact on this, right? Because, we're chatting before the call about, you know, isn't it nice driving on sunshine like and I think it's but it's not just that. Right. Because what a lot of people are discovering is they get the EV, but, if they haven't got the power system and the home set up for it, it can be a very expensive transition.

00:13:12:02 - 00:13:29:05
Matt Power: Like they may have to add another whole panel. It can be a four or 5 to $10,000 if they don't plan it out properly. So I think having that solar, the ability to inject that solar energy into your charging, routine is, is a pretty big plus.

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Cameron Stewart: Absolutely. Additionally, like with energy storage, like, yeah, my EV is with me at work, at the office. I use it to drive into the office.

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Matt Power: You can't charge it when you're at work. No charging. All right.

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Cameron Stewart: Exactly. So I have energy storage. So when I do go home, I can charge it from all the energy that I stored throughout the day. And my battery pack and charge my AP that way.

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Matt Power: That's a good point. I notice also another feature I like. You know, I live in Florida, and one of the things about Florida is the builders never insulate the garages. So the garages get very, very hot. And where does your battery and your inverter end up in the garage. In the garage? And I noticed you have some special, like, heat tolerance built into the system.

00:14:10:18 - 00:14:36:04
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So the, the entire enclosure is made out of aluminum. It's a completely aluminum chassis. The reason we did that one is for heat dissipation. And its thermal characteristics and properties were able to cool the system, very easily. And then two, it's very robust. It's a really nice, solid design. It looks great. It feels great when you're installing.

00:14:36:04 - 00:14:59:07
Cameron Stewart: And it gives you the the sense of quality and robustness. So that's what I really like about the aluminum enclosure. But also additionally there's provisions for cold weather climates too. And so we have the ability to keep the batteries warm. So if you're in Maine, Portland, Maine or wherever. Yeah. -four degrees Fahrenheit, those, those batteries will continue to operate.

00:14:59:10 - 00:15:21:06
Matt Power: That's good. So it's it's sort of been, I'm sure that's one of those things. Over the years, you sort of have thought through, it's like, oh, yeah, we really need to make these. We really need to design these for different climate zones, that sort of thing. Yeah. Talk about, you know, different, applications, like, you know, there's there's sort of the emergent and you did touch on this a little bit, but from the emergency system.

00:15:21:06 - 00:15:42:19
Matt Power: Right. That just keeps, you know, maybe it's one refrigerator on and your, your propane, you know, heater that runs your propane furnace or all the way up to the complete off grid system, like, now, and maybe tie it in with this idea of this, universal, the skew thing that you're doing, which I maybe you could explain what that is, where it's a single skew.

00:15:42:22 - 00:16:08:16
Cameron Stewart: Sure, sure, sure. So I'll take over single skew, Jim, if that's okay with you. So what is a skew? Excuse just a part number. I think it's, stock keeping unit is what skew stands for. And so it's just, inventory part number that Solaredge uses with other distribution warehouse to identify what products are what.

00:16:08:18 - 00:16:08:29
Matt Power: And.

00:16:08:29 - 00:16:27:04
Cameron Stewart: When we developed a single skew product, we said, no matter what you buy, it's going to be the exact same inverter. Kind of like, you know, Mr. Ford with the model T, if you can have it in black, you can have it in any color so long as you want it in black. Right? Right. So same thing.

00:16:27:04 - 00:16:48:14
Cameron Stewart: You can have any power class of inverter that you want. So long as it's a 13.5. What's beautiful about the skew and kind of how technology has evolved in inverters over the years is now we can control the amount of power that that inverter outputs, so it can behave, in a certain power classification while it's on grid.

00:16:48:14 - 00:17:11:17
Cameron Stewart: And then when it goes into backup mode, it can increase its power to 14.5kW. And so that's what the single skew does, is it gives our installers a lot of flexibility. You don't have to worry about having the wrong part on the truck. Your service calls become easier. It's all the same. And the benefit for Solar Edge is now we manufacture only one inverter.

00:17:11:19 - 00:17:23:05
Cameron Stewart: And because we don't have to retool part lines and change things out when we are manufacturing now, we can make a lower cost product because we only make one now, right? And it's much simpler that way.

00:17:23:07 - 00:17:40:10
Matt Power: And I would assume that going forward. I mean, one of the things you know, everybody worries about is I don't know what this become obsolete, right, in five years. So there's a company have like a strategy that says, you know, we're going to we're going to make everything going forward backward, compatible with the system. Yeah.

00:17:40:11 - 00:18:02:27
Cameron Stewart: We always keep backwards compatibility in mind when we develop new products. You know, Solar Edge has been around for a while. I've been at the company for 11 years. We were founded in, 2006, I think, delivering product since 2010. And so yes, we've been around for a while. All of our inverters have some level of backwards compatibility with all of our power optimizers that are on the roof now.

00:18:03:01 - 00:18:09:05
Cameron Stewart: So if you need to swap out any of our inverters, you could totally do that. And we've not had to touch the roof when.

00:18:09:05 - 00:18:33:12
Matt Power: You're positioning, you know, like there's a lot of inverters out there and a lot of, you know, knock offs from everywhere, like, how do you, What are it? Get like, give me three things that you would say are your or your product, you know, superiority aspects that you would pitch to, say, a builder. It's like, here's why you want to go with us, you know, and make us your preferred inverter.

00:18:33:15 - 00:18:35:00
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. Go ahead. John, do you want me to take it?

00:18:35:02 - 00:18:54:20
Jim Westover: Maybe I'll take that one and combine this one, please. I mean, I think the first one is just highest efficiency. You know, people install solar typically to save money. And, and so whether it's high power, low power, you name it, you know, we have highest efficiency, which is going to drive the highest savings. The second one would be flexibility, not only in the battery stacks that are here.

00:18:54:20 - 00:19:12:14
Jim Westover: You know, how many stacks you want to do, but also in roof planes, you know, if you have a small roof plan, you want to could put a couple of modules on it. You can put a couple optimizers over there and bring them in. And and really the last one is safety. Like, Solar Edge, you know, has been one of the most safe technologies, you know, since its inception.

00:19:12:21 - 00:19:22:11
Jim Westover: We are on 50% of the fortune 100 companies roofs. So they choose us for those same reasons. You know, safety, high efficiency and savings and flexibility.

00:19:22:14 - 00:19:40:07
Matt Power: Okay. I just got a question from, Scott. Leave his last name. Santella. He was asking about support from installers and and from Solar Edge. Right. Say, say you got a problem. Now, I know through the software you have sort of a cloud based. If you want it, you can have sort of the bird's eye view, you know, from the company to.

00:19:40:07 - 00:19:49:17
Matt Power: Right. So you can would you be able to remote diagnose or how would that work for, for somebody who's got a system and has a problem, need some help?

00:19:49:19 - 00:20:22:01
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So we definitely call that know before you go. Yeah. And so, the most costly expense for any installation company when they're servicing their equipment is that service department, because they have to go to a site. Windshield time is a big cost factor. And so we want to limit the amount of windshield time, installers experience. And so if they pull up the monitoring portal and they, they can chat or call Solaredge or email Solaredge or use our support portal, like we have a lot of ways to get Ahold of us.

00:20:22:03 - 00:20:45:04
Cameron Stewart: They can diagnose what the problem is and they know what they need to do before they go to the site. So they only have to roll that truck one time. And with single skew, it becomes even easier because the cost of the inverter so much lower. It is also easy, like this one inverter to replace everything, right? So the installer can roll their truck with a single skew inverter.

00:20:45:04 - 00:20:58:21
Cameron Stewart: If, if that's what the problem was, they can, you know, take it off the wall. Solar Solaredge process the arm and replaces their inventory. So sorry that happened. Here's your, you know, 12 year, 25 year warranty, whatever the problem may be. Right.

00:20:58:24 - 00:21:17:24
Matt Power: And I know, you know, the builders are thinking too. Like like they don't really want to babysit any system on a house once they walk away. Right? So they want to feel confident that it's it's easy enough to understand for both the homeowner and the trade. Maybe that's going to be the the person that would would do an installation.

00:21:17:24 - 00:21:33:01
Matt Power: So, you know, once the bill, at the point when everything is installed, is there sort of like a check like that, the builder would run it, just make sure everything's working properly, that they can safely hand off to the new homeowner.

00:21:33:03 - 00:21:54:17
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. So, like, whenever the permission to operate is granted. So that's the utility saying, yes, you're allowed to operate the system. They can leave the system on and running. And I would even argue that that's a nice kind of validation check point. A lot of homeowners, when they're waiting for their homes to be built, are like, stuck in limbo, like what's happening with my house.

00:21:54:17 - 00:22:12:17
Cameron Stewart: And I know some builders are really great about, oh, we're putting up paint. We're doing. Yeah, roofing. Whatever it is. That's another thing you can give to the homeowner as a data point. Oh, you're solar system is on and it's producing energy up and running. Right. Here's the information about your solar system. And you can see it running live.

00:22:12:19 - 00:22:20:11
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. And so I as a home builder, I think that's just another touchpoint to give your customers a great experience.

00:22:20:14 - 00:22:43:10
Matt Power: Right, right. I think that's true. And I remember with your interface it was always, you know, good to be able to just check in and see that it was working and, and get literally get a granular, here's how much this panel's putting out. I also think, you know, with that, with that high level of detail, it allows you to do things like evaluate different kinds of panels.

00:22:43:17 - 00:23:08:15
Matt Power: You know, are my bifacial panels working better or my mono fascial, you know, a lot of details. You can if you're if you're geeking out right, you can. Yeah. Get into that stuff. So, you know, where do you see in the US market like as you roll this out. And I think you said the the like the Nexus product, both the batteries and the inverters are going to be ready in about June.

00:23:08:18 - 00:23:20:08
Matt Power: You know, what's what's going to be the first question. Are you going to just try to get people entry level? Are you going to try are you going to be pushing, you know, like like go all in and get the whole package or where are you going with it?

00:23:20:11 - 00:23:42:14
Jim Westover: It's a great question. So, we currently have more than 1000 sites operating, globally and more than a gigawatt hour of throughput. And here we are in early March. We plan to GA the product in July. So we really want to test that in all kinds of harsh environments. You know, a lot of back up markets like Puerto Rico that have a lot of backup events, you name it in the northeast, you know, Arizona, all that type of stuff.

00:23:42:20 - 00:24:06:07
Jim Westover: So by the time we have sort of general availability, all you can eat in July, we're really happy to work with anybody. We do have a whole lot of safe harbor deals that we've done. We haven't been incredibly public about how much. But, you know, all of the third party ownership companies typically have a position with us. So if you're working with the sun runs and fins, light reaches, you name it, you know, they should be able to help service you with Nexus, right away.

00:24:06:07 - 00:24:20:25
Jim Westover: And if and if you're not and you would like to, we're happy to connect you or if you have different financing. Yeah, we still have allocations. Really. It's starting in May for customers that would, like to go to Nexus. And we don't really care how many what size you use. It's not like we're only going big first.

00:24:21:02 - 00:24:25:16
Jim Westover: So we want to start small. You know, we have the ability availability for that.

00:24:25:19 - 00:24:37:17
Matt Power: Another question from Scott about he says, how much time does it take to commission a new PV and storage system? How does that work with a new home that may not actually be hooked up to the utility yet?

00:24:37:20 - 00:25:02:28
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So let's start off with our current product line. So our current offering, it takes roughly 45 to, I'm going to say on a long time 90 minute, commissioning. So that's there firmware upgrades and programing, everything to work correctly. For the Nexus system, the new one, we have that was one of our key areas of focus.

00:25:02:28 - 00:25:29:11
Cameron Stewart: And we really wanted to reduce commissioning time. And we found, different ways to do that. So our target is no more than 15 minutes. But right now, we're, you know, as Jim said, we are making a lot of lessons learned in this, initial thousand systems. So I'm going to be fully transparent. I have commissioned, about ten systems myself personally, and it has changed every single time.

00:25:29:13 - 00:25:38:10
Cameron Stewart: My best case scenario was 20 to 30 minutes. And my worst case scenario was much, much, much longer than that. I don't want to even give you a number.

00:25:38:12 - 00:25:47:09
Matt Power: So what do you think? What do you think makes the difference? Like, just from your anecdotally, the ones that were a little more like what made them more complicated?

00:25:47:11 - 00:26:09:21
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So the old ones, we used a different communication protocol called called Modbus, and it was done over Rs 45. And the speed at which you could send data over that communication protocol was a lot slower than we can with our new protocol. So we use Cambus now, which is a much faster communication protocol. And so that was our biggest barrier.

00:26:09:27 - 00:26:33:22
Cameron Stewart: Additionally, there was a limit to how much memory our inverter could store on its communication card. And so we made it much more robust now, so that there was it was a twofold problem. And then the last piece of that is definitely how we commission the system using the Solaredge, go app, which is how the installer connects to the inverter, commission it.

00:26:33:25 - 00:26:56:15
Cameron Stewart: And we wanted to make the process much smoother. So it's a, it's a commissioning wizard. So they just got to put in a couple buttons and we programed the inverter for them and upgrade all the firmware, and they don't have to worry about it. So that's that's where we're going. Now, there's a second part of that question that I think is worth noting is what happens when you don't have grid energy, like how do you commission a system?

00:26:56:17 - 00:27:16:10
Cameron Stewart: Well, if a battery is connected. We have been looking at ways to be able to commission the system just from the DC energy that you've got available to. You may not be connected to the grid, but we have, DC energy. So that is a roadmap item. And if you were to do it today, it would work. But yeah, that is something that we're actively working on.

00:27:16:12 - 00:27:39:19
Matt Power: In the works anyway. Yeah. Another another interesting. I was reading through your documentation. Yeah, I do get that data, but I, I noticed your, some of your certifications, like you have a, ul 9540 a that's, flood ready engineering, which I thought was interesting because I was thinking about, you know, living in Florida, a lot of people who are interested in solar, I think are, you know, we have a lot of power outages.

00:27:39:19 - 00:27:54:04
Matt Power: And when we get hit by hurricanes, sometimes the power's out for, you know, ten days or two weeks. So, it seems like you've built some resilience specifically into the system, including. What does that mean? Flood ready engineering?

00:27:54:06 - 00:28:20:17
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. We support, 18in, flood resistance. So, the batteries are designed to be four mounted. And so if they're resting on your garage floor and you have that hurricane roll through, we don't want your battery to get trashed. So up to 18in of standing water. We are flood resistant. And then beyond that, like, you could wall mount the battery and get a little more high side of it.

00:28:20:21 - 00:28:23:25
Cameron Stewart: If that was a general concern.

00:28:23:27 - 00:28:28:03
Matt Power: Now, do you guys, do you make the wall mounts as well?

00:28:28:06 - 00:28:42:05
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's just a bracket. It's an accessory bracket that we sell. Basically, it's like any TV. If you've mounted a TV to a wall, you can mount the battery to the wall. So it's ostensibly the same thing, right?

00:28:42:05 - 00:28:57:24
Matt Power: I was just looking at, you know, some of that, some of the stats on the new system with, it says 19.6kW hours for four blocks. Right. So for some houses, you know, that might be that might be as high as they ever go. But you can go quite a lot higher. Yeah.

00:28:57:27 - 00:29:21:23
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. And so when you get that full stack of, four battery blocks, the, the rule of thumb is if you can look at this image over here, this little, this little narrow block, we call that the Nexus link. And the inverter is limited to four links. And the link has a maximum capability of four battery blocks.

00:29:21:26 - 00:29:46:10
Cameron Stewart: So if each battery block is like five kilowatt hours, that's 20 per link. And four of those per inverter would be 80 per kilowatt hours per inverter. And then you can have up to three inverters and back up. So that'd be 240 kilowatt hours. Wow. Back up system. So really from the very like you said, the very small size, small home, single battery block, five kilowatt hours minimum.

00:29:46:10 - 00:29:50:00
Cameron Stewart: You could sell those upgrades all the way up to 240 kilowatt hours.

00:29:50:01 - 00:29:56:07
Matt Power: Yeah. If you're using that much power, then, you know, maybe you should have your own coal plant anyway.

00:29:56:10 - 00:30:08:01
Cameron Stewart: Not solar services are getting bigger every day. Like I remember, we're like 100. Answer the standard, then 200, and now we're seeing standard 400 amp service entrances on these new homes.

00:30:08:01 - 00:30:13:18
Matt Power: And so because of the is it honestly it's because the two EV cars in the garage is what's doing it.

00:30:13:20 - 00:30:17:10
Cameron Stewart: Exactly. And we have the solution ready for those EV chargers.

00:30:17:12 - 00:30:32:04
Matt Power: Right. So, explain to me what you know, I know, I know it's the inverters really efficient. Right. But most people may not know exactly what that means. Now you claim a 92% round trip efficiency. What does that mean exactly?

00:30:32:06 - 00:30:36:09
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. Do you want to take this one again, Jim? It's super technical, so I'm happy to, you.

00:30:36:09 - 00:30:38:23
Matt Power: Know, give it to us.

00:30:38:26 - 00:31:02:16
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. So round trip efficiency accounts for energy coming from the solar panels on the roof down to the battery. So into the battery is the DC source. And then out of the battery to be used by the home. That's what roundtrip efficiency is. And as Jim had mentioned, we are DC coupled. That means that the solar array and the battery sit on the same exact DC bus.

00:31:02:19 - 00:31:27:16
Cameron Stewart: And so we can go DC to DC, and then out of the inverter one time that would be 92% efficiency. So when you use other AC coupled solutions, you go from a DC source and you go through an inverter, which is AC, so DC to AC and then you go into the battery, so go AC back to DC, you store that energy and then you want to use it and then you go DC back to AC.

00:31:27:16 - 00:31:47:12
Cameron Stewart: So you have three inversion points. And that just ruins your efficiency. So at the end of the day like I know that's like efficiency this efficiency that conversions whatever, at the end of the day, what it means to the homeowner, to the system owner, to the third party owner is it's more energy that is being used by the home.

00:31:47:15 - 00:32:12:06
Matt Power: I love that. So one of the things that's a trend that's happening in the southeast now where I live is, is that people are more interested than ever in your direct use of solar energy in their homes, rather, because honestly, the utilities are terrible down here. And they they basically they either give you scratch for it or, you know, essentially what what kills you is more than half your bill are the service costs that you pay to the utility.

00:32:12:06 - 00:32:31:11
Matt Power: So I actually think there's going to be a move towards more as soon as it's, you know, as soon as it seems safe. Right. As soon as it seems doable towards going off grid, even in suburban areas. So I think it's really interesting that you guys are on top of that, you know, put the power back into your house immediately where you can use it.

00:32:31:14 - 00:32:34:05
Matt Power: It's sort of ahead of the curve a little bit. So that's great.

00:32:34:06 - 00:32:35:04
Cameron Stewart: Absolutely.

00:32:35:06 - 00:32:49:24
Matt Power: I love my mike. I mean, a lot, you know, go ahead. So I might Mike just let me go on. We have a lot of audience questions sitting there. So why don't we why don't we take like 2 or 3 questions right now from Mike. Just pick pick a couple good ones and, let's let's roll with those.

00:32:49:27 - 00:33:15:08
Mike Collignon: Sure. No problem at all. Yeah, a ton of interest, guys. So this is really cool. So, from a marketing perspective, let's talk about a marketing perspective. So we've got Luke with us, and he's a solar installer. And his he and his company have started offering complete electrical wiring for home builders. They thought it was a great opportunity to basically electrify the home and to offer solar battery storage.

00:33:15:11 - 00:33:32:16
Mike Collignon: The home builders hesitant, not just because of roof warranty issues, but also home builder doesn't really understand the value and the appeal to the home owner. So Luke's wondering, do you have any pamphlets, brochures, any kind of, marketing pieces that might help ease the worries of home builders?

00:33:32:19 - 00:33:36:21
Matt Power: Good. At good point. Yeah. If you don't, we can help you make some.

00:33:36:24 - 00:33:37:17
Cameron Stewart: Yeah.

00:33:37:20 - 00:33:57:13
Jim Westover: Yeah, that's a great point. And we can follow up with the audience afterwards with some of those, some of those things. Typically we rely on our finance partners for that. So, you know, most people either finance a system either directly or roll it into a, a leasing or a power purchase agreement. And oftentimes with those finance products, there's no out of pocket, no upfront payment.

00:33:57:13 - 00:34:12:16
Jim Westover: So if the if the customer is going to pay $0.20 a kilowatt hour from utility power, we have a lot of partners. I can say, great. You sign a contract with us, you'll pay $0.14. And, so you can save money day one. You don't have to worry about any of the maintenance. You know, you mentioned roof leaks.

00:34:12:16 - 00:34:29:06
Jim Westover: These third party owners can actually come out and deal with with the roof leaks, should there ever be one. I would say they're minimal at best. But yeah. And then if there's any sort of service that needs to happen, they can handle it. If the customer wants to upgrade, they can handle that as well. Typically there's an override for the builders.

00:34:29:06 - 00:34:41:14
Jim Westover: So you know, by engaging with these folks, you know, you can essentially offer solar without having to handle the financial hassle or the service hassle or, you know, whatever the perceived hurdle may be. Yeah.

00:34:41:17 - 00:34:48:29
Matt Power: I mean, just to throw that, Bob just asked, are you installing in all states? You just quickly answer that one. Yeah. Yep.

00:34:49:01 - 00:34:59:15
Jim Westover: Yeah. We have we have installations in every state, and we're actually have people in 33 countries, and we have installations in 110 countries. So we're definitely global. But yes, we're in all 30, all 50 states.

00:34:59:17 - 00:35:01:00
Matt Power: All right, Mike, back over to you.

00:35:01:03 - 00:35:24:26
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Jim, you mentioned, power purchase agreements. And Rosalie sent in a question along those lines. So I wanted to go ahead and address that. So Rosalie is developing a tiny home community that will produce 35% excess power. How difficult is it to wrap a PPA around that? And she's looking specifically with to partner with Envy Energy, which is a good friend of Green Builder Media.

00:35:25:01 - 00:35:31:26
Mike Collignon: But, you can do retail in all states. So how difficult is it to wrap a PPA around something like that?

00:35:31:29 - 00:35:52:08
Jim Westover: It's a great question. So Solar Edge, is one of the leaders in distributed power plants. So it's essentially batteries on site that the utilities can call on. And the utilities typically pay a customer for, for access to that energy. So I live here in Utah. Rocky Mountain Power has a program that pays between 2 and $3000 per battery.

00:35:52:10 - 00:36:14:08
Jim Westover: And they're doing exactly what you're talking about. So solar energy during the day oftentimes isn't worth as much as solar energy around 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., because, you know, during the day there's a lot of utility scale solar, you name it, there's maybe a lot not a lot of load on the grid. People aren't home run in their air conditioners and stuff, so the utility can essentially pay a customer to be ready with that battery energy when they need it.

00:36:14:16 - 00:36:25:22
Jim Westover: They call on it, the customer makes money. So some of that 35% excess can be stored in a battery that has incentives. And, just about every PPA provider we work with offers a similar program.

00:36:25:25 - 00:36:26:20
Matt Power: I. Oh, yes.

00:36:26:22 - 00:36:49:09
Mike Collignon: Okay. Let me go to two more math and I'll take it back to you for more discussion. So, net and I, I had a question. He's, attending from Long Island here, and, utilities have switched to the time of day rates. That's really interesting for those who have residential solar. But those, especially those that have battery storage options.

00:36:49:11 - 00:37:06:08
Mike Collignon: However, what he's seeing is there's community pushback about fire risk with the battery storage in dense neighborhoods. So any information you have on either new safety upgrades or any kind of issues with fire risk, do you have anything on that?

00:37:06:10 - 00:37:27:19
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. I can take this one. So first and foremost, as Jim had mentioned earlier, safety is really what Solaredge founded its core technology on is making sure we have the safest products possible. I sit on a lot of UL making, your committees and code making panels where we basically discuss how to make sure that the batteries are safe.

00:37:27:20 - 00:37:49:27
Cameron Stewart: There's a test that we call a certification that is called UL 9540. And within that certification, there's a test called You all 9548. And basically we set a battery on fire to see what happens. And if, that kind of thing interests you, I recommend you, try to become a UL committee member. But anyway, I digress.

00:37:49:29 - 00:38:12:11
Cameron Stewart: The point of the test is to make sure that it's safe. So Solaredge uses lithium ion phosphate and the Nexus solution. It's a energy dense battery that is also very safe. So that is we wrap that around three core safety features. Number one is we have a feature that we call thermo shield where there's insulated barriers between every single cell.

00:38:12:11 - 00:38:34:20
Cameron Stewart: So if if a cell were to ever go into thermal runaway, it's it's near impossible for it to transmit that heat to an adjacent cell. So there's no way that can happen. The second thing we do is there's a basically a battery optimizer and every single battery block. So we can see the state of health of every single battery.

00:38:34:22 - 00:39:04:29
Cameron Stewart: And the last thing we do is that really robust aluminum enclosure protecting the entire solution. And part of your 9540 a test is to make sure that when if something does happen, how do you how do you dissipate the heat or the flames? Solaredge. Are you only 548 test report was very favorable. What that means is no flames exited the battery when we were able to, cause the cell to go into thermal runaway.

00:39:05:01 - 00:39:30:02
Cameron Stewart: We were not able to get any cells adjacent to burn. And so we have, what we call reduced spacing, which means we're allowed to stack batteries very closely. So without this reduced spacing, you'd have to keep batteries very far apart. And there's restrictions on where you could put them in a home. The short answer is you're never allowed to put a battery inside of a habitable space.

00:39:30:05 - 00:39:46:19
Cameron Stewart: So it's got to go in the garage or on the outside of the home. And with, homes that are very close adjacent to one another. Our design and other battery manufacturers also design the batteries to make sure that there's no heat, getting out of that battery as.

00:39:46:26 - 00:39:52:05
Matt Power: Those weatherproof assemblies, it's like if they want to put them outside, they can Mount Maria.

00:39:52:07 - 00:39:56:22
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. Nema three are so again flood, flood 18.

00:39:56:24 - 00:40:29:03
Matt Power: I was going to mention, you know, I think where this question may have come from is, you know, social media again, but there's a lot of stuff on social media about especially e-bikes and stuff with lithium batteries, but I don't think they're regulated especially closely. And if you want to go because they're horrifying, right. With batteries blowing up, one thing I would say, from builder's perspective to I was just at the builder show, you know, like in my garage, I'm installing some, fireproof paint or fire resistant panels just to be safe because I have e-bikes and I have, you know, other stuff like that.

00:40:29:10 - 00:40:52:10
Matt Power: And an electric vehicle would, you know, could be a risk. And honestly, I feel like those are going to be a much higher risk than a wall mounted or a floor mounted, you know, whole house system. It's the rogue stuff that you got to worry about. But there are like like I think it's called fire point. You might want to look up, but you can just basically slap it up on your wall and it gives you like another hour of fire rating.

00:40:52:17 - 00:41:00:05
Matt Power: Yeah. So there's ways to preemptively, you know, if you're concerned to protect yourself from from the unknowns. Yeah. Yeah.

00:41:00:06 - 00:41:19:20
Cameron Stewart: You can harden your home like there's a, an example that I did where I put all my soffits underneath my eaves. I used Hardie board there to again, fireproof my home because I live in California. Additionally you could put Hardie board on the wall. There's other things you can do to make it, more robust. And there's an interesting website.

00:41:19:20 - 00:41:35:13
Cameron Stewart: It's a UL website that identifies all the battery fires that have ever existed, been reported and where they came from, what they were started by and to date, knock on wood, not a single battery that was has you all 9540 has caused a structural fire.

00:41:35:13 - 00:41:40:07
Matt Power: That's good, that's good. Now that's a great, great point. Why don't we take one more question, Mike? You go.

00:41:40:08 - 00:42:03:27
Mike Collignon: Yeah, yeah, we'll take one more, then we'll come back to you. Don't worry. There's other questions coming in. We'll try and get all those to. So a question for our good friend les out in Nevada. With some utilities now adding demand charges to residential service, are there controls to prevent high loads from running simultaneously over, like a 15 minute period?

00:42:03:29 - 00:42:26:15
Jim Westover: Yes. Yeah. So just a demand charge algorithm that can essentially follow the, you know, the load of your home and you can preprogram that, hey, I don't want my home to ever go above, you know, this peak, we have, current transformers that are actually built into the Islander device that Cameron talked about. So there's no external seats required in terms of wire runs and bridges that I get the polarity right and all that.

00:42:26:17 - 00:42:37:12
Jim Westover: So based on that, we know what the load of the home is, what the solar production is doing, the energy state of the battery. And we can manage all that to make sure we can mitigate, demand charges.

00:42:37:14 - 00:42:57:10
Matt Power: Are you guys I'm sure you're aware of, you know, the rise of smart panels, right? Like the span system I think Siemens has, there's other companies, so, just clarify for me, because I'm not I'm a little, you know, fuzzy on it, too, is where does the inverter stop and the smart panel begin, right. What? Which things does a smart panel do?

00:42:57:10 - 00:43:00:14
Matt Power: Maybe that an inverter doesn't and vice versa.

00:43:00:17 - 00:43:22:07
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. So an inverter just provides energy to all of the home loads. Right. And the smart panel will tell you, will control those loads on, on and on and off behavior as to what to do with that energy. For example, if you're using a lot of energy and you don't want to hit your demand charge, they'll just start turning off appliances, right?

00:43:22:07 - 00:43:48:03
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. And as a homeowner, I don't want to be in the middle of like, make making dinner or whatever and just have like my electrical range turn off, like, I need this on. I'm making dinner right. So the difference here, it's more applicable smart panels like if you can provide excess energy. So when you're producing more energy than what your home is consuming, maybe you actually want to turn on some LEDs.

00:43:48:11 - 00:44:05:05
Cameron Stewart: Maybe you want to turn on your air conditioner and cool your house a little bit colder and use your house as a thermal battery, right? So those are the types of things that smart panels do that an inverter doesn't. And of course, we work with those smart devices to make sure that the customer has the best experience. Right.

00:44:05:05 - 00:44:20:18
Matt Power: So it's sort of the smart panel is really more about, you know, prioritizing and maybe, you know, it's going to allocate. So many watts to your EV charging at this time of day. And, you know, that's getting down into more into the details of of how the power is used and that sort of. Yeah, yeah.

00:44:20:21 - 00:44:37:24
Cameron Stewart: I think it's smart panels are going to be more common as we go forward, especially with the 2023 NDC, which requires load control and energy management systems. To for shutting down loads. When you go into backup when you have a standalone system.

00:44:37:29 - 00:44:58:07
Matt Power: Right. Because I mean, to be honest, we've been covering them since the the inception of smart panels. And one of the things they've struggled with is trying to convince builders that a house needs a smart panel. Right. And honestly, I think things like electric vehicles are, you know, really turning their heads around where they're going, oh, if I don't do this electric vehicle, I've got to come up with some.

00:44:58:09 - 00:45:18:22
Matt Power: If I don't do a smart panel here, I gotta put another panel in or come up with another solution. So I think you, like you said, and with the code changes, they're starting to move more into the mainstream. Yeah. And that might be good. Honestly, in terms of working with the inverters, I think. Yeah, all of that increases flexibility.

00:45:18:24 - 00:45:40:08
Matt Power: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I just want one other note I had was to talk about, your cloud connected platform a little bit. Right. And I had some, I had some notes on about, you know, energy flow visualization. And we talked a little bit about, like, you can see where you know which panels are producing and that kind of thing.

00:45:40:11 - 00:46:06:13
Matt Power: What, what how might the, builder benefit from this sort of heads up display even during, you know, installation and commissioning and even afterwards where they want to go back and check, you know, how how does that benefit sort of the, the tradesmen or the builder who just wants to make sure everything was done right, and it's working properly.

00:46:06:16 - 00:46:27:25
Jim Westover: Yeah. So it's really just visibility into the system. There's cloud communication on site either via cellular. So it's own network. You know, or you can connect it to a Wi-Fi. A builder can essentially have like an admin account and see their entire fleet, and maybe promote, you know, use that to, to market the, you know, what the builders doing.

00:46:27:25 - 00:46:44:22
Jim Westover: This is how many customers we have. This is their aggregated energy. This is how much savings we've driven. And then, you know, oftentimes the customer will say, hey, my, my, you know, solar system isn't producing as much as I thought, what's going on? You know, you can log in and see. Well, geez, your demand's actually increased, you know, 10%, 20%.

00:46:44:22 - 00:46:59:26
Jim Westover: Did you get an EV or, you know, as grandma now moved in and she's got the, you know, the air conditioner running all the time, or did you get a hot tub and and so that type of stuff just really gives you visibility into what the, what the home is doing. And then if there ever is an issue of any kind, you have, you know, immediate visibility.

00:47:00:00 - 00:47:13:29
Jim Westover: The cloud actually can send alerts as well. Like, hey, this panel hasn't reported in a bit. Maybe it got hit by a golf ball and needs to be replaced. So it's basically just almost think of it as like the security system you set up for your house. That's for your own system.

00:47:14:01 - 00:47:27:12
Matt Power: Yeah. That makes that makes a lot of sense. Mike, let's, let's I think we're we're we're about to run out of time here, so let's make sure we get 2 or 3 more questions. I know we had made a lot of questions. I want to make sure people feel like they got stuff answered.

00:47:27:15 - 00:47:52:05
Mike Collignon: Oh, definitely. And, you know, like I said in the chat, don't hesitate to send in questions if we don't get to all of them live. And we probably won't. We'll share those with both Cameron and Jim's for for private follow up. So, okay, let's hit this one. Ryan had a question. Are all the loads in home able to be dynamically turned on and off, or only selected loads?

00:47:52:08 - 00:48:27:16
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So if you have a smart panel like, span panel or something like that, then yeah, you can dynamically control all of those loads. There's less, sophisticated devices that are just like on or off. And that is most commonly what I see. But, the inverter will dynamically respond to what the, what the programed behavior is for example, I'll give you a very simple one maximize self consumption, which is if there's a battery attached, the home uses whatever energy they use.

00:48:27:17 - 00:48:50:28
Cameron Stewart: Excess solar energy charges the battery when the battery's full excess solar energy cells to the grid. When the sun starts to go down and there's not enough solar energy to power the house, we start discharging the battery and that matches whatever the house is is consuming. So that would be a dynamic mode of operation. And that'll carry you through to the next day where you get to rinse and repeat.

00:48:51:01 - 00:49:06:09
Matt Power: So I'm thinking through like you get a basic system, right? Get the Nexus, you just get the one battery you know, you got, you get four kilowatt hours and you want it just for your power backup, right? To run and say, we're going to run a refrigerator and, and a propane furnace. You're what you're going to do when that power goes out.

00:49:06:09 - 00:49:17:25
Matt Power: You probably if you assuming you don't have a smart panel, you're just going to basically turn on those two circuits on your panel manually and that'll be all that you're running essentially, right?

00:49:17:27 - 00:49:40:14
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So the, the all the there's. Yeah. So you could do it two ways. You could leave everything on the same backup panel, the main panel, the main distribution panel. And we could backup that entire panel with a single battery, but the homeowner would be right. Like if they're trying to run everything, the inverter is going to give them a warning that says, hey, you're trying to use too much power.

00:49:40:20 - 00:50:03:21
Cameron Stewart: You need to reduce your power. And the inverter has a unique feature where if the homeowner is using too much power, we very quickly abrupt power and then restore it, which turns off a lot of your loads like your microwave is a great example of if you're right, is running and experiences a power outage. It turns off and then stays off and requires human intervention to turn back on.

00:50:03:28 - 00:50:14:11
Matt Power: So we do that. But how does it do that? Like how is it sensing the microwave circuit, if you know what I mean? Is it kicking that circuit off on the panel or how does that work?

00:50:14:14 - 00:50:33:08
Cameron Stewart: There's a device that we call the Islander, the Nexus Islander, and that is installed behind the meter. And in that device, there is two current transformers that are measuring the current and voltage on the panel or anything that is downstream that it's protecting. And that is how we determine how much energy to.

00:50:33:08 - 00:50:41:00
Matt Power: Sort of like, it's very similar to like the way they do the leak detection with algorithms kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Technology, but the same idea. Yeah.

00:50:41:02 - 00:50:43:08
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. Same idea. Yeah.

00:50:43:10 - 00:50:55:13
Mike Collignon: For our friend. Eric's got a question. I think this is probably for Jim. He was looking for the five kW battery on the Solar Edge website. Is that something that's coming soon?

00:50:55:16 - 00:51:18:23
Jim Westover: Yeah. So we listed it as a 4.9kW of usable energy. Sorry, kilowatt hours of usable energy. We are going to have a variant that's going to be A02 part number. That is the true five kilowatt hour variant for customers in California. So you can get the GA 12 certification under title 24. There's a chance that we may just launch the zero one as a five kilowatt hour.

00:51:19:00 - 00:51:28:14
Jim Westover: Our R&D is trying to work on how we can either extract five kilowatt hours out of every unit, or have a special unit for new home builders who need the true five kilowatt hours to get the incentive.

00:51:28:16 - 00:51:36:18
Matt Power: And yeah, and just to remind, the viewers, you said June, July, you know, stuff will actually be available, right?

00:51:36:20 - 00:51:53:20
Jim Westover: Correct. Yep. And the goal is to have that unit available for new home builders. The folks we spoke with about this so far are very excited about it and very much pushing for that. We had an executive QBR yesterday. It was a topic on it, and confirmed that it's going to be available for launch for.

00:51:53:22 - 00:51:54:19
Matt Power: All right. Let's take another one.

00:51:54:25 - 00:52:10:05
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Bill, to know if, if you've got things available for commercial or multifamily projects and if so, can you clarify what are the key dates for earning investment tax credits for solar?

00:52:10:07 - 00:52:32:16
Jim Westover: Maybe I'll speak to it a little bit. Cam. And you could back me up on the technical side. So yes, right now we have, units installed in multifamily locations. Emily and Michelle from our marketing team are on. They can put some application notes and marketing stuff about how we've deployed this. We've got projects with, you know, four and 500 batteries of our existing batteries working on multifamily sites.

00:52:32:19 - 00:52:52:17
Jim Westover: We can, you know, use them a single phase if you have single phase meters for, you know, specific units. And then they also work in A20 eight volt, three phase configuration. Not for backup, but for energy arbitrage. And so, yes, we actually have a lot of interest and deployments of that with our existing strategy Nexus should be even more because of its modularity.

00:52:52:19 - 00:53:13:17
Jim Westover: The second piece was the tax credits. So, the old triple B that happened last summer, got rid of the tax credits for consumers. So if you just want to buy a solar system and install it, you can no longer get the investment tax credit. But they kept them live for a commercial, folks. And so, you know, a Sunrun, a good leap.

00:53:13:17 - 00:53:38:04
Jim Westover: Every bright light reach all the different third party ownership structures out there. They have commercial operations they can take advantage of not only the 30% investment tax great credit, another 10% bonus tax credit. Because our stuff is now made in the US. We've offshored nearly 3000 jobs, hard working Americans that are now making our, inverters, optimizers and batteries in Texas, Florida and Utah.

00:53:38:07 - 00:53:50:25
Jim Westover: And then you can even get an extra 10%. So 50% off price tag if it's an energy community. And we're happy to put you in touch with anybody who can help you, take advantage of those tax credits.

00:53:50:27 - 00:54:06:17
Matt Power: Somebody was asking about the mounting. I know I mentioned mounting systems for the batteries. Maybe Michelle or Emily, if you have a, like, a photo or, or a link to some place where you just stick it in the chat, maybe, people can go and see what the mounting system looks like.

00:54:06:19 - 00:54:10:22
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So, yeah, just two options. One is for mounted and the other is wall mounted.

00:54:10:22 - 00:54:24:24
Matt Power: So they're and they're just some bracket basically a bracket system. Yeah. Yeah. Now you do it. I suppose you could do if you wanted to or some kind of rolling rack. Or does it have to be. Not that you'd be able to roll very far, but you could do whatever you want it basically. Yeah.

00:54:24:24 - 00:54:37:04
Cameron Stewart: I guess in theory, like if you are going to get an, I'm going to say round in my lab, yes, I would do something like that. But, in my own home, my batteries are mounted on the ground. Okay.

00:54:37:06 - 00:54:44:20
Matt Power: Yeah. All right, let's see. We right. We're at, 265. We got a probably time for maybe two, maybe three more questions.

00:54:44:23 - 00:54:56:16
Mike Collignon: That's fine. Yeah, I got plenty of them. So we talked before about commissioning time. But Ryan was wanting to know, how does the new stacked design affect installation times?

00:54:56:18 - 00:55:26:02
Cameron Stewart: Oh, yeah, man. Installation time. So here's here's the big question that everyone has when you have a giant monolithic battery, a giant battery, the conventional thought is I can move this battery into position and boom, it's done. All I have to do is connect my wires. And it's great. With a modular approach, there's always concern about, okay, I have to now stack each module in place and then connect the wires and then it takes longer.

00:55:26:04 - 00:55:50:04
Cameron Stewart: The Solaredge nexus system has what we call simple click architecture. And basically the batteries click into place with a mechanical connection. And there's a quick connector between the battery blocks in the inverter and the link and all those things. And so not only is it making your electrical connections, it's making your communication connections as well. So just the act of stacking a battery completes all of your wiring.

00:55:50:05 - 00:56:06:04
Cameron Stewart: All the wiring is internal. You don't have to do anything, to bolster the installation. So once you get your first battery in place, you click, click, click, click all of the next pieces into place bolted to the wall, and then you're ready for wiring.

00:56:06:07 - 00:56:12:22
Matt Power: I'll turn that so it's the same drop in. You got one battery drop two more on like Lego blocks. That's like right. Yep.

00:56:12:24 - 00:56:15:04
Cameron Stewart: Exactly. That was our design philosophy.

00:56:15:06 - 00:56:22:06
Matt Power: What's my commissioning process at that point? What what what do I have to do to add those two batteries in?

00:56:22:08 - 00:56:45:10
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. So once you get the, so you stack, click like two batteries and then you put your link on top. The link will immediately validate that all the batteries in the stack are good. And you'll see LEDs turn on. And then you put your inverter on top and the inverter, once you get AC power right now, once you get AC power to the inverter, you scan the inverter with your phone and then you can commission the system.

00:56:45:13 - 00:56:53:27
Cameron Stewart: So it's the wizard will walk you through it. And again, best case scenario right now that I've seen is about 20 minutes. So it depends.

00:56:53:27 - 00:56:57:21
Matt Power: Like you said, it it talks you through the ways you talk. Yeah. Yeah.

00:56:57:24 - 00:56:59:24
Cameron Stewart: It's very simple. Very simple.

00:56:59:26 - 00:57:01:29
Matt Power: Yeah.

00:57:02:02 - 00:57:21:28
Mike Collignon: We see this sometimes with heat pumps, this, this kind of question on temperature. So I wanted to talk about it from the standpoint of, of solar storage. And that is, Doug's asking, can you talk a little about the efficiency related to when the outside temperatures get outside of the range of 0 to 100°F?

00:57:22:00 - 00:57:54:15
Cameron Stewart: Yeah, sure. So, as we know, batteries really, especially lithium ion batteries, really don't like cold weather. All right. As they as batteries get very cold, they're they hurt their cycle life on a chemical level. So what Solaredge has done to protect that is we have resistive heating mats installed between the, layers of cells so that way when it starts to get really cold, we can warm up the batteries with these resistive heating mats.

00:57:54:18 - 00:58:19:08
Cameron Stewart: Additionally, when a battery starts operating, when it starts charging or discharging, it's heating itself. And so the resistive heating mat turns on at a certain temperature, and then it'll, the battery will start operating. And then the battery will, maintain its own health or heat level as it's being operated. The efficiency as the battery warms up, there's definitely, a sweet spot if it gets too hot.

00:58:19:10 - 00:58:42:09
Cameron Stewart: He does a big resistor. Right. And if it gets too hot, also the efficiency starts to drop. So ideally, like if we could all live in 70 degree weather and have the most efficient system in the world, that's what we'd be doing. But, low power thresholds. Solaredge is the most efficient products available on the market just because of how we control our battery discharge behaviors.

00:58:42:12 - 00:58:51:21
Cameron Stewart: And, I'd say power and the amount of energy that your home is using is has a bigger impact on efficiency than temperature does.

00:58:51:23 - 00:59:08:20
Matt Power: So, to clarify, so that resistance mat, is that running off the AC? Is that running off the grid? You know, when you're when we've got a little bit of power flowing through, right, to keep the battery cells a little warm, or can it run cannibalize itself. Can it cannot run off the batteries.

00:59:08:22 - 00:59:21:20
Cameron Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. So we want it to be we don't want it to run exclusively off the grid. Because what if the grid goes down. Right. Right. So yes, it's using its own internal, mechanisms to turn that resistive heater on when it needs it.

00:59:21:22 - 00:59:27:04
Matt Power: But let's take, one more question. I think we've done well here, Mike. Give us a good one.

00:59:27:07 - 00:59:44:16
Mike Collignon: Yeah, I'm gonna let Cameron geek out a little bit here. So, this one's from William. He says, you know, with many devices, being DC Watts remains or what's left for homes to just be built 100% DC.

00:59:44:18 - 01:00:05:25
Cameron Stewart: I mean, that's a great question, right? And so, like, we think about everything we're using, like in my own home, you know, every single one of my devices is DC. Like my cell phone is DC, my laptop, my TV, everything we install in our home, every consumer electronic is DC. So what is stopping us from making DC homes?

01:00:05:25 - 01:00:33:14
Cameron Stewart: And really it it comes down to infrastructure. And as Americans, we have standardized on, distributed generation, where we have a big power plant somewhere and we distribute that energy all the way across the desert into or the mountains or the forests or wherever to, to our individual homes. And it's easier to send AC energy long distances than it is DC energy.

01:00:33:16 - 01:00:50:18
Cameron Stewart: And so who knows, 30 years from now we could all have our own DC power plants on our own houses. And then then it makes sense to make DC energy and have a DC home. So it's the only thing that's stopping us is our own imaginations at that point, I guess.

01:00:50:20 - 01:01:04:28
Matt Power: Well, you know, back in I remember back 25, 30 years ago when I got started, there were articles coming out about how you should you should wire your house for DC as well as AC. But yeah, not many people actually did it because it got pretty expensive fast.

01:01:05:01 - 01:01:12:18
Cameron Stewart: It was it was like those old RV outlets, like you'd see like that cigaret outlet, like just on the side of a wall. The camera, those. Yeah.

01:01:12:21 - 01:01:32:20
Matt Power: But if you look at RVs, you know, look at, you know, mobile housing, you know, a lot of them I do have dual they have AC and DC wiring they've had they have for years only they've switched over now everything's like everything's a USB port. You don't have, you know, nine volt ports anymore. So yeah, it's theoretically possible, you know.

01:01:32:22 - 01:01:45:28
Matt Power: Yeah. Yeah. Well guys, I think that was great. Mike, why don't you wrap us up and, we'll we'll let any other questions we'll will hand off to these guys and maybe they can email and communicate that way.

01:01:46:01 - 01:02:04:09
Mike Collignon: Yeah. They were only they were only just a couple of questions that we didn't get to. And I've got them down. So we'll we'll get those to, to our guests. And thank you very much. Not just to Matt for leading the discussion today, but our panelists and our audience as well. As always, you came through with wonderful questions.

01:02:04:12 - 01:02:22:18
Mike Collignon: We really do appreciate and thank you to Solaredge for their generous sponsorship of today's webinar. You know, our next webinar is going to take place in two weeks. It's going to be on March 18th. We'll be joined by our friends at Panasonic's. So we'll start at our usual time of 2 p.m. eastern time. And hey, don't forget that in most places.

01:02:22:18 - 01:02:31:19
Mike Collignon: Anyway, the clocks move forward one hour on Sunday, so don't forget to change those out until next time, stay safe, stay healthy and take care, everyone. So on.

01:02:31:21 - 01:02:33:02
Matt Power: My everybody.

01:02:33:04 - 01:02:33:16
Cameron Stewart: Thank you.