Insights on Solar Racking and Technical Due Diligence with Azimuth Advisory Services

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Yeah. So oftentimes, you know, extreme events come through, and then the system doesn't perform the way it was intended. And the asset owner wants to know what went wrong. The insurance company wants to know what went wrong, so they'll send racking experts like Chris and I out, and we will walk the site and look for forensic evidence that points to the failure modes that ultimately led to what is often catastrophic destruction when it comes to hurricanes. So

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are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization?

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today on the Clean Power Hour extreme weather and technical due diligence that you can do on solar products, solar projects. I'm Tim Montague, check out all of our content at Clean Power hour.com. My guest today is Frank Oudheusden and Chris Needham, they are the principles of azimuth advisory services, a company that does a whole variety of things, which we'll get into around due diligence. It boils down to technical due diligence of various flavors, but they are racking experts, and so when things go wrong on solar farms, they they are. They are either helping you prevent that thing go wrong, or figuring you figuring out why that thing went wrong. But welcome to the show guys. No thanks for having thanks. Tim, looking forward to this very much. And why don't you guys give us a brief introduction to yourselves? How did you come together? How did you get interested in the solar industry, and then give us a cliff notes on what you're up to in the world? Yeah.

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So my My name is Frank Oudheusden, as Tim mentioned, I've been in solar since 2008 it started at Sun Edison, which was a large solar power developer who went bankrupt in 2016 I met Chris while at Sun Edison, he and I sat together in the in the bullpen and and we developed racking systems inside Sun Edison and ran technical due diligence for that company for for almost A decade, for their for their projects globally.

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When they went bankrupt, Chris and I formed a partnership, and we've been consulting together ever since my my background is actually manufacturing engineering, Chris, I'll let you do your intro.

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Pretty much everything Frank said, but I started at Sun Edison 2007 instead of background in aerodynamics.

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Cool, yeah, for our listeners who are not familiar, sun, Edison was one of the early providers of power purchase agreements. Jigger Shaw was one of the founders of that company. So they really made a mark in the solar industry for a period of time before things went south. But great company, and many OG solar professionals can date their experience to son Addison. They were like the first major force in solar companies in the US. But So solar racking, why did you guys gravitate to that space? Why? I mean, I happen to be a geek for racking, but it's not the sexiest part of solar. It is a very important, important part.

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It holds the solar panels hopefully, and tilts them towards the sun or tracks them.

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But what's, what's so special about racking for you guys?

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I'll go I'll go first. Yeah, we'll alternate. I guess I like solar racking because it's the it's the framework for solar. It's easy to ignore it. It's easy to think of it as four pieces of steel that just hold a solar panel.

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But really it affects every aspect of the architecture. It affects how much power you make, it you make when you make the power, whether the system costs a whole bunch or a little, it's, it's kind of the key component, and definitely an underdog in the solar industry.

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Yeah, I'll echo a lot of that. I've always seen it as kind of the interface to the customer, right? It's the thing that holds all of the wiring and the and the modules, oftentimes inverters, if you're using micro or string inverters.

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So it's not, quote, unquote, the reason for the season. But you know, it does interface either with the land, and thus the landowner, or with the roof and the roof owner. And so it is, it is the interface with the customer. And so it takes into account pretty much every aspect of the environment in which you want to install these systems, as well as every piece of the LCOE calculation that makes it valuable. Yeah,

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I think, as my more established listeners know, you know, you've got fixed tilt, which is the probably. Be for rooftop, absolutely the most common. And then for ground mount, you have fixed tilt or tracker. And now you have also systems like Earth OS and peg.

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Earth OS is flat to Earth peg is a east, west, low to ground system. So there's a variety of systems, but trackers, for example, are a huge percentage, perhaps 96% you guys would know better of the large scale solar for ground mount, and you're getting maybe 10 to 15% more energy out of that by using a tracker. But as we've discussed in our meetings prior to this, you know, there's a grand experiment happening in the solar industry by installing these, for example, single axis trackers on mass, because we don't truly know how they're going to perform over decades.

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We know that, yeah, they can do the job in the short term. And then there's these wild cards of extreme weather, like hail storms, like hurricanes like tornadoes. And in the recent hurricane in Florida, there was tornadoes, and hurricane in this at the same time, a hurricane can spawn tornadoes. And that's just a horrifying thought. I just I feel bad for those people that had to experience that.

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When I saw the news, I asked whether or not the next one was going to be on fire and throwing sharks everywhere.

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It is absolutely

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terrifying. Yeah, right. But let's, let's talk about some of your experiences.

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You know, triaging these extreme weather events. What exactly do you get hired to do when it when it relates to solar power plants and extreme weather? Yeah? Yeah.

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So oftentimes, you know, extreme events come through, and then the system doesn't perform the way it was intended. And the asset owner wants to know what went wrong, the insurance company wants to know what went wrong, so they'll send racking experts like Chris and I out, and we will walk the site and look for forensic evidence that point to the failure modes that ultimately led to what is often catastrophic destruction when it when it comes to hurricanes. So we've been on many sites in which this has happened, and we wrote white papers on it as early as 2018 and 2020 entitled solar under storm one, and solar under storm two. Solar under storm one was written in conjunction with the Rocky Mountain Institute in NREL, and it focused on fixed tilt ground mounts. A lot of lessons learned could be shared across all the different platforms that Tim mentioned. And then solar under storm two focused on rooftop systems, both residential and commercial flat roof and so we've been trying to evangelize throughout the industry that the need for storm hardening measures, especially in areas that see extremely high wind.

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Obviously, hail is a large topic more recently, but wind is ever present and ever prevalent. So yeah, we go to these sites, we look for forensic evidence, we write we do Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, and we write technology assessments and failure assessments for asset owners.

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And then I'll throw in the one type of racking I failed to mention is floating solar. And I was just talking to d3 a developer that does nothing but but floating solar, about a project they had that went through the hurricane recently and survived without any catastrophic failure. So that was interesting to hear. And of course, floating solar is very low to ground. It's basically like, you can think of it as flat roof solar, but floating on the water and but it has a unique racking system in the US.

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The most common floating racking is sea lataire, the French company, yeah,

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and Chris and I have been very fortunate to work in floating when we were at Sun Edison, and over the last 10 years, it's just grown tremendously in its market share. I would also add to that list car ports. I think car ports are kind of a unique beast of the racking world, and they break a lot of the rules that I think what we would consider to be behind the meter systems need to follow. So, yeah, we're now hanging 1500 volt power generation equipment over people and property, and it's in the public eye. Esthetics come into play and a little more safety factor. So, you know, car ports are, are growing quickly, and we're big supporters of them.

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But they are, they are a unique platform.

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What are your thoughts on how well the industry is doing in terms of, I mean, generally, what's happening is people are designing products that meet certain specifications and can pass certain certifications, like UL certification and. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that landscape, but how well are we doing? Are we? Are we? Is it? Is it good, bad or ugly?

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Yeah, it's a mixed bag. I mean, it really depends on the platform and it really depends on the project location and the goal. So I would say the march towards larger format modules is ever continuing. When Chris and I started in solar, 170 watt panel was a little bit bigger than maybe 1.2 meters by one meter wide. Today, you know panels are the size of a sheet of plywood, and you know those larger panels are coming with ever smaller frames and ever smaller glass, significantly less rigidity, and the racking systems that support them are being tasked with providing that rigidity in lieu of less glass and less frame.

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So, you know, in certain platforms like fixed tilt, I think they do a pretty good job of providing that rigidity, you know, and in other platforms, it is a an ongoing question as to under what conditions large format modules are are performing. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of innovation happening in the world of module mounting and record

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so I'll add to that, I'll say, in terms of good in our career, the industry has gotten very good at really understanding the underlying physics of the loading that goes into a solar system. They've gotten very good at optimizing around that. I mean, when we began, nobody even did a wind tunnel test. For the most part, it was a kind of a rare bird.

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And now the level of sophistication, particularly in the tracker world, with wind tunnel testing and the aerodynamics is is amazing, and they've really driven a lot of cost out where the industry absolutely needs to improve is in building and resiliency. So these systems are designed as though, basically, everything goes right. Every bolt doesn't have a backup. This component doesn't have a backup. So what happens, you know, frequently in our investigations that we find what are called cascading or progressive failure modes, where one little bolt breaks and then that leads to a chain reaction that can take out, you know, a lot bigger part of the array than what that bolt originally supported, so that that's something that that the industry should get better at. Can

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you explain that a little more? Chris,

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yeah, sure. A good example is like top down clamps on systems. And so when we did the solar under storm reports, we found that in a lot of instances, what happened was modules would share a top down clamp. And so you'll have a whole row of solar that might go 50 panels say that all have individual clamps that are shared, and then two at the end, and then the next row has 50, and the next row has 50 like this. And what happens is, is a piece of debris comes along and it hits a panel on the first row. And nobody's going to design for that. Nobody should design for that. That panel should be sacrificed. You know, if a tree hits it, or a piece of a cooling shroud we found in the middle of a ray once hit it, it doesn't make sense to design it to survive that. The problem is that one or a few panels, let's go. We call them panel liberations in our in our our lands. And they fly downwind.

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And that one panel hits one group of 50 over here, and the next panel hits a group of 50 over here. And then once you lose a panel from that bunch, it just unzips. The clamps, which are designed to be shared, aren't shared anymore. There's a there's a hole on one side, so the whole thing pulls out like a zipper. And I got 50 panels going down. So it's a geometric failure mode. And we found instances where we can clearly document this panel was lost, and then, like 300 panels down midwind. So there are ways to design those failures. Think of it like throwing a wet blanket over it. Yeah, you lose that module or that group, but you mitigate the the failure, and that's the kind of resiliency the industry needs to get better at

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so so a recommendation that we've made is for individual modules to have individual clamping systems, not shared clamping systems, or for modules to be direct bolted, so that they are they're into individually fastened to the racking system.

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We've advocated for vibration resistant hardware, which we've seen introduced across the Caribbean, where our reports have been read the most, and recently, we're on some hurricane barrel sites where we found vibration resistant fasteners performed quite well.

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So people are learning these lessons, either through attrition or through reading the types of documents that Chris and I like to publish with with the Rocky Mountain Institute, and they they're getting better in that regard,

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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 gigawatt the 252 75 pairs well with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to Chint Power systems.com to find out more. How many types of failure are there? Let's just talk about trackers, because they are such a huge part of of the ground mount industry or the utility scale industry, you know, because I can just think of a couple like the tracker can break and stop tracking. The module can fly off, the module can crack, or the cells in the module can crack. Those are the three main things, I think of.

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But what are the failures and how much of this is covered or not by insurance that an asset owner has,

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yeah, so, I mean, you could have, you'd have to follow the load path through the entire system right. So you could buckle your module rails, and they could fold over. You could buckle your torque tube.

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You could pancake right, fall over sideways from lateral loading wind, wind pushing you over. There's lots of different ways that that a system like a tracker could fail. There's a lot of moving components. Slew drives can shred, journals can slip. I mean, there's, there's lots of different ways that that these complex systems can can feasibly fail. Whether or not insurance covers it is, is a complicated question that goes to how the system was supposed to perform versus how it actually performed. And so in the case of hurricanes, many times, systems were designed to take, say, a category three hurricane of a certain amount of wind, and then they got hit by a category five hurricane. That's a situation that we can clearly point to as a forced majeure event. And typically, insurance comes into the room and pays, pays the insurance payout. In other instances we've seen, you know, even with trackers, category one hurricane comes through, which typically has top three second gust in the 90 mile an hour range, and the system was supposed to survive to 105 and absolutely, insurance is not going to to pay for that failure. So that usually results in a litigation right the the ability for the racking OEM or the the the ability, or the desire for the ranking OEM to fix an entire project, including broken modules and the labor and all of the things to remediate.

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You know that that results in the litigation. So that's that's unfortunately not uncommon when, when those failures don't line up with the design parameters of the

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project. I'll add to that, there are, I don't know, hundreds of 1000s of ways for a plant to fail when you get down to the ultimate cause, what was the thing that pushed over the limit? And I think Frank and I probably find dozens of unique ones on every failure analysis we do, at least. But an idea that we should all have is that as you are cutting out the fat of a system, as you're reducing the safety factor of a system, there are failure modes that used to be protected, failure modes that we as an industry didn't understand, that used to be protected by those safety factors. And as we continue to march down and cut costs from the system, we open ourselves up to learning what those failure modes we were protected from are, and so we're at that point in the industry, I think

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I don't quite understand that point being what?

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Oh, sorry, the point where we've cut so much fat from the systems that we are, we're discovering and learning new failure modes. So for example, fatigue loading of Connections is a big point of interest right now, and something that's being studied in the industry. And if you were simply designing to code prescribed loads, say, 10 years ago, maybe your bolt size was 50% bigger in diameter, and that bolt was not stressed as high, and so it didn't have fatigue, failures, things like that. Got it, got it.

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So, you know, I want to, I want to shine a light on some areas that are going to be most valuable for my audience of solar professionals, developers, asset owners. So where should we? Where should we go from here? We've, we've kind of set the table. And there's, you know, there's these trade offs being made between the cost to build any particular system and. And how long it will last under, you know, real life conditions. And then there's this uncertainty of conditions are changing because climate is changing. Storms are bigger, more frequent. But what matters most to solar professionals?

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So if you're working, if you're talking utility scale projects, right?

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Generally, I would say, I bifurcates into two camps. There are developers who sell the project at the end of the day, and there are developers who own and operate their projects for the lifetime of their their their projects. And I would say, the developers who own and operate this stuff that they develop, they do a much better job of focusing on LCO. And LCO is a metric that encapsulate encapsulates both cost and the long term operating O and M costs of these systems. And so as the industry grows, I think it's most important to start to bring in costs that are externalized, things like O and M, things like module cleaning, things like vegetation abatement, you know, things like corrosion checks and torque checks, and all of the things that are, you know, in the install manual that we should be doing should be brought forward as a as a net present value to that, to that forward cost, and that would stop a lot of people from buying what is the cheapest racking available, just in terms of upfront cost and and we would ultimately make better systems, because you'd be taking into account the long term costing.

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Yeah, of course, I

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think it's, I think it's also important to start thinking more regionally.

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A lot of people, you know, just have the opinion that tracker is the answer in a lot of instances. And while tracker is often the answer, it might not be the best answer for southern Florida, for example, yeah, whereas it could be a great, you know, answer for the desert in Nevada, you know, considering the regional differences in terms of climate, I think, is going to become more and more important in the

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future. Let's talk about extreme weather areas in the US. We you know, we have the hurricane zone in the South.

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This is Texas, Florida, and then up the Atlantic coast, we have the hail zone just published an interview with VDE on hail, and that's a huge swath of the Great Plains that's impacted by hail.

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But if you're, if you're designing for high wind, you know, let's say in the Caribbean or in Florida, my gut tells me, hey, go to go to some form of fixed tilt, and maybe go to a low to ground, like a like a peg, which is, you know, very high ground cover ratio, low to ground, or an earth Oh, system, are you? What are you guys seeing in, in, the projects that you're visiting, or any of these emerging technologies getting applied yet,

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yeah, go ahead, Chris.

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No, I say your intuition is in the right ballpark. For sure. I would change it a little bit and say for projects, expect to see, you know, more extreme hurricane events, wind events focus more on resiliency than than you might for a project that doesn't now that could look like any of the sort of novel solutions you've outlined, or it could just look like, you know, the belt and suspenders approach to the typical fixed tilt design you might otherwise do. You know, we laid out a configuration for a dual post system with through bolting, with nylock fasteners and solar under storm to kind of prescribe that exact thing, to give people something that had some resiliency built in.

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Why nylon?

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They are vibration resistant. If they're not installed perfectly or for some reason, things loosen up over time. Basically, the nylock holds the nut in place just long enough for it to corrode to the bolt. And so we've, we've just, and sort of anecdotally, over our career, found that nylock nuts don't come off. It's Oh, but

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so what, yeah, explain exactly what a nylock bolt is.

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Yeah, a nylock nut is a is a brand name term for a nylon insert that basically binds to the thread on the nut. It could You could also say Loctite, or any other kind of solution, but the idea is something that's vibration resistant if it's not installed perfectly.

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Got it? Got it.

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I'll

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also add Tim to the to the east west architecture, or flat to ground architectures, right? We've seen these types of systems, not those specific systems, but systems with East West architecture fail in the Caribbean, and so they're not immune to the to the same lack of resiliency that we've seen on a typical South facing fix till.

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Per se, or a single access tracker. So regardless of what system or system architecture is being installed, I think the same tenants apply. And specifically with ones that are trying to get an aerodynamic benefit, like anything that uses an East West architecture, there are going to be wind tunnel boundary conditions in which that system is applicable, and one of those is topography and undulating terrain. And specifically in the Caribbean, you're going to have a very hard time finding large swaths of very flat land. And so asset owners and designers need to be cognizant that these types of solutions require very specific types of project conditions. And if they're applicable, they're great. And if they're not applicable, then they shouldn't be shoehorned in because, because you think they're going to be better when it comes to handle equipment forces. So as as with most things in engineering, it depends

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and is, is, you know, I think of two main ways of attaching panels to racking.

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There's clamping right from the top, or bolting. Is, is bolting a minority of the installations happening and and is it that much more expensive to bolt panels to the racking there?

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There's a few others out there. There's certainly Huck bolts, which are a brand of kind of rivet that they get used prevalently on single axis trackers. There are clips that are made by companies like a Raymond or Vesper that are made to retain modules.

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There's, there's lots of different there's, there's slide in Module rails, which are most prevalent on solar carport solutions. So there's a lot of different module innovations flying around the industry right now. Which one is best for which which type of project in which project location is the type of questions that people should be asking when they do technical due diligence in sourcing these systems, which is what Chris and I work with large developers on doing right they want to sit down with their portfolio, look at all of their projects slated over the next six quarters, and they want to ask themselves, what's the best architecture and the best product and company to service my boutique portfolio?

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And because we know the technologies and the players and the people, we're able to create a short list with them, and then we go product by product, doing technical due diligence, and we check things like module pressures and snow angles and types of foundations and matching geotext and and module mounting solutions and speed and all of these things. So these are the types of questions that that developer should be asking if they want to really address.

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LCOE,

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yeah, there's always this tension between making the the construction more affordable faster and then making it also reliable over the long term and oftentimes the short term price reduction wins.

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But what else should our listeners know? Like, okay, if you're doing large scale solar, hire you guys to vet the technology that you're planning to use or thinking about using, right and then make adjustments.

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Is that? Is it that simple?

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Yeah, I think getting experts involved early is always best, whether that's us as racking experts or others in the world of power electronics or module selection.

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I think those are equally powerful things to do before you go sourcing OEM parts for gigawatts or hundreds of megawatts of plants, I think at the end of the day, being able to proliferate lessons learned and not repeat your mistakes is another way to go and continuously improve. So this is where forensic engineering on field problems is extremely helpful to especially mid size and large size organizations. I would say installation speed is another trend that we're seeing in the industry. We're seeing a lot of construction automation come into the market. And the question that our developer clients always have is, you know, speed is great, but can I get the cost reduction, the labor cost reduction from my EPC? And this is where I think having a great partnership with an EPC and an actual. Installer and somebody who's going to be bidding your construction allows you to do trade offs with upfront cost and and speed and long term O and M. So, you know, for people that are purely developing, that are bringing the financing to the to the party, and hiring an EPC, right, all of these different pieces trade off with one another.

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There's, there's very few free lunches left, and so on.

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I guess I have a little bit of a fantasy. I mean, I love what you said about if you're, if you're doing a lot of construction, find good partners and go deep and long in that. I also think of just kind of settling on bulletproof designs, like, let's say you do a lot of work where there's a probability of a hurricane or tornado, you know, why not just figure it out, so to speak, and say, Okay, we're not Going to do a module above a certain format. We're going to do this type of attachment, we're going to use this type of racking. Do you see this kind of logic? Or am I just kidding myself, and there's just too much bespokeness to the solar industry. Still, you

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know, if you, if you made all of the decisions in the name of resiliency, you just wouldn't be cost competitive like that's the honest economic answer. So the reality that Chris and I live in every day is, how do we find the belt and suspenders solutions that cost very little but turn off progressive and cascading failure modes, right? What's the smallest insurance premium you can pay for the largest coverage and and so those are the types of recommendations that we make to our clients. Those are the types of things we look for in project reviews. Those are the types of things that we try to proliferate through forensic engineering and due diligence, because those are ultimately the things that are that are near free, that people can can institute and just make their projects infinitely, infinitely more resilient. So, you know, I think that's where the industry should really be, really be focused, and then as we raise that bar, and everybody has to meet a certain level of resiliency, that the whole industry just gets better together,

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I would say, in the in the immediate term, before the bar is raised, people doing a failure modes and Effect Analysis study on their projects is, is money very well spent, whoever, whoever they get, to do that, but an FMEA is is very good value. And then making sure that the loading that the system actually sees is well understood is something that a lot of research is happening on right now.

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So, I mean, there's always going to be natural disasters, and for the foreseeable future, they're going to get worse until we get serious about removing carbon from the atmosphere, which at this time we're we're still dabbling around the edges, unfortunately, so but, but in The next 10 years, are we in your guys opinions, are we still, are we trending the right direction in terms of large scale developers using services like yours and making good decisions about what they're installing for the for the LCOE, or is there, is there going to be more acceleration of this train wreck that we see? No,

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I think, I think they're, they're largely trying to do the right thing. At the end of the day, solar is growing asymmetrically fast.

00:33:51.700 --> 00:35:01.860
These storms are becoming far more frequent, and as you mentioned, far more, far more catastrophic. So, you know, of course, the prevalency of solar incidences is going to go up like that's just, that's just part of that math. The reality is, I think the general public, outside of the solar energy space, thinks of solar is somehow less resilient than everything else. And and Chris and I have always kind of scratched our head to that to some extent, because I've been on a number of islands throughout the Caribbean that have gotten hit by category four and five hurricanes, and sitting next to these large scale solar power systems are diesel power plants, and they are missing cooling shrouds, and their engines are not running and their roofs are missing. And so, you know, resilient compared to what like in the grand scheme of things, and so how fast can the solar power plant get back online and producing power for the people that that it's meant to serve is is, ultimately the question, and that boils down to what percentage of the plant can can be resilient to the storm.

00:34:58.480 --> 00:35:35.659
Dollars, and you're never going to stop a solar panel from being broken if a pickup truck gets thrown into it, like that's not a that's not a thing we're going to engineer away. But at the same time, we should be able to quickly activate an O and M team who owns that asset to go out there to drop a string and rewire things and get 90% of the plant operating again in a relatively short order, and then be able to make the fixes that they need to fix and get the plant back up to 100% capacity in relatively short order.

00:35:37.159 --> 00:35:39.199
Well, said any closing remarks? Chris,

00:35:40.280 --> 00:35:48.280
oh boy, no, I just appreciate the opportunity to come on here and talk resiliency. It's something we're working on getting better at.

00:35:50.079 --> 00:35:52.900
Well, thank you.

00:35:50.079 --> 00:36:08.219
Please, if you're listening to this, go to clean power hour.com, and share that URL with a friend. Telling others about the show is one of the best things you can do. Give us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify, reach out to me on LinkedIn. How can our listeners find you? Frank and Chris? You

00:36:08.219 --> 00:36:35.059
guys can find us on LinkedIn. We also have a website at azimuth ventures.com you can see our publications on that website, solar under storm one and two. We are also in the middle of writing solar under storm three, with all of the findings from Hurricane barrel, in conjunction with Rmi, who used to be known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. So we're looking forward to the release of that, that new white paper.

00:36:35.059 --> 00:36:35.239
And

00:36:36.079 --> 00:36:37.099
when is that coming up?

00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:58.900
We just started writing it. Barrel just came through, beginning of August, Chris and I lived on a tri Moran for four days visiting all those islands because transportation wasn't yet available. We're hoping to have drafts completed by the end of the year and and to be able to share more details, probably around that time frame.

00:36:59.739 --> 00:37:02.460
Got it all right.

00:36:59.739 --> 00:37:05.219
Well, I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Take care. Everybody. Absolutely.

Insights on Solar Racking and Technical Due Diligence with Azimuth Advisory Services | EP247

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