Mitigating Hail Damage in Large-Scale Solar: Insights from VDE Americas

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Over the past five years, hail damage has caused more than 50% of total insured project losses for solar farms.

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So that's a big number in 2022 alone, hail losses exceeded $300 million in Texas, and the average solar hail claim now amounts to approximately $58 million so this is a big deal in the insurance industry. And as you mentioned, right insurance rates are going up. And that's not just in solar. Insurance rates are going up for all kinds of things, hail, impacts, all kinds of things.

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today on the Clean Power Hour mitigating the impacts of hail damage on large scale solar projects in the US, my guest today is Senior Principal Engineer with VD America's Jon Previtali, welcome to the show, Jon.

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Thank you, Tim, thank you for having me really

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looking forward to discussing your work on hail damage. Check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify, and please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners.

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So Jon, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. How long have you been working in the solar industry, and what is it that VDE Americas is best known for

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sure? Yeah. So yeah, I've been working in solar for over 20 years now. I was actually in the first.com boom of the internet business back in the 90s. So yeah, I did that until the bubble burst, and then, you know, got into solar.

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And around that time when, you know, most of the solar was residential and and CNI, there was really just only a few utility scale projects. Just

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what year was that, when you got your first solar work going about 2003 Okay, two, 2003 Yeah. So you must know Mike Hall then, because he was one of the few solar entrepreneurs working in in California at that time too.

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I'm sorry, who Mike Halla Borrego, do you know Mike? I don't know Mike, yeah, sorry, because you're definitely an early adopter. There are a few people I've interviewed who've been in solar longer than Mike Hall. He got his start in oh two. Anyway, I digress. Tell us about VD. What is VDE and why?

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Why are we talking about hail damage?

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Yeah, yeah. So VDE, it stands for Verben to electric technique in German.

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And we're actually a 160 year old company that was founded by Werner von Siemens, who is? Who was the like the Thomas Edison or Nicolas Tesla or Westinghouse of Europe, Siemens built out, organized and designed and constructed with his team a large portion of the European infrastructure for the grid, and at that time, 160 years ago, as I mentioned, it became clear to him that they needed an organization to be that was responsible for the safety of the grid. And so he established VDE, which, incidentally, in German, stands for means, the Society for electrical engineering. And roughly and so in Europe, VDE is mostly a standards organization and also safety testing organization. So if you go over to So, very much like UL underwriters laboratory.

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So if you go over to Europe and you turn over like an electronic good, like a retail product, you'll see a VDE stamp to confirm that it's safe to use.

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But in the United States, we're actually a relatively small group of engineers who are totally focused on solar and energy storage technical due diligence, and we've been doing business in the United States for over 10 years. Our primary client is Wells Fargo. We're essentially owner, the owners engineering staff for Wells Fargo's Tax Equity Team, and doing that for almost 10 years, and we've worked through them and through other clients. We've worked on about 10 gigawatts of utility scale and CNI and community scale solar power projects that are actually operating in the United States, so not just in the development phase, but in the operating phase, and and and Wells Fargo is still our it's our top customer, but we also serve a number of developers as independent engineer as well.

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Yeah, and I purchased. I worked at wells on the tax equity team for about nine years before coming to Wells Fargo, or sorry, VDE, about two years ago, I led, I established and led the technical due diligence practice at Wells Fargo's tax equity group.

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Okay, cool, 10 gigawatts of solar. You said, huh, yeah, nice. Well, let's dive into the topic du jour. You know, in 2024 we've had some big hail storms that impacted projects in places like Texas.

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The one that was in the news a lot, was fighting Jays. It's a 350 megawatt solar farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, if you just Google that, you'll see that that project suffered massive, what we would call catastrophic hail damage. And so as a result, more and more people are thinking about, talking about, and drilling down on how to mitigate against hail damage in large scale. Solar so paint us a picture, Jon, if you would about what are the considerations for project developers and asset owners when it comes to hail damage? Yeah,

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yeah. It's a good question. And unfortunately, you know, as I think you alluded, to, fighting Jase is just one of a number of major losses we've had in solar due to hail over the last few years, really starting in 2019 with the Midway hail solar, or midway solar hail loss, which was estimated to be About $70 million that's when we saw the hail insurance market, really, for all industries Harden, meaning that sub limits were lowered and premiums went up. And so unfortunately, now many times it's it's hard to make projects pencil with the cost of of hail insurance. And oftentimes hail insurance isn't even available for some solar projects. Yeah, so it's a, it's a tough problem to solve. I, you know, I can say, personally I felt like, I feel like I missed this issue as a technical due diligence expert, you know, we were, you know, at that time before midway, you know, we were building projects outside of Texas in places where there was as much hail risk, like in California, like the Central Valley and whatnot and and then, when I saw that, that midway disaster, I think is a fair assessment, I immediately took action to try to put into Place hail monitoring and and Stoke capabilities for the projects that Wells Fargo was funding in Texas and and the good news is that I was successful in we, we as a team at wells were successful in doing that with those projects. So it didn't hold up a financing for those projects. But it has, you know, this issue has been, needless to say, a major problem for the solar industry that's really limiting the growth of solar, particularly in places like Texas and the Midwest, where we have high hail risk. But there are solutions, and that's what we specialize in, helping people find and and the solutions are, well,

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hold on a second.

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Hold on a sec. I want to put a an image on the screen. This is a FEMA map, and I'll put a link in the show notes for audio listeners. But this is showing the hail risk across the US. And it's, it's, it's clearly, well, it's clear that there is a band right running down the middle of the country that is very high risk. The red, orange and yellow that you see on this map is high risk. Well, yellows relatively moderate So, but huge swaths of the Great Plains and the Midwest and including Texas, which is a huge solar state. And then, you know, here in the Midwest, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin is also home to large utility scale solar farms now. So this is a real consideration for solar developers, just if you're questioning, you may live in a blue state. Okay, on this map, blue is very low risk, including Arizona, you know, Utah, Nevada, some places are very low risk.

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So hail is very is very spotty, so to speak. But there's a huge band across the middle part of the country. So just to set that stage. So when

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you go back to that map, and I'll show you why some of that map is wrong,

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yeah, talk to me about the map. I mean,

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this map is, this map is, is directionally correct, but it's, there's so many wrong places in this that mislead people. And.

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Unfortunately, FEMA, FEMA maps, the hail map is not the only one problematic map with FEMA. The flood maps are also wrong. And the reason that is is because there's population bias in these maps. You can see that there are some locations where there's very low or relatively low hail risk, right next to areas where there's very high and relatively high hail risk. Nature doesn't work like that, right, right? So the reason that we're seeing this is because this map is based on what's called spotter data, and also probably claims, insurance claims, yeah, and spotter data is data that's sent in by storm spotters, surely storm Yeah, Storm watchers,

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that's a great point. Yeah? So it's worse. It's probably worse than the map shows, right? There are some blue there. There are some blue areas here that should be red or orange, and we just don't have good data. Yeah? Frankly,

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like it's, it's a disservice that FEMA is doing to the insurance industry by putting out these inaccurate maps. Well,

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some map is better than no map, I would argue I agree.

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I agree. And so the reason I'm mentioning this is because we have better maps.

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So VD, we being VDE, yes, okay.

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We have apps. So we have, we have maps that are based on radar data covers the entire continental US. And do you want me to show you one of the maps?

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Yeah, you

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can put a map on screen. Sure. So

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we we saw this map. This map shows, let's just turn on 45 this. This map shows the return interval for a 45 millimeter hail, or greater hailstorms, okay? And the return interval is the the chance of a hailstorm, one hailstorm happening within a certain time frame. And so you can see, you know, just with this 45 millimeter layer, there's a one in 25 year chance of hit of a hailstorm of that size happening in this entire area of the United States, and one in 50 in this, this orange area. So, so, as I mentioned, like, while the FEMA map is directionally correct it, it's, I don't want people to think that there are little spots, you know, of of areas that are actually high risk, that are magically low risk, because that just doesn't happen,

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sure. And you referenced 45 millimeters, which is 1.7 or 1.8 inches. So you know, you're talking golf ball sized, or maybe a little bigger, right? You know, in in the solar industry, we talk about solar panels being designed to withstand golf ball size hail, or one inch hail, maybe, but not larger. And so talk a little bit about that, like, what are the module manufacturers designing to to set the stage a little better as well. And then maybe you could just go ahead and close your map. Unless you wanted to talk more about Sarah, I'll

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stop sharing Well, I do want to mention just real quickly, the other thing that we have in these maps that we can show are actually average annual loss and probable maximum loss for different types of modules. So for solar series, six and seven, two millimeter two millimeter glass, glass 3.2 millimeter front glass, Palmer back sheet, and then also at different tracker angles into the wind and away from the wind.

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So this, these maps are really good for developers who are trying to understand the risk of hail with specific modules and specific tracker capabilities at specific locations during the siting process or procurement process. So these are all available on the Esri ArcGIS website, by the way. Yeah. So, yeah. So about you mentioned that module manufacturers design modules with specific hail resiliencies, and you know that claim is they do make those claims, and you can see in the data sheet, oftentimes that they have hail resiliency up to the most common is 25 millimeters.

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Okay, right? Some have testing up to 35 millimeters. But the the issue with that is that, first of all, we're seeing hail that's like much larger than that. You know, we're seeing hail I was just looking at, I just did a analysis for Sia. Our team did an analysis for sia looking at historical hail, at projects over 50 megawatts, and there were dozens of projects that have experienced hail great, way greater than 45 millimeters, like 65 millimeters, 70 millimeters, so, so that's the first issue is that we're actually seeing much larger hail than these modules are designed for. And then the other issue is that the actual testing that's done on these modules is not sufficient. It's not a test to failure. You know, they get a couple modules. They send them to a test lab like our sister company, ritc, who does a good job testing to the the IEC standard, which governs this hail test. They shoot a couple 25 millimeter or 35 millimeter freezer ice balls on to the the onto these modules, and if they don't break, then they're good to go. But unfortunately, they're only testing a couple samples, right? And as I mentioned, they're not testing to failure, so we actually don't have a good way of creating an accurate hail resiliency curve for these modules. And so one of the things that we're doing, actually, in collaboration with ritc, is we're developing a a better hail test that that actually uses freezer ice balls, which are a proxy for hail, for naturally occurring hail over a wider range, a larger range of sizes, representing a larger number of impact energies. So impacts at different you know, you can, you can model different angles with different impact energies, right? So we, so we really understand the true hail resilience of modules using this new test, this new test of failure. Okay, it's going to be ready in a couple months. But

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so what is so different about the test that you've developed compared to others?

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Oh, the other thing I'll mention, yeah, so instead of using a couple modules, we're using 30 modules.

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So it accounts for a diversity in the glass manufacturing. We are seeing glass defects from time to time that seem to affect hail resiliency. So in addition to being able to create a much more accurate hail resiliency curve with with more hail impacts that that are, you know, essentially a test to failure, we're actually using 30 different modules for this. And yeah, yeah, so we can, we can account for variation in in the module, in terms

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of resistance to hail, I think about two things.

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There's the module itself and the thickness of the glass. And as you pointed out, there's different thicknesses, and we can get into that, why there's different thicknesses, and there's different angles, right?

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Flat Roof solar, for commercial solar, is typically 10 degrees, and then you have sloped roof, of course, which is at whatever angle the roof is. And then you have fixed till ground mount, which is often at 30 degrees or 20 degrees. And then you have trackers for large scale solar.

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The statistic I've learned is 96% of ground mount solar is using single axis trackers. And it's noteworthy that when you google fighting Jay's, you know hail damage, there's a story in PV tech about array array technologies, the tracker manufacturer, developing a hail tracking software. So obviously, there are things you can do with the angle of of the array, with with trackers, and we're going to get into this. 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.

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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. But what do you want to what do you want to convey about module construction or design? And then let's talk about racking and trackers.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so So, yeah, the module makes a difference. Two millimeter. Two millimeter front glass, back glass, bifacial modules are about half as resistant to hail, as resilient to hail as 3.2 millimeter front glass modules with Polymer back sheet. And the reason that is is because the two millimeter thin glass is not fully heat tempered in like the vast majority of manufacturing scenarios, and while 3.2 millimeter is so it's just much easier to fully heat temper 3.2 millimeter front glass. So it's actually a harder glass so you see less you really see less damage with 3.2 millimeter front glass than you do with two millimeter glass, glass modules due to hail. But to your point, though, the the tracker angle also makes a huge difference. So really, the the steeper the angle, the better to us, to a certain degree, you don't want something that's so steep that it's going to catch.

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Much more hail because of the wind. Wind makes a big difference too. So and it's difficult to predict the wind speed and and the direction When hail hits, but in general, steeper the angle the better.

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The other thing I'll mention is that if you can put the trackers into an angle away from the wind, facing away from the wind.

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That's better than facing them into the wind. So we recommend, actually a two pronged approach to hail monitoring and Stowe.

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And the first prong is what we call preemptive Stowe. And this was really, I would say, pioneered by Kevin Christie at light source BP. And the idea is that the operator will monitor for for severe convective storms that may contain hail just in the region around the project, and if they start getting an alert for a storm like that, you know the day before or hours before, we recommend that the operator put the trackers into a preemptive stoke position away from facing away from the prevailing wind direction, so the direction of the storm at the steepest angle. And that's

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a little counterintuitive, because you're also thinking, Well, if you put the back of the array towards the wind, and it's going to catch more wind and potentially face wind damage, right? Because the modules also crack when you when you dig into this problem, very thin glass, two millimeter glass, is very prevalent on bifacial modules. Bifacial modules have swept the large scale solar industry. Now, I don't know what the what the percentage is, but it's very high. And, and you know, if you again, Google this problem, but go to PB magazine, they've got stories on this that just out of the box, you're getting 10% breakage oftentimes, because the glass is so thin, these are very fragile now and and so talk about that, because there's you're optimizing around around multiple variables now.

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Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, no, we haven't seen that type of glass breakage due to high winds. Actually, the glass breakage that you're talking about seems to be due to defects or issues with the design of the connection between between the torque tube and the modules. There's, you know, there's a bracket, but then there's a rail that is supposed to be installed around the outer rows, the perimeter rows of the of the array that basically stiffens the module. So,

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so the rail is, the rail is being installed in the middle along the the portrait length of the module.

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Is that correct? Yeah,

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that's right, yeah, yeah. But if there aren't enough modules with that rail, then, yeah, you are going to have some breakage. But also, yeah, as I mentioned, they're they're most likely glass defects that are also causing that issue. So so back to your original question. Yeah, we think that the the risk of hail damage is much greater, much greater than the risk of wind damage, and so that's why we're recommending that modules in certain

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geographies where you have hail, not everywhere has hail.

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Fair enough, fair enough.

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So how big is this problem for the industry, writ large, like, how do you how do you see this problem? Oh,

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it's a huge problem. It's a huge problem that we missed, that I personally missed, and lots of people missed years ago, and part of the reason we missed it is just we, you know, we got, we got overconfident, comfortable or whatnot, because insurance was cheap and reliable, right?

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And you didn't have a scenarios where it was not renewed on a yearly basis, right? Which is, you know, starting to happen now, right? And yeah, so we just, we thought, okay, yeah. We knew that there was some level of hail risk, but we didn't bother to really assess it, whatever in 20 before 2019 we didn't bother to really understand, like, quantify the risk of average annual loss or probable maximum loss or whatnot. We just relied on insurance. So we have soft

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and and for my listeners, you know a quick a quick tool to use to study this problem is, is a platform called perplexity. It's a large language model perplexity.ai.

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But what I like about perplexity is it gives you references to the information that it's sourcing. And so I just asked, perplexity, how prevalent is hail damage in solar farms? And it gives me some answers. It says over the past five years, hail damage has caused more than 50% of total insured project losses for solar farms. So that's a big number in 2022 Alone, hail losses exceeded $300 million in Texas, and the average solar hail claim now amounts to approximately $58 million so this is a big deal in the insurance industry, and as you mentioned, right, insurance rates are going up. And that's not just in solar. Insurance rates are going up for all kinds of things, hail impacts all kinds of things, roofs, cars, buildings, etc, right? But so yes, it's a growing problem and a problem that we need to pay more attention to, and it has real economic impacts on our industry and on the insurance industry. And you also mentioned that some projects can no longer get hail insurance if you're a project developer and asset owner, what are you thinking about, and what are you trying to do to ensure that your project is insurable?

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Yeah, it's a really good question. So obviously, you're shopping around like you would normally do, regardless of whether we had this problem or not. And you know, specifically, I would say, developers, owners, operators, are looking for insurance providers that take into account, you know, proven hail monitoring and still capabilities, right? So we're at a point where the I would say it's fair to say the insurance industry and the solar industry are believing the analyzes that VDE Americas is putting out there with regard to hail risk, just like I mentioned, the average annual losses, that probable maximum losses with different module and tracker configurations at different locations. So they believe the analyzes, and we have, we validated those analyzes, and they they look good. So that's like the next phase, I would say, in convincing the insurance industry that we are on top of this problem and we're solving this problem, is proving to them that the hail monitoring and Stowe protocols are in place, right? And so we actually are now helping customers do that.

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We have a best practices memo that's free from our website that we recently co published with Wells Fargo, who I mentioned, is our primary customer and and then we also have a hail protocol off the shelf, hailstow protocol testing and forensics specification, like a forensics protocol specification that we can provide customers, but it, yeah, it's super important. I would say that the it's super important to have this stuff documented, right, so people who are monitoring for hail know what to do when hail is approaching, using this two pronged approach that I started to talk about before preemptive Stowe and then basically immediate Stowe. If you missed the preemptive Stowe window, it's, it's, it's so important to have an alert from a reliable hail monitoring service like DTN. We think DTN is the best and, and, and you know that will come in in ample time to put the the trackers into a hailstone position, yeah? Walk us through

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some of the mechanics of that. Yeah. Okay, you've got your solar array.

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It's got a SCADA system monitoring what's going on with production. But there's this whole other world of what's going on in the environment, when, when is the storm coming?

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How does DTN work? If you're an asset manager, yeah, yeah,

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yeah. It's not a perfect system, because, you know, hail storms can form very close to project perimeters and even over the over the projects, right? But basically, there's a, there's a national radar system out there called NEXRAD, that's maintained by the federal government through NOAA and the National Weather Service, and that monitors for hail, and that provides basically near real time data that companies like DTN translate into these things called storm corridors, which are essentially like these digital polygons that track storms, and they can tell what the probability of hail different sizes is within the storm corridors and which direction these hail storms are moving. And so what you can do is you can set up, you know, an alerting service to alert at a certain perimeter, a certain radius beyond the project's perimeter, we recommend 30 miles, right, at least 30 miles to get a hail alert. And the reason that is is because hail storms can travel up to 60 miles per hour. So we want to give operators ample time to put the trackers into stow position. We think 30 minutes is probably ample time. Typically, yeah, yeah.

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I'm at the DTN website and and what you know, one of the things I immediately think of Jon is, okay, you're going to preemptively stow your project, meaning tip, tip it up to 60. Degrees, is that? Right?

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Yeah,

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depending on the tracker array technologies, is 52 degrees, but, yeah, tip it to the maximum tilt angle,

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so 50 plus degrees and and then you're going, Well, Tim, but I'm going to lose my production. And yes, you are going to lose your production if it's the middle of the day, and the tracker should be pointing straight up, let's say at high noon, right? And obviously, you want to minimize the impact of the hail, so you're sure going to hailstow at a high angle. And interestingly, though, DTN found that, you know, one study showed moving into hailstow during extreme weather events resulted in a production loss of $12,000 and a property insurance premium reduction of $2 million per year. So the loss of energy is trivial relative to the gain in cheaper premium. And you also then have to think about the cost of of a loss event of a catastrophic event. So let's look. Can

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I just chime in on that? Go ahead. Go ahead.

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Thoughts so, yeah. So basically, the reason that is is because when you have hail storms approaching, you almost always have cloudy skies anyway, right?

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You have overcast sky, so your energy production is going to already be very low. Yeah. In fact, in speaking with light source BP, they've said that their asset managers don't even really they haven't even noticed when the trackers are being put into hailstone relative to the expected performance. And then there's also a really good there was a really good poster at the PVR W conference a couple years ago by Nicole Thompson at wh analytics that basically demonstrated what I'm talking about. And I'll just take an opportunity to mention that kWh analytics sells insurance, and they are one of the few insurance companies that actually take hail monitoring and stove protocols into account when they're pricing insurance.

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Very

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cool. So in our last couple of minutes together, Jon, you have been working on a tech memo on this topic. We will put a, put a link to that memo, which is going to be in the wild by the time this publishes. But give us a, give us a quick summary of what you found in in in doing this research. Yeah,

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this is interesting. So this is actually the second tech memo on hail that we are going to publish with a client. And the first tech memo, I think I I mentioned before, it was with Wells Fargo, and it describes the best practices that we in Wells Fargo think should be used for hail monitoring, and Stowe and and now this next memo. And I can't, I don't think, I guess I could mention the customer, it's with array technologies, because by the time this is aired, the memo is going to be at, it going going to be out it, it shows the effectiveness of hail. So we looked at three projects that were in the close in a close vicinity and within 15 kilometers of fighting Jays in March 2016 that experienced similar hail as fighting Jays but had no damage because those projects went into hailstone. So very interesting validation of the capabilities of hailstow.

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There was one project I should mention that had there were a couple tracker motors that didn't function properly. I don't know, we don't know why, but there were a few rows that did not go into hail and those did have damage. And so it was actually a very good proof point to demonstrate that hailstow did work for all the rest of the trackers on that site that went into hailstow. So this is a, it's a validation study of hail monitoring and stuff, sure,

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yeah. And you know, this isn't rocket science.

00:33:59.089 --> 00:34:32.989
It makes a lot of sense that if you put the tracker at a higher angle, you're avoiding that direct hit, so to speak. That's going to be the highest risk factor. But now you're putting some some concrete engineering and statistical analysis behind this. So that's that's cool. Are the tracker manufacturers responding to this, because there's obviously credible evidence that they need to have a hailstow and then a way to effectively automate putting the array in hailstow,

00:34:34.489 --> 00:34:57.949
yeah, yeah, we're seeing some really good responses from tracker manufacturers. So yeah, we we're working with a number. We're working with all the leading tracker manufacturers in the United States and and, yeah. So you can see that, you know, they're developing, first of all, ways to manually put their trackers into hailstone much more quickly than ever before.

00:34:54.019 --> 00:35:49.550
You know, a few years ago, we would have scenarios where the opera. Just had to go to each tracker controller and put it into hailsto separately across the entire Ray field, and would just take hours, right? So now we have, like, a one button. We have these tracker Stowe interfaces that have one button hailstoe capabilities, which is great. They're also integrating hail monitoring services, and they're also starting to to offer automated hail capabilities, which is great because, you know, you you take the operator out of it. I wouldn't say that people should, you know, rely entirely on automated Stowe. We still think that, you know, having an operator monitoring for hail and putting the trackers into hailstone preemptively is really good, but having an automated state, automated hailstead capability, is really good as well.

00:35:50.659 --> 00:36:10.280
Alright. Well, check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. That is the best way you can help others find this content and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. Or you can contact me via the website, Cleanpowerhour.com, Jon, how can our listeners find you?

00:36:11.929 --> 00:36:19.429
Oh, yeah, you know, they can easily go to my website, or our website, VDE Americas and or they can contact me through LinkedIn.

00:36:20.389 --> 00:36:23.539
Very good. Well.

00:36:20.389 --> 00:36:35.750
Thank you so much. Jon Previtali at VD Americas for joining us on this interesting and important topic, how to mitigate hail damage in large scale solar. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Take care. Jon. You.

Mitigating Hail Damage in Large-Scale Solar: Insights from VDE Americas | EP238

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