Innovations in Performance Monitoring with Faviola Angula CPS

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I haven't gone to the field in the past four years, and that that is saying something, because it's also saving money from our perspective. So it means that I don't have to go to the field anymore with a very fancy peak curator, which is that can be run, is one of the most useful pieces of information. But that says a lot that I as inverted manufacturer, I don't have to go into the field anymore with a fancy key or scope or as often, because I have all of that information from the gateways perspective.

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Today on the Clean Power Hour performance improvement of solar assets. I'm Tim Montague, your host. Check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and tell a friend about the show today. My guest is faviola angula. She is the performance improvement engineer for CPS America, the number one three phase string inverter manufacturer in America. Welcome to the show.

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Faviola,

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hi Tim. Thank you very much for having me.

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I'm very excited to finally have you on the show.

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You have many fans out there in the solar industry. I see them on LinkedIn giving you a shout out. And what you do is largely behind the scenes there in Dallas at CPS headquarters. But before we dig into performance improvement and performance monitoring, tell me and my listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to solar Sure.

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I started with CPS about six years ago. I had just graduated from my master's in electrical systems. And I was like, in that discovery journey, again, I have worked with electrical systems in the past.

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I was mostly focusing oil, gas in the industry, and then I wanted to make the switch. This is you start seeing the trends of the industry, and then also it's like, I wanted to focus on something that I would feel aligned more with my values of wanting to improve the state of the world, having wanted to do something cleaner for the planet in terms of energy. So I started interviewing some places, and then Destiny thing, I got to CPS. It was this very tiny office at the beginning, very few people, and I just loved the environment, and it was like a new challenge that I wanted to get into, because I have never gotten into much solar. I haven't read that much into it, either. So it was something very spike my curiosity, and that's how I became involved with with solar and string, the whole string in better world. Cool.

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I like to say that solar isn't rocket science, but a three phase string inverter is a pretty technical device.

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There's a lot going on there. So I look forward to learning more about flexo M, that's your performance monitoring system.

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And I guess at a high level, why don't you paint a picture for our listeners? Though, what is your job at CPS? Yeah,

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for sure, my job at CPS right now is to make sure that our customers are satisfied with the production that they get out of their units, that their system operating up to capacity, and that, of course, again, in operation within the expectations that they have. So as you mentioned, my job is a lot of behind the scenes, talking to different technicians, project engineers, on personnel, trying again to make their life as easy as they can in the whole term of the operation of the inventors, and then again, helping with as much as I can within the operation of the system as a whole. And

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you have some 10s of 1000s of projects now in the US, which means maybe hundreds of 1000s of individual inverters. That's a lot of data that's flowing into the to the network operations center there the knock in Dallas. How do you triage that information and and how proactively Are you even able to let customers know that there is a problem with their system if they are not aware of a problem,

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of course. So we are very lucky in a sense of we have projects that are working wonderfully, that haven't had an issue in years, and then we have other, other practices that have more challenges, that we have to work through the time, through some time. So what we have with our flex monitoring system is we have dedicated or real time alarms, and then that those get filtered by the priority of the alarm. So we have designated alarms that get to my email and then when I see them coming. Is why we do a reactionary mode and we go to the customer and we let them know. Hey, Disney matter is having such and such alarm, we believe that the best course of action is either let me do firmware, let me do setting adjustments, let's shut down the unit and let me send you a replacement. That is the usual curse of actions that we follow.

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And then we also, we also have customers that have understood that, yes, we are still a relatively small team. And then they have also applied what we can provide them from the flexible and portal into their or their own type of monitoring systems. And then they just send me emails if I haven't seen them already, or if I haven't let them know. So it has been like a very teams, a unification between the customers and us in terms of the monitoring and the operation of the of the projects.

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I imagine the flexo M platform is is giving you and your asset owners some kind of a green, yellow, red indicator. But why don't you walk us through how the flexo em platform handles information from the field and and then what are some of the steps that asset owners or CPS might take in response, for sure.

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So the Flex OM has or uses RS 485, data that is coming directly from the field, from the inverter itself. So what it does is that we, they see chain all of our units they go to. We have 32 inverters per flex, one. That's usually the limit. We gather data from the units using, again, RS 485, data. It's sent out into our server and then codified to be presented in the portal, as we see it daily. So we have modes of operations as any other unit.

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So we have running folded and then standby or the rated. And then we also started color coding that, just to make it easier, a little bit easier visually. And then, as you mentioned, we have 10s of sites, or 10s of 1000s of sites, which makes it hard I can I wish I have more time in the day so I can look at everybody. But what we what we do is I prioritize from customers that I know have had challenges, either by the unit perspective or by by the site conditions perspective, and then we dedicate our days into looking those until we figure out what is wrong with it, and then we can call them okay this, this case is closed. Then we can move out to the to the next the next one. We also have our hotline, which is a very good access in access in the terms of CPS, because we don't have machines answering or non technical people answering the phones. All of our technical personnel in the hotline are either engineers that are fresh out of college, or we have technicians that have had 1510, 20 years of experience. So you always, always getting someone technical. And then we also don't have, like, several layer steps of troubleshooting. We usually have only one or two levels, either they solve it at the technical level with the person in the headline, or if it's something more complicated than they just transferring to me or any other of our engineers, and then that's where you stops. That's where we usually solve the problem. So we are very happy with ourselves in the terms of we try to solve everything as fast as we can, and then we don't make our customer wait unnecessarily.

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That being said, we are also people again. We are real people. We don't have machine answering so sometimes we some things do get lost in email or in calls. So we just ask for a little bit of leniency or just patient or just a call back.

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Hey, if you haven't answered me within the day, just call me again and I will call you back.

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I think this is a very important point, that you're actually reaching a human being in real time to help you dial into whatever issue you're having, whether you're commissioning a project or trying to get a project back online. And changes is definitely differentiating itself by offering very good customer service. You have to have good technology as well. So it's a both. And I like to say so if I'm a if I'm an asset owner or developer, I'm thinking about owning and operating, ultimately, gigawatts of solar facilities. What are some of the considerations I have as an asset owner that I may not think about because I don't, I don't know all the ins and outs of of the Flex OM solution, but when you when you're talking to asset owners about flex, what are some of the selling points in your mind?

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One of the first things is going to be the capability of having control over the unit. So think about the flexor as a controller of the system. I have access to the whole Mattos mapping of the embedder, meaning that I can change all of the settings remotely. All the settings that I need remotely. I can curtail the unit. I can change the power factor. If there is any given alarm that I can actually reset remotely. I can do that remotely through too. So one of the biggest selling points of the gateway is going to be to reduce truck rolls, or at least unnecessary truck rolls. So let's say that you're an asset owner, and then you have an embedder that has faulted. You can just give me a call before sending someone to the field.

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And then I can let you know exactly what is wrong with that unit. And I can tell you, hey, the unit doesn't have AC voltage. It might be the breaker. Or hey, the unit is showing AC voltage, but then the values don't align, so you might have a lost face. Or hey, this unit is completely dead. Let me start a replacement before you even go to the site. Just wait for me to send you the replacement, and then you go there with the replacement already. So it's about minimizing the cost that the the operators have to face daily with unnecessary truck rolls.

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That is one of the biggest selling point. My second one would be the oh, sorry, go ahead. The second row would be like the type of information that you get from the gateway.

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As I mentioned, many of the monitoring systems are very focused on what is happening at the poi. But then, yes, that is, that is what is getting you, the revenue and everything. But also you have to focus into what is creating or what is compromising that revenue, which is the individual embedders. So if you have an embedder that is not behavior, behaving the way that it should be, you also want the most amount of data so you can troubleshoot that you need specifically or units. So that is another very good selling point of the game, with the type of information that you get out of it. I'm

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curious. Brian is a little famous for saying that the inverter is the is the one piece of equipment that is guaranteed to fail eventually in a solar facility if you leave it online long enough. And that's not a weakness. All inverters are going to fail. They're doing this heavy lifting. I like to say they're the heart of a solar array. But when you think about ways that CPS is facilitating greater value, right? You talked about reducing truck rolls.

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Okay? I I saw recently that the average truck roll is costing at least $1,000 so that's real money. When a company rolls a truck, and if they're doing it in out of necessity, that's great, right? If they're able to do something and solve a problem. But if they're, if it's a false alarm, or, as you said, the inverter is already failed, they might be rolling a truck for no reason until they have a replacement part. But what else is, is CPS doing, from a technical perspective, with Flex that our listeners would be keen to know, because I think there are many listeners here who aren't necessarily O and M managers or technicians.

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Certainly they're, they're among my audience. But for for others, what else, from a technical perspective, is unique about flex. Let

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me talk putting into this perspective. When I started on CPS, I will have I was traveling probably once a month or so, doing troubleshooting in the field, going with my scope, with my P, Q meter, with my meters, to look into the unit physically in the field. And that will occur once, once or twice a month, once we were able to, like, fully develop the flex to its what we believe is a full capability right now, I haven't gone to the field in the past four years, and that that is saying something, because it's also saving money from our perspective. So it means that I don't have to go to the field anymore with a very fancy PQ meter, which is that can be run, is one of the most useful pieces of information. But that says a lot that I, as an inverter manufacturer, I don't have to go into the field anymore with a fancy PQ or scope or as often, because I have all of that information from the Gateway's perspective, and that has been one of the biggest breaking bodies for us. Like all of the information that I need I can get from there, all of the data that I will gather from any other fancy machine, I will get from my Flex like in my day to day, there are elevated issues or more complicated problems that do require a more sophisticated piece of equipment, like a peak emitter, but that hasn't been my day to day since four years ago, and again, that that's saying something another. Another anecdote that I have is so a couple years ago, whenever you were doing a witness test or pre, pre commissioning or CO commissioning with the utility, many of the utilities, we want to see the settings that were included into the unit, and then that will mean that you will have to do an inspection in the field. And oftentimes, I don't really know why, but inspections are done either in a very hot weather in very cold weather, so people is not in their best mood at that point. And so what we have found is that we can do inspections remotely as well. So I will talk to to the EPCs or to the installers, and then to the utility, and let's get into a single meeting. Let's get into a teams meeting. Let me share my screen. Let me show you what I can do remotely. Let me show you all of the settings of the embedded remotely. And I can do it from the comfort of my office, and then their cars, their office or whatever, and they don't have to walk the field anymore. And we build like that, trust of okay, if you if we find anything remotely within the settings of the Union, I tell them, Okay, let's take a let's take a second. Let me broadcast all of the settings to all of them. Better studies fixed in a second. So that is something that we have been able to create with different utilities across the country, and they love it, because, again, no one, no one wants to be in the middle of the snow or very hot weather, inspecting embedders With installers that might not know all of the insights of the unit. So they might have to go back and forth, looking settings. So now they don't have to do that. They have me doing it remotely, because I know where everything on the matter is, so I don't have to go back and forth. We can just see through it a couple minutes, and then everybody goes about their day to finish witness test or whatever they have to do.

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I think about how variable conditions are in the field as well, on a daily basis, right? Some days are cold, some days are hot, some days are wet, some days are cloudy, some are sunny and and so the inverter is doing this constant ramping up and ramping down, and then it has to discern from all that information whether or not the inverter is functioning properly, and then convey that to the knock and Deuce with 1000s and 1000s of strings worth of information, the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, the maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gig Watts shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 25 to 275 kW their flagship inverter, the CPS 252 75 is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts.

00:17:13.588 --> 00:17:40.680
The 252 75 pairs well with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to Chintpowersystems.com. To find out more. I'm I'm just curious, like, how have you seen chint's ability to to a, read the data accurately and then B, how does that work in terms of getting the data to the knock and then processing that information for sure.

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So I have had multiple instances where a system, let's say, losses a phase, and then, depending upon the conditions of the transformer and the project, whenever you lose a phase, you might not see it from the voltage perspective. So your voltage might be completely fine, or looked completely fine.

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And then you have owners telling you hey, or I have had owners telling Hey, Fabiola, all of my inverters are damaged. None of them are coming online. Is what is going on? I have AC voltage check that. And then it takes me going into let me take a second, let me go and check the harmonic distortion of the unit. And then you will see that the voltage harmonic distortion is extremely high. And then you will say, okay, then this means that you have a lost phase. Yes, you might see all of your voltage because it's being regenerated by something else, but you still have a problem that you have to address.

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When you say a lost phase, you mean from the grid, or from the grid

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perspective, I

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see, yeah.

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So then it takes them going to the field and say, I Oh, huh, yeah, I did have my one of my fuses was blown, or I had a x and y issue with my transformer that I couldn't see before. And again, it's like, from the surface level, everything was fine, but then you have to go, you have to look deeper. You also is using a like, a little bit of logic.

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It's okay, not all the inverters in a project, again, because these are string embedders. Yes, they interact within each other.

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But there are also individual machines. So the probability of their all of them faulting at the same time for the exact same reason is very little. So we have to look below the surface to see what could be happening to all of the genes where they are responding. So the loss of phase sample is very good, because, again, it's like everything in the surface level looks fine, so you have to go deeper using the NOx center. Is okay. I have my my data, data analyst, take a look to all the distortion within the units, all the noise. And then they let me know, hey, 1212, for the harmonic distortion, shoot very high, and then they better fold it. Okay. That means that there's something happening to the system at that time, and that's how it usually responds to these problems. Sometimes is, hey, my inverter is not operating, but then everything is fine. It's just giving me something like an isolation error. So then it's going us using the flex gateway to take a look at the actual isolation.

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Reading that is coming out of the unit, and then I can tell customers, Hey, your detection value is too low or is too high, or we're having noon, noon stripping. Let's change values here and there is an extremely useful tool. And

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what are some of the other common problems that asset owners might either really have or think they have? What are some of the common presenting problems that you're dealing with on a daily basis.

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One of the most common issues that we have in having lately is because, as we are moving forward into IEEE, 1547, 2018, requirements, you have more controllers involved into the smart response of the better. So you have controls like ball bar control, frequency, watts control, ball Watts control and then you have to make sure that all of those are interacting within each other, and that they are not creating problems for each other. For example, I have a lot of customers that come in and tell me, Hey, I'm seeing a reduced output and by embedders, but then they are not aware that the utility ask them to have bull bar enable, and then their voltage is writing too high, so the inverter has to compensate more reactive power, so they start losing active power. And then it takes me telling them, okay, let's, let's look into our auctions. Can I enable, enable the headroom capacity of the unit? Because one good thing that CPS inverters have is like we offer that for some of our units, we offer that headroom capacity. For example, in a 125 we can take it from 125 Kba to 132 Kba. So that gives you that headroom if you have to open, or if you have to give more compensation into the field, and you open that headroom capacity, and you don't compromise active power, at least so fast we can, of course, we can only go so far, but again, it's give you more room into not losing your actual generation. Interesting,

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I don't really understand that that headroom factor. Why is that important to have that headroom?

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It is very important because, again, especially with the way that the utilities and the way that the lines are behaving right now you have more unbalanced loads or capacity banks, of many factors that are going to influence the line behavior as it relates to solar. So whatever one thing that utilities are doing right now is they're real, realizing that, yes, inverters can compensate a lot of reactive power, so they're using that to their advantage. Point of let me not like adjust or fix some of the problems that I have in my mind, but let me have the Solar System compensate with that reactive power. So again, it's like we can only compensate so far before you start losing active power, but then giving you that room capacity, it allows you to provide more compensation into degree, without losing your active power, which is at the head, what is going to give you money or generation. So for putting into simple, for example, in a 60 kilowatt, whenever you have the embedded set to 60 kilowatt, 60 Kba, and then you have a utility that is requesting a power factor of 95 then at some point you are going to compromise active power generation, because you have to get those bars from somewhere.

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So when I said, Okay, let's take the embedder from 60 Kba to 66 Kba, then I'm telling the the owner that I can compensate that extra k bar without compromising their active tower production.

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So it's a very good function to have so you don't lose unnecessary active power generation.

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Okay, when it comes to performance engineering or security, are there other features about flex that you'd like to highlight

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for sure? Again, as we have mentioned before, it's like it gives me a wide variety of information pertaining to the unit. But then again, it's also in terms of security. Let's say that you you see something, or let's say that the utility keeps you. Make a better example, so you don't have a power a power management controller, so you don't have anything to curtail the active power if whatever something happens into the grid side. So you can call us, if we have the flex gateway, and say, hey, the utility have requested me to shut down my power or curtail my production by X amount. But I don't have someone to go into the field until tomorrow, so I can go in remotely and then curtail the capacity of the unit, or simply shut down the units until you can get something someone into the field to do whatever you need to do per the utility request against in other in terms of cyber security and stuff, is we have our the protection levels of each system. So we have the admin of the system. But then again, within our admin of the system, we also divide it in between people. For example, I have my own dedicated login, same as everybody else in the company, and then same as everybody else that we give access. And the way that we do the reason that we do that is because we have something that we call the audit log. Basically whenever we go into the portal and check. That audit log, we can see any change that have been made by anybody in the lifetime of that project. If I made a change, it's going to be recorded at that audit log. So it also creates, again, accountability and responsibility from our sides.

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We never do certain changes or firmware changes without previous authorization from the customer. So it's also a way of our way of protecting ourselves in some way of, if there is confusion of what happened to a unit, we can come back into that lock and say, Hey, these are all the changes that have been performed into the embedding, the lifetime of the unit. This was done or this wasn't done. So it's a good again function for the both the owner and ourselves as

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commercial solar grows, these projects commercial and small utility and now utility, they're getting bigger.

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The inverters are getting bigger. The projects are more complex. How do you see flexo M's architecture evolving to meet those future demands?

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Let me tell you that the flex o ms is right now, is a, is a very, is a very tiny piece of equipment, but it's so complex in what it is, we have to move with the industry as it relates, for example, we we have to compete. So there are other new requirements, okay, check the map was help on my system.

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So having the ability of actually detecting the amount of times that the data wasn't pulled correctly, or that the system didn't respond and respond as as expected. Or, for example, you also have other expectations from utilities now where they want to have control into the system. So you're basically adding their controller, the flex gateway, and then the embedders, or whatever other thing that you have in the middle. So whenever you have so many controllers into the system, you also have to create a sequence of response, and then the Flex OM, or any other system that, or a SCADA, or whatever that you have, has to be able to respond up to the expectation of the the master controller, basically developing the gateway. I think we are, we are still on track to come up with more solutions to be able to respond to new controllers that are coming out into the field and then their necessity for bandwidth or response.

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I'd like to circle back to something you said early on you you were new to the solar industry. I think when you went to work at Chint, right? And here you are, six years later, still at Chint. What? What should others know about that?

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Like the culture that Brian and other leaders at Chint are creating,

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for sure, it's like seeing it, seeing it myself, the way that the job marking has been evolving lately. You don't see that many people that stays within a company for so long, so that has to represent something from my side is, is that sense of like collaboration, that we get within each other and then trust that we that we form within each other. I love my co workers. And then again, we that sense of being able to express yourself or say whatever that you need to say to them. It that says something that that is important. And again, it's like Brian has done an excellent job, or cultivating that culture of being able to speak up, being able whenever you believe that there's not something that is not flowing the way that should be flowing is, hey, let me know.

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Tell me, having that open dialog and not creating unnecessary walls has been something amazing for us. And then again, that thing of being able to just collaborate, laugh, talk, being able to express yourself, and then, but also have the responsibility that you have someone backing, backing you up, that if I'm in a meeting and then someone is being disrespectful, or something like that, then I'm going to have one of my co workers or something come back, or have my back. That is not something that you get all the time. So it speaks volumes about the culture that we have here.

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Another very unique thing that Chint does is you host an annual Innovation Day at your HQ there in Dallas.

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What could an asset owner, an engineer, a developer or an EPC look forward to learning at Innovation Day, which is April 2, you can reach out to the team at events at CPS America and but, yeah, I'm curious what you think is the benefit of customers coming to you guys on site for that day? It's a very it's a very fun event.

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It is a very fun event. I think that the biggest takeaway that customers have is, again, that we are real people and that we are knowledgeable in what we do that we are not knowledgeable engineers that work every day with their products, with our products, to understand and improve that we are not perfect, but we are working every day towards being better. When you come here, you can see our love. You can see all of the investment that we have put, not only monetarily, but also in time to have the better, the best. Agreement that we can the best troubleshooting that we can provide. So that that is the takeaway that customers can get when they come here, that they can see the Nook center that we created, the people that we have working in there. So it's just having to take away of the people that we have here, and then what we have created to provide the best product that we can that

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email, again, is events at Chintpower.com the website is chintpowersystems.com and you can just email that email address to see if there's any room. I know that it is largely sold out at this time, but maybe there's a few seats left. Fabiola, I want to thank you for coming on the show. How can our listeners reach out to you? Yeah,

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you can reach me out at my email is Fabiola.angola@chintpower.com or through my phone number that has been highly exposed, exposed from everybody has it. So, yeah, but it gave me grace. If you send me an email or send me a text, I will reply to you. I take a lot of pride of I replay everything. Just give me a little bit of time.

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Check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. Tell a friend about the show, and please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. I want to thank Fabiola, angula, the performance improvement engineer for CPS America, for coming on the show today. Let's grow solar.

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Thank you. Tim bye.

Innovations in Performance Monitoring with Faviola Angula CPS | EP244

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