The World's Simplest Racking System with Drew Bond

Transcript

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Really one to understand that our power racks are suitable for any installation of any scale. I shouldn't say any installation.

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There are certainly areas that you don't want to put in flood prone areas, for instance. But there's no scale limitation. So our product has been used for residential applications. Could have been DIY were installed by a local installer, CNI brown fields, all the way up to utility scale. So we have a project in our pipeline that we're working on now that's 100 megawatt project in the southeast part of the United States. Are

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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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We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition

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today on the Clean Power Hour, the world's simplest solar racking. I'm Tim Montague, your host, please check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners. My guest today is Drew Bond. He is the CEO and co founder of Powerfield Energy, a company that you may not be familiar with, but I think that you will be interested to know more. They make a very unique racking product for both CNI and utility solar. Welcome to the show. Drew,

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thank you. Tim, great to be here.

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I am a geek for racking so I'm thrilled to bring Powerfield to the show and my audience So Drew, as we always, start tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. How did you get into the energy industry and what motivated you to create Powerfield?

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Yeah, so I, you know, got a long background in energy.

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Actually started first learning about energy back in Oklahoma when I was at the Corporation Commission, working with the commissioner there, Denise Bodie, and we were, you know, doing everything from natural gas unbundling to electricity competition. And then fast forward to 2007 2008 and I was appointed to be a Senior Advisor for George W Bush at the Department of Energy, and specifically in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. And you know, candidly, I knew nothing about renewable energy at the time when I started. What I did know was that, you know, we were again, this is 2007 2008 we were still fighting a war in Iraq. You know, we were still, as a country, importing energy, not exporting energy, and and I just, you know, thought at that time I'd love to learn more about all the other forms of energy, because, really, you know, from a, from a sort of all the above or portfolio perspective approach. I just thought, you know, this is crazy that we don't have more options.

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And so I dove straight into that role as one of the the team leads on on technology commercialization within that Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. So we really got to look at all the technologies, from solar to wind to hydro power to hydrogen to geothermal to batteries and electric vehicles. So our role there was really to help try and accelerate new technologies to market, either ones that are sitting on the shelf in the lab, could be a national lab, or it could be a lab at a university, or just try and find better ways to connect capital with new technologies and help those get to market. So you know, it was then that I really first started learning about solar, and then I went on a bit of a journey leading a couple of other startups, a waste to energy startup, a data analytics startup, and then, lo and behold, Powerfield came my way.

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So anyway, it's, it's, and what's

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that? What's that origin story? How did, how did Powerfield get on your radar?

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Yeah, so maybe, like every good startup, it started in a garage. I was, I was just happened to live next door to that garage. So it turns out that the company was first founded a year before I came along by two guys that had been at AES and AES solar, and also Sun Edison, David Flory and Paul Burdick, and they had been developing utility scale power plants all around the world, and were increasingly frustrated by the complexity of the projects and the timelines and the capital risk that's associated with all of that, and so that that led them down a path of really doing a deep dive on. How they could make installation solar faster and easier and therefore less expensive. And so when I got involved, it was sort of a year down the road. There was a wooden prototype in a garage with a provisional patent. And David and and Paul didn't really have any experience with with startups, and this was became my fifth startup, and so I knew a little bit about, you know, raising capital and going out to the investment community to try and understand how we could scale this. So, you know, the even further back story is, you know, David had been a longtime friend through his sister and their family. And so I had known David, known of him traveling around the world, but lo and behold, he just happened to move right next door to me about the time that he started on this idea. And thankfully, you know, Paul, who's who was a long time colleague at AES, really had an engineering background, you know, and so could take the ideas that David had and turn those into real hardware and prototypes. And so again, when I got involved, it was a wooden prototype, but that wouldn't prototype. Probably took another at least dozen prototypes just to get to that one versions.

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And was the concept a bucket at that stage.

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Because if you, if you're not familiar with Powerfield, yeah, their trademark is a bucket that becomes the racking and and so it's a plastic tub that gets filled with sand or dirt or rock, and then the module is mounted to that. But what was the early permutation of this product?

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Yeah, it was. It was a bucket, as you said. I mean, I call it a highly engineered bucket, but it was, it was essentially a wooden bucket, so really thin, you know, pliable wood. It sat there David and I took it, put it in his backyard, and put some sandbags in it, and popped a solar panel on top.

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And, you know, sat there and went, huh, that's interesting.

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Surely, this has been invented somewhere before, you know, I just thought, wow, this is the coolest thing since sliced bread. So pushed it over, and it popped back up. And as you said, it's a big tub. So, you know, for the for the listener out there, you know, please go to our website, Powerfield energy.com, and you'll see the product, and you'll see it even being installed in a time lapse video, but it's a big tub, about the size of a wheelbarrow, but with higher sides. It's, you know, 17 pounds when it's empty.

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So it's, you know, again, it's just a big bucket, but a big bucket that has a 25 degree angle and is designed and engineered so that one install the panel on top of it with no bolts, no tools, and so essentially, bucket down dirt or gravel in panel on top, and you do it over and over again, depending on what size system you want. So you know, it's simple enough to where I've effectively just taught you how to install solar minus to plug it in. So

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the panels, little literally, are mounting directly to the bucket, or is there some part in between? Yeah,

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the panels are literally mounting directly to the bucket. There are two clips that go on the very bottom side of the of the bucket. So again, the bucket is, you know, 25 degree angles, so you've got a high side and a low side. On the low side, there's two clips that go in just using your hands. And the very first iteration didn't have any clips. It was a single piece, just one one bucket with two grooves, one at top, one at bottom. We've learned over time that the panels, even when they're the same dimension of one by two meters, let's say, depending on the manufacturer, there's a difference in, in, in that length or width by millimeters. And so those two clips of the bottom accommodate any variability that might happen between manufacturers.

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Yeah, it is. It is an extraordinarily simple product. It's ballasted with sand or dirt or rock, which is ubiquitous, right? You can get, you get these products anywhere, and so you can use local, local products to ballast the product.

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It's very low to ground, so that reduces the wind load. And, yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. So how has the market responded?

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How long has Powerfield been selling the power rack, as it's called, and how has the market responded? Yes.

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So we, we started the company in 2017 raised our first seed capital, then went and demonstrated it at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, left it there for two years in high winds, and, extreme weather in the winter in the summer. At the end of that process, NREL actually bought the system from us. They liked it so much, and so in 2020 we were going to hit the market.

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And everybody knows what happens in 2020 and so we hit pause, and. Then really began another push at the market in 2022 we've seen a big uptick in sales this last year, and so it's been exciting to see year over year growth, because it's a new product and because it's so simple, we often have to prove it ourselves by installing projects ourselves. So while we're seeking to be a racking company and selling racking through distribution and to installers and developers, we're also finding that we have to go out and, you know, take what we can get, and so we go out and develop projects. We'll even be the EPC on projects in order to get them done so we've, you know, we've sold over 200 installations across the US. Our product is now listed with more than half a dozen distributors across us. Green Tech renewables is one of the biggest has our product listed. We've got a new, you know, distribution company in Texas called signature solar that's really started to take off. And we've also now shipped our first product overseas, to Africa. And so, you know, we think we're at the really beginning of the hockey stick, if you will. We've got a proven product. We've got patents around the world. We've scaled manufacturing multiple times.

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We've got proof points at residential, commercial and utility scale. And so now it's really a matter of getting the product out there in front of the customers, helping them understand that the simplicity also is relevant for durability.

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And as you said in part of the introduction, you know, the wind durability is really an important factor of our product.

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And so because we're low to the ground, we experience winds that are typically about 20 miles per hour less than our competition.

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So that's important, because that means, you know, we can withstand higher winds. You know, I should also say that, you know, when you install a solar panel with one of our racks, you can install them in multiple configurations. And so you can install one in the in the middle, you can install one on each end, so that's two racks per panel. You can install even three racks per panel, if you need to for like, a really high wind scenario, or what we call rack sharing, where the rack actually meets in the middle of the panels. And that works really well when you have flat, smooth ground. And so that variability allows you to do you know, different things with your land. It also allows the adaptability for for areas that have high winds. And you know, those, those those buckets, those power racks, as we call them, you know, they're 17 pounds when they're empty, so easy to move around. You can, you know, put one in each hand as you're laying their Ray out when you fill them with dirt or gravel, they can weigh up to 550 pounds. And so what that translates to is, you, you know, you've got somewhere between 1000 to 1500 pounds of weight holding a single panel to the ground, which keeps it in place in those high wind scenarios.

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And there's no, you know, ground acres necessary. You can put ground acres in them if you need to. There are three holes on the bottom that you'll see, two for drainage in the case that when our water gets in there, and one for a ground anchor if you need it. We've only used that once, and that was early in our in our sort of product life cycle. So you know, we're seeing a lot of exciting opportunities, not only in sales, but also in the future pipeline, with projects that you know, range from CNI related to, you know, brownfield CNI related to, you know, warehouses, to also farmers and ranchers, we Have a really distinct advantage in that, because it's low to the ground, we don't need a lot of row spacing in between the rows, and that means that we can put more power on a smaller footprint than the competition.

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And so it's just, you know, we're pretty excited about it, because I know there's a big tension with landowners about, do they want to put solar on their land? Do they want to forever, you know, put steel in the ground? You know, again, with ours, it's, it's power racks or buckets on the ground filled with local, natural dirt panels in place at the end of the life of the system, send everything back to recycling, dump out the dirt and recommission the land for however you want to use it.

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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. So in in what I call traditional ground mount, which could be tracker or fixed tilt, you're putting perhaps a megawatt per four acres, maybe five acres. What kind of density are you getting with the power rack? Yeah,

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so we could do a megawatt for every about two and a half three acres, depending on setbacks. So we actually just won a contract for 1.2 megawatt system in Colorado, where we beat out a tracking system and on on that same footprint, we were able to put 33% more power on the very same footprint and do it at a lower install cost and a lower O M cost over the life of that system, because we don't have any moving parts. So there's some real advantages there. You know, where, you know, I think we have a long, long term place in the market,

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Colorado get snow.

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So how does the product handle snow load?

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Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we've had a lot of sales in snowy areas, including up in the Northeast.

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What we've found is that anytime you model out a system, you're going to model out whatever the snow coverage is, and so you expect that, you know, the system is going to perform based on that snow coverage. In Colorado, the snow melts pretty fast, so snow really isn't that much of an issue. We've also learned that, you know when when systems are higher off the ground, oftentimes what happens is, with that edge around the panel, that edge builds up an ice edge, and that ice edge then starts to accumulate snow. And so even if they're up off the ground, even if those panels are up off the ground and not being buried by the snow, they will be covered by the snow. And so with our system, at least, if you want to, you can, you know, snow. You can blow the snow off.

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You can sweep the snow off. But you know, by and large, we really just haven't seen a problem in that. And, you know, I think about areas like, you know, buffalo, upstate New York, or even, you know, Pennsylvania, we installed a 2.2 megawatt system in Pennsylvania on a rocky hillside, and that system has has performed as good, if not better than than expected.

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You mentioned a hill and, and that's another consideration with all racking products, is undulation in the land. So what? What are the limitations, if any, around undulation or, or, you know, tilt. What are the what? What can the product handle? Yeah.

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So one of the things that's really, you know, promising about our product is you don't really have to do any ground prep if you don't want to, you know, certainly, if you scrape the land, that helps for the installation to go that much smoother. But you know, this example I gave in Pennsylvania, for instance, it's on a rocky hillside. It's got about a five degree slope. And you know, at some places it's less than that.

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In other places, it's probably around that. And so the ray is actually very undulated with our system. The racks, the buckets, if you will, have a rounded bottom on them. And that rounded bottom actually helps accommodate land that isn't perfectly flat. So if we had a flat square, brought up bottom trying to put that flat square container on a piece of ground that isn't level, isn't flat, then you get torquing of the of the bucket, so to speak. In our system, you don't have that because of that rounded bottom.

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What we've learned over time is that if you've got a flat piece of property, you know, I'd say, you know, ideally parking lot flat, but semi flat, then it works really well to put the one rack in the middle, where the, you know, rack sharing, where the panels meet in the middle, then what you end up with is really clean lines of, you know, very straight rows and half as many racks needed for the installation when the when the ground is more undulated, like the example I gave in Pennsylvania. Then two racks per panel works really well, and then, so what you end up with is the panels are actually individual units sitting side by side with each other then, and that having those two racks just holding a single panel to the ground allows those racks to go with the contour of the land.

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And so, you know, we would say, typically, I think, you know, probably a 10 degree slope is what we would recommend as a matter. Maximum slope. There's no reason that you can't really do more than that. As I mentioned, it's got our racks have a hole at the bottom for a ground anchor, so if you're worried about sliding, that ground anchor can prevent that.

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Also on the bottom of the rack are some like tire tread, you know, configuration to, once you put it on the ground and fill it with weight, it's really going to dig in and grab that ground.

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So it's really not going anywhere, you know, I think it's, it's, you'll find it's pretty versatile.

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It looks at face value that it could work on Brownfield, like, so, I mean, like a landfill, is that true?

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Yeah, absolutely perfect for something like a landfill, just because there's no, you know, no need to puncture the surface. You know, the weight is distributed well enough, and it's low to the ground. So, I mean, I think we, we found that to be of high interest for for for the market.

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So

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what, what are the challenges? What have you run into that are barriers to entry or points of friction for the installers or developers who are ultimately the end user?

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Yeah, I think, you know, probably first and foremost, because it's a new product, we just have to overcome the way of thinking within, you know, especially larger systems, CNI systems.

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When an engineer is used to looking at specific specs for steel systems, you know, they see that it's, you know, got all these various certifications, UL included. We don't actually need a UL certification because it's made out of high density polyethylene. It's a durable plastic material. But we're going to go ahead and get that UL certification, just so that box can be checked on any project. So, you know, I think part of it is, you know, a new way of thinking. You're asking customers to do something new and different, even though it's simpler, their systems might already be set up to pile drive steel, you know, they might already have the capital invested in those in those pieces of equipment. So it's, you know, asking them to make a mind shift, even if it's simpler, even if it's faster to install, even though it's lower cost install, which is why I mentioned earlier, we've, we've oftentimes had to come in and just simply install the systems ourselves. And we've done that, you know? We've used volunteers from communities in Glenwood, Springs, Colorado and Vail, Colorado. We've used local contract day labor in Pennsylvania on that 2.2 megawatt system. So, you know, it is, it's so easy that you really don't need a long term skill crew to do the mechanical installation piece of it. So the advantage there is you can use local labor and provide local jobs, and you don't have to put people up in hotels for so long.

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Again, you know, if a company is entrenched in doing that, you know, doing an installation a certain way, then we're asking him to do it differently. You know, I think you know that part of the other other challenge would be that, as the panels have gotten bigger, we we need to build a bigger rack. And so right now, we're a little bit limited in that, you know, we can only go up to racks panel sizes, really. So that the limiting dimension for our our product, I should say, is when, when you install panels on power racks, you install them horizontally, right? You install them in landscape format. And so those panels, those frames clip onto our racks on the top, high side, and then they lay on the low side, and then you put those clips in. As the panels have gotten bigger, they've gotten wider, and so that means our racks need to be a little bit longer. So we're in the process of accelerating our product development to build a larger rack to accommodate those larger panels, and so that that transition from the smaller panels to the bigger panels has happened faster than what we've been able to keep up with just because we've been a bootstrap startup company. But you know, by the end of the year, we'll have a new rack with the ability to accommodate those larger panels and then, really, the sky's the limit at that point.

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Yeah, it's amazing how big solar panels have gotten. And you know, there are now 700 plus watt panels in the market, and they're approaching four by eight feet, the size of a sheet of plywood. What else should our listeners know? You know, I'm you have a lot of great footage on your website and photos. I didn't see any east west, but it looks like the product would lend itself well to an East West design as well.

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Have any installers developed in East West? Yeah. So

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I love that formation, personally.

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Installation, an East West installation has been done or what I. Would call sort of a tent formation. So instead of the panels, you know, being faced all South, they're faced east west. That configuration was actually used in Maui, our product was used as a part of the Maui fire relief effort. And so they, you know, put racks down with panels on concrete in order to power refrigeration for the relief workers after that tragic episode, and we saw an instance of where they also did the East West formation. I think the obvious advantage there is, because the panels are meeting back to back, you don't have as much wind concern of wind uplift, and therefore it reduces the amount of ballast you need.

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It also allows you to increase the the, you know, the ground coverage ratio, the amount of power that you put on that piece of property. Because, you know, you don't need to keep, you know, spacing in between the rows as much for shading purposes. So, you know, the other thing that I've, I've I've heard, I was talking to an expert about this just last week, is, you know, one of the things that you get in that East West formation is sort of more of a smooth power curve over the day, which, you know, from a from a CNI or small utility perspective, might you might find more attractive, as opposed to, you know, if you've Got all south facing, you're going to get a spike in the morning and then it's going to drop back down in the evening. So I think there's some real advantages to that configuration. I

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love east west, and it's great when you want power in the shoulders in the morning or the evening.

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Yeah, you must have been that expert that told me that. I think

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I and this is very easy to model in a tool like helioscope. So if you're, if you're a user of Aurora or helioscope, or any of the solar design tools, you can easily model out south facing versus East West in 10 minutes. DREW.

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What else should our listeners know in the last few minutes we have together.

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Yeah. I mean, I think really one to understand that our power racks are suitable for any installation of any scale. I shouldn't say any installation.

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There are certainly areas that you don't want to put it in, flood prone areas, for instance.

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But there's no scale limitation.

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So our product has been used for residential applications. Could have been DIY or installed by a local installer, CNI brown fields, all the way up to utility scale. So we have a project in our pipeline that we're working on now that's 100 megawatt project in the southeast part of the United States. The farmer there, long term farm, ranch, ranch family, multi generations. They care a lot about their property. They care a lot about their land.

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They do want to put solar there for the next 30 years, but they're not sure that they want to commit that land for solar for the next 100 years. And so our product gives them the versatility and kind of the peace of mind and knowing that they can put solar in place on the ground, and 30 years from now, when it's time to send product back to recycling, they can recycle it all, dump out the dirt and recommission the land for farming and ranching, if they decide to do that. You know, I think that really gives some versatility to landowners.

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That is important as you're thinking about making a decision, do I want to put solar on my land? Do I want to put it here forever with our product?

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We call it permanent but portable, and so you could move it as much as you want to. You probably don't want to move it all that much. But the reality is, you can move it. And so if you need to repurpose that land for something else, you can, you know, I would say also that, you know, we're proud to make our product in the United States, and so it's made in the USA, product, but you know, also one that we plan on exporting around the world. As I said earlier, it's a high density polyethylene material. So it's a really durable plastic that is thick walls and, you know, fortified with the structural ribs that are needed to, you know, give our product a 25 year warranty.

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We put a UV protective additive in it. And so, you know, back to the maybe the very first point, it is a highly engineered bucket. It's been highly engineered and tested at the National Lab. It's been highly engineered and tested at wind tunnels, you know, all of the finite element analysis and engineering that you need on, you know, any product bringing it to market. And so, you know, I think what I want people to understand is it's, it's simple as a bucket full of rocks or dirt, yes, but it's durable as what you need, you know, for any system of any scale, for you know, the life of that system, whether it be 2530 years, I

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that's a good place to leave it. I look think forward to checking it out. By the time this goes live, I will have been at Ari. Plus and been to your booths. Look forward to that our listeners can find all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify and reach out to me on LinkedIn or on the website. Cleanpowerhour.com Drew, how can our listeners find you?

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Yeah, check us out at powerfieldenergy.com again, you'll see all the resources there. And you know, we should, should also talk about, you know, cost. We certainly drive down the cost of solar installations, not only the upfront cost, but the long term OAM cost. So check us out. Happy to give you some pricing on on any installation that people are looking at

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fantastic. I'm Tim Montague. I want to thank Drew Bond, the CEO and co founder of Powerfield energy, for coming on the show. Let's grow solar and storage.

The World's Simplest Racking System with Drew Bond | EP242

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