Solar Power World November 2022

November 2022

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Technology • Development • Installation

KICKSTARTS A NEW ERA FOR U.S. SOLAR MANUFACTURING NEW CREDITS SPARK ENERGY STORAGE GOLD RUSH INSIDE A U.S. SOLAR TRACKER MANUFACTURING PLANT EV-CHARGER-INTEGRATED INVERTERS SIMPLIFY HOME SYSTEMS

THE FIRST WORD

It’s a new dawn for domestic solar manufacturing Uncertainty seems to be a defining quality of working in the solar industry. In recent memory, we were unsure of how to carry on addressing a warming planet when the world shut down due to COVID. We awaited an ambitious overhaul to American renewables in President Joe Biden’s proposed Build Back Better Act that took the industry’s collective conscious by storm and just as quickly faded into obscurity.

We watched tax credits that were integral to sustaining domestic solar growth taper off with no extensions or renewals in sight. The global supply chain is still recovering from the delays caused by the pandemic.

But let’s cover some concrete certainties.

The Solar Power World team attended the first RE+ conference since the start of the pandemic, an event that drew more than 27,000 people to Anaheim, making it not only the largest solar show in the United States but also the largest energy-related trade show in the country. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council reported that the U.S. solar industry employed approximately 255,000 people last year. So, by those numbers, more than 10% of the industry attended a single event. And every manufacturer and installer I spoke to at RE+ said they were busy and seeing a lot of interest from attendees.

We covered the momentous passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in our last issue, and now we

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focus on the implementation of the landmark bill in this final 2022 edition of SPW. There are still many questions about the IRA, but the Dept. of the Treasury will hopefully soon make final declarations on the provisions related to solar workforce, project development and manufacturing.

Even before the finer details come out, manufacturers are already expanding operations in the United States. I was able to visit Nextracker’s newest torque tube production plant in Pennsylvania in September, where the single-axis tracker manufacturer is adding a second production line with the IRA in place. We’ll continue to report on new factories starting up in the wake of manufacturing tax credits in the IRA. Uncertainty still remains around the details of federal support for U.S. solar. Yet, that is the nature of proceeding into a new generation for Billy Ludt an industry. We Associate Editor certainly don’t have bludt@wtwhmedia.com all the answers at @SolarBillyL @SolarPowerWorld the moment, but Kelly, Kelsey and I have covered a range of topics related to the IRA in this issue of SPW. We hope you’ll continue to recognize us as your go-to sources regarding the U.S. solar market. SPW

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CONTENTS

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BUSINESS

ON THE COVER The IRA could bring solar manufacturing stateside thanks to new production tax credits for various components. Pictured is a European Meyer Burger plant, but a similar plant is expected to open in Arizona in 2023.

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Apprenticeship requirements pose a daunting challenge for the industry, but groups are ready to take it on

INSTALLATION 14 CASE STUDY

An all-electric train line uses behindthe-meter solar to cut costs and save riders money

TECHNOLOGY 18 PANELS

The most up-to-date list of module makers with existing U.S. factories or future domestic manufacturing plans

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30 MOUNTING

SPW visits Nextracker’s Pennsylvania manufacturing plant to see how solar trackers are made

36 STORAGE

The standalone storage ITC allows the technology to perform its full breadth of functions

SPECIAL SECTION: FEDERAL POLICY

The IRA will transform the solar industry over the next decade. We dive deeper into some of the many clean energy provisions affecting project financing, manufacturing and more. | PAGE 39

26 INVERTERS

2 FIRST WORD

New inverters make it easier and cheaper to pair rooftop solar with EVs and charge from the sun

8 NEWS BRIEFS

52 SOFTWARE ROUNDUP

58 CONTRACTOR’S CORNER 60 AD INDEX

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NEWS BRIEFS

SOLAR POLICY SNAPSHOTS A guide to recent legislation and research throughout the country.

Ground-mounted solar projects may need to become more durable if FEMA's plan to raise the risk category goes through.

FEMA proposes change to building code that could increase cost of ground-mounted solar

Newsom signs bill requiring California utilities to create community solar programs

Washington, D.C.

Sacramento, California

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has proposed raising the risk category for ground-mounted solar from low-hazard risk category I to category IV, which could increase the material makeup of solar racking and modules and raise costs substantially. SEIA and other industry advocates are pushing for a compromise to classify groundmounted solar as risk category II.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2316, which requires large utilities to create community renewable energy programs that pair community solar with storage to help the state overcome clean energy access barriers. The law was supported by a diverse coalition, including advocates for environmental justice, clean energy, ratepayers, home builders and commercial property owners.

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NEWS BRIEFS

California cities and counties required to switch to instant, online residential solar permitting by 2024

California Energy Commission to require more utility transparency into customer electricity rates

DOE calls for increased cybersecurity measures in preparation for rapid distributed energy growth

Sacramento, California

Sacramento, California

Washington, D.C.

Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to require instant, online residential solar permitting in large California cities and counties was signed by Gov. Newsom in September.

This new law will require those entities to adopt a solution such as NREL and UL’s automated permitting SolarAPP+ software

by September 30, 2024.

The California Energy Commission adopted updates to the state’s standards that will give consumers more timely and accurate information on electricity costs to help them better manage energy use. By April 2023, the state’s large IOUs will be required to publish an at least hourly rate database.

The Dept. of Energy recently released a long-term evaluation and strategic look forward at cybersecurity considerations associated with distributed energy resources like solar power. The authors recommend minimum security requirements and governance to protect these resources from hackers, especially as the industry grows.

CPUC expected to hold off on NEM 3.0 decision until after election

Treasury seeks public input on clean energy provisions in the IRA

Community solar groups partner with farmers on sustainable development

Sacramento, California

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to hold off on issuing its NEM 3.0 proposed decision until after the November election. The California Solar & Storage Association previously thought the decision would be announced by the end of September.

The U.S. Dept. of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service in early October began seeking public input on the numerous climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. The department also started convening stakeholder roundtables to hear from a “wide range of voices.”

The American Farmland Trust has partnered with two community solar groups on an initiative to combat climate change through sustainable solar energy development.

The groups set a goal to develop 500 MW of community solar capacity in five years, guided by AFT’s Smart Solar siting principles.

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BUSINESS

B I L LY L U D T | A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R

SOLAR ORGANIZATIONS PREPARE TO MEET JOB DEMANDS

STEMMING FROM THE IRA U.S.

federal and state governments have set clean energy goals to curb carbon production and produce electricity from renewable sources like photovoltaic solar. The deadlines are years away, but in the interim, solar installation companies, industry organizations and governmental bodies are determining how to quickly scale the job growth needed to reach these milestones.

Solar workforce requirements are both intensified and supported by the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA will provide tax credits for solar projects above a certain megawatt size that pay

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installers prevailing wages and employ a required number of people enrolled in apprenticeship programs. However, in its current state, the IRA does not include any direct funding for job training or apprenticeship programs.

“One of the disappointments of the IRA was that in the final version that was enacted, a lot of the resources directly for workforce development and job training were no longer in there that had been in the Build Back Better Act,” said Andie Wyatt, policy director and legal counsel for GRID Alternatives. “So that leaves nonprofits like GRID and other sectors to fill in and make sure that we

actually have the workforce to do the enormous buildout of renewable energy that the Inflation Reduction Act otherwise promises.”

Commercial arrays that employ four or more people must meet apprenticeship requirements to be eligible for the full 30% investment tax credit. Additionally, those laborers must be paid a prevailing wage based on “rates for construction, alteration or repair of a similar character” within a region, according to the IRA. The bill text says for projects started before January 1, 2023, 10% of a project’s labor hours must be performed by

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BUSINESS

GRID Alternatives

apprentices — but these requirements take effect for projects that begin construction 60 days after the Dept. of the Treasury defines the metrics, which hasn’t happened at the time of publication. That percentage grows to 12.5% starting in 2023 and 15% in 2024. Commercial projects smaller than 1 MWAC are not required to meet these qualifications to be eligible for the ITC, and there are no labor requirements for tax incentives in the residential market.

Once Treasury guidance is released, companies will need to follow the new prevailing wage and apprenticeship rules to avoid missing out on the majority of incentives. And they shouldn’t try and cheat the system, either. The IRA includes monetary penalties to discourage contractors from falsifying apprenticeship enrollment and prevailing wage payment.

How this process will be handled is still unclear until the Dept. of the Treasury issues guidance.

We’re not going to be successful in reaching our goals if we don’t have a diverse workforce.

Finding the workers Solar-specific apprenticeships are rare at the moment. Apprenticeship programs must meet certain criteria of the Dept. of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency, but very few have gone through that effort so far.

“Apprenticeships are formally approved programs,” Wyatt said. “There

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is not really one for solar installation right now. GRID is involved in helping develop that, but as of right now, apprenticeships tend to fall into other categories like electrician or different parts of labor.”

One of the few examples is Florida’s solar energy technician apprenticeship created by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), the Florida Solar Energy Industries Association and the University of Central Florida’s FSEC Energy Research Center. It’s still in the early stages and can only accept a limited number of apprentices to start.

“This is a complicated issue,” Wyatt said. “Apprenticeships are generally multi-year, big commitment processes where once you’re really sure that industry is for you, it’s a job.”

While industry organizations like GRID are working with collaborators to lay the solar apprenticeship groundwork

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BUSINESS

PAT. PEND.

The Next Generation of Trunk Bus Technology

in the United States, the Dept. of Labor is taking steps to help too. It recently named renewable energy developer RES an “Apprenticeship Ambassador” for the U.S. renewable energy industry and is expected to nominate other companies for the role too. These ambassadors will help the government develop best practices for renewable energy apprenticeships and expand access to these programs for underrepresented individuals.

The IRA does not include low-income workforce training initiatives in the text, but solar nonprofits like GRID and SEIA, along with the Dept. of Labor and Dept. of Energy have made it clear that equal opportunity is a priority for the buildout.

“Honestly, we’re not going to be successful in reaching our goals if we don’t have a diverse workforce,” said Erika Symmonds, VP of equity and workforce development at SEIA. “We are serving more communities, and we are going to have to have a workforce to reflect those communities.

Just to meet the numbers, it’s going to require that we set up companies and opportunities that are equitable and create inclusive environments within our workforce. I think it’s a huge opportunity for people who might not have been exposed yet to the opportunities of clean energy to get in and play a key role in meeting these goals.”

Last year, SEIA released an industry roadmap that envisions 30% of the electricity generated in the United States coming from solar by 2030.

SEIA estimates that ambition would require the total number of people employed in the solar industry to grow to 1 million. According to IREC’s National Solar Jobs Census, the U.S. solar industry employed a total of 255,037 people in 2021. It will be no small feat to get to 1 million, but industry leaders are working behind the scenes to pave the way for a booming solar jobs market.

“There’s going to be a great demand for the jobs that are being created, so there also needs to be something complementary in the workforce development space to prepare individuals from local communities to be able to fill these jobs,” said Adewale OgunBadejo, VP of workforce development at GRID Alternatives. SPW

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VOLTAGE-LLC.COM

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B I L LY L U D T | A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R

MULTI-ARRAY SOLAR PROJECT

DIRECTLY POWERS INTERSTATE COMMUTER TRAIN

THE

PATCO Speedline is a 15-milelong high-speed commuter train responsible for transporting millions of people between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden County, New Jersey, annually. Like many modern commuter rail lines, PATCO Speedline uses an electrified third rail to power its locomotive cars. A robust behind-themeter solar portfolio is responsible for most of that power.

The Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) is a bi-state transit agency responsible for maintaining four bridges crossing the Delaware River that connect New Jersey and Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. It is also the parent company of the Port Authority Transit Corporation, which operates the PATCO Speedline.

In 2018, the DRPA commissioned a 22-MW solar portfolio built across seven different sites in its New Jersey territory that is now powering the PATCO Speedline. The six carports and one rooftop array started commercial operations in April 2022. While using solar to power electric trains isn’t a new concept globally, this project is the first

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and largest in the Northeast United States that is not grid-tied, and instead supplies power directly to the rail line.

“We committed ourselves to the idea of stewardship,” said John Hanson, CEO of DRPA and president of PATCO. “Stewardship is at the center of our mission and our vision. Environmental stewardship makes sense, because we’ve got these four bridges that span a very complex and biodiverse ecosystem in the Delaware River, and this mass transit line, which is hopefully contributing to positive environmental effects.”

Powering the third rail with solar Back in 2017, the DRPA conducted a feasibility assessment for solar construction on its properties between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The port authority had prior experience with energy efficiency measures, such as upgrading to LED lighting, but not with solar energy. Given the electrified nature of the PATCO Speedline and its high energy load, the DRPA started seriously considering solar as an energy source.

Looking at its train stations, bridges and headquarters throughout the region,

the DRPA opted to develop sites east of the Delaware River because New Jersey offered renewable energy credits and Pennsylvania did not.

“For the money to make sense, New Jersey has really strong renewable energy credits, and Pennsylvania, at the time, did not have that,” said Nicole Ochroch, senior engineer at the DRPA. “It just wasn’t making sense at the time to look into Pennsylvania.”

The DRPA issued a request for proposals for the solar project in 2018 and selected SunPower Commercial & Industrial Solutions prior to its acquisition by TotalEnergies in early 2022. The groups arranged a 20year power purchase agreement on the project, with TotalEnergies responsible for designing, building, operating and maintaining the arrays for the duration of the PPA. The arrays were designed throughout 2019 and construction began in May 2020 — two months after the COVID-19 lockdown.

“It actually worked in our benefit, to be honest. We are a transportation

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INSTALLATION

The Delaware River Port Authority

agency and right at the beginning, we were given the opportunity to continue our construction projects because we were vital to the region,” Ochroch said.

“As such, we were actually able to expedite a lot of our construction in our public-facing areas because the parking lots at our PATCO stations, which is where we have our solar systems, weren’t being used.”

There are seven solar arrays installed across the DRPA’s properties in New Jersey. Four carports are installed on four different PATCO lots, accounting for 20 MW of the total project size. A small

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carport is installed at the Betsy Ross Bridge; another covers the employee parking lot at One Port Center, the DRPA’s headquarters; and the final system is a rooftop array at the Commodore Barry Bridge. Altogether, there are more than 50,000 solar panels installed across the seven sites.

Working with the former SunPower installation team meant the hardware used on the system was mostly first-party.

The arrays are composed of SunPower X-Series and E-Series solar panels, Helix Carport racking and Delta inverters. The systems did require some modifications

NOVEMBER 2022

We were given the opportunity to continue our construction projects because we were vital to the region. www.solarpowerworldonline.com

INSTALLATION

to tie directly into traction power connections of the PATCO Speedline that aren’t found on grid-tied systems.

“The technology is pretty much the same, but the safety mechanisms and our SCADA systems had to be really tuned in to understand what’s happening on the PATCO side and how that interfaces with the solar systems so that there’s no back-feeding,” Ochroch said. “We have multiple layers of safety elements built in, which is definitely more than what is traditional in a typical carport system.”

Running directly to the train line in seven different locations meant different wiring considerations for each site. Mike Venuto, chief engineer at the DPRA, said PATCO locations and the rail line weren’t always considered contiguous parcels, so months were spent arranging easement approvals from other property owners and transit Delaware authorities to run The these strings.

River Port “The other challenge was when we were Authority putting it all together, you’re working in and around a live train line, and our PATCO system operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said. “So, something as simple as going under the tracks or pulling wires across the tracks…takes a lot of coordination to do.”

PATCO Speedline provides a service to millions of commuters in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. While public transit is subsidized, the DRPA still strives to keep the cost of train fares down. With the addition of solar, the DRPA is covering about half of its electrical needs, which has resulted in substantial savings for both the agency and commuters.

“Cutting costs enables us to keep our costs low and to put off fare increases for longer periods of time,” Hanson said. “In fact, right now we’re nearly 12 years without a toll increase or a fare increase because of the financial stewardship that we’ve engaged with here, and this project rings both bells.

It’s financial stewardship and environmental stewardship.” SPW

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The Delaware River Port Authority

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TECHNOLOGY 18

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in large-scale K E L LY P I C K E R E L | E D I T O R I N C H I E F

DOMESTIC

SOLAR PANEL

MANUFACTURING

UPDATE 2022 The

United States is hopefully, fingers crossed, entering a solar module manufacturing renaissance. After having its domestic supply decimated by China’s precise buildout of solar manufacturing over the last decade, manufacturing tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act should provide a lifeline to the market. As it stands today, U.S. solar panel manufacturing consists only of module assembly in the crystalline silicon space, but the promised credits could rebuild the domestic chain and bring silicon ingot, wafer and cell manufacturing back home.

The hard work begins now. With various steps in module manufacturing taking years to build out from scratch, industry folks should be wary of new-name companies promising ribbon cuttings within the next year. If all goes well, the United States should begin hitting its domestic manufacturing stride by 2025.

Until then, SPW has gathered information on the companies already making modules in the United States and provides a summary here of their expansion plans related to the new IRA credits.

Only new outlets that have earned our editorial team’s utmost confidence are included in this list.

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PANEL TECHNOLOGY

OPERATING Auxin Solar – California Auxin Solar, the small-scale solar panel OEM in San Jose, California, that is publicly at the center of the ongoing AD/CVD circumvention investigation, is still invested in manufacturing in the United States. The company has a stated annual manufacturing capacity of 150 MW, and reps told SPW that the actual capacity is “well beyond that,” but no official numbers were provided. Auxin was actively planning expansions and placed orders for new equipment before decisions around IRA tax credits were announced. While the IRA is a step in the right direction, Auxin CEO Mamun Rashid said that the United States can “never out-subsidize China,” and fair trade policy is critical to domestic solar manufacturing success.

OPENING 2023 Convalt Energy – New York The company that bought the equipment previously used at the SolarWorld factory in Oregon has moved everything to New York and expects to have a 900-MW panel assembly plant open by mid-2023.

The vintage equipment still makes use of smaller wafer sizes. Convalt Energy is also looking into an ingot, wafer and solar cell manufacturing factory if enough capital can be raised. Convalt CEO Hari Achuthan told SPW that starting production on domestic ingots and wafers may be “aspirational,” but it’s the route the U.S. market is moving toward. The manufacturing tax credits only validate Convalt’s manufacturing roadmap that was established more than two years ago.

EXPANDING Crossroads Solar – Indiana South Bend, Indiana-based solar panel assembler Crossroads Solar started in 2021, amidst supply chain woes and uncertain policy progress.

Crossroads reached 12 MW of annual manufacturing capacity in 2022, using a labor force comprised of men and women who traditionally struggle to find good employment. All of Crossroads’ employees are felons reintegrating into society. President Patrick Regan said that with the assistance of IRA credits, his small-scale operation — which he expects to bring to 40 MW of annual capacity with the opening of an additional line — could be adopted in more communities needing local employment.

WHAT ABOUT PLASTIC?

Meyer Burger

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ADVERTORIAL

SOLAR SPOTLIGHT:

Mitigating supply chain delays in the solar tracker market IN THIS SPECIAL EDITION OF CONTRACTOR’S CORNER¸ solar tracker supplier Soltec has found success in cutting supply chain delays by having a global manufacturing footprint. Colin Caufield, sales vice president at Soltec, discusses how the company has successfully navigated trade roadblocks like steel tariffs and supply chain delays, and what that means for the U.S. utilityscale solar market.

Below is a portion of the company’s Solar Spotlight podcast with Solar Power World, but be sure to listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app.

What challenges are arising in the supply chain for photovoltaic solar projects?

There are many. I’ll try and break it down piece by piece. For the past several decades, but certainly in recent history as it relates to PV projects in the United States, there’s been a total dependence on “just-in-time” deliveries, especially those that are coming from overseas, across the entire value chain — especially as it relates to our product, which is trackers — whether it be steel beams, piles, mounting rails, other forms of hardware, electronics. These are all part of a complicated supply chain that depends on many different countries of origin to try to get to the best and most aggressive price for our customers.

What we saw over the past couple of years were tons of interruptions to that supply chain. Some of them were happening at the manufacturing level; a lot of them, which was global news, were happening on maritime shipments, and congestion at ports or even canals that were famously being blocked. There were all types of interruptions and challenges

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when it came to getting things on time to sites.

The whole just-in-time delivery thing wasn’t as dependable as it had been in the past, and there’s been a lot of adjustments that everybody, ourselves included, has needed to make.

What are the solutions that Soltec is adopting to deal with supply chain constraints?

It’s been all about diversifying the supply chain that we have. Adding new countries of origin, adding new manufacturers, so that we’re not beholden to one source or another. We do have a bunch of suppliers that are in Spain, because that is where our company is headquartered, and that can give us anything from piles to tubes to rails to even the assembly of the electronics, for example. We control a lot of that supply chain because our team does the manufacturing, so we own some of that, which is a great way to mitigate risks and prioritize depending on what the list of projects is in front of us.

At Soltec, which market scope are you actively covering in the U.S.?

Folks here probably know us mostly for being a tracker supplier for utility-scale projects.

Projects that were 20 MW and greater, and coordinating with the EPC of the given project, to supply them with the trackers and maybe engineer the plant to some extent. That was really the limitation of the scope that we had.

We’ve really widened those offerings. So, now, we’re focusing on utility-scale supply of our trackers. We still offer some installation services depending on the states where they’re being delivered, even for some of those larger utility-scale projects. The newer offerings are

related more to the distributed generation markets. Specifically in the Northeast, and there’s been some in the Midwest where we’ve had some success recently bringing on new customers.

You already talked a little bit about your tracker structures, but what would you say is your flagship product for projects in the U.S.?

The SF7 is the two-portrait product, and that has more than 2 GW of installations here in the United States. However, we’re seeing, especially as it relates to really large utilityscale projects, and especially those that are in conditions, let’s call them parcels, that are very square, very flat, that have friendly soil conditions. We are providing the SF1 on most of our quotations for those projects. The reason is simply that is uses far less steel, and as steel has gone up in price as a commodity, that has significantly impacted the overall CapEx of these projects. So our best bet, and our customers’ best bet for some of those larger utility-scale projects where the conditions are very favorable, is to look at our SF1 product.

It just has a cheaper price to buy and it’s all in those conditions. SPW

SOLTEC.COM

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OHIO: EXPANDING SOUTHEAST: OPENING 2025

First Solar - Ohio & Southeast First Solar has three thin-film solar panel factories sited near each other in Northwest Ohio that will have a cumulative capacity of 7.1 GW in 2023 after the third factory is completed.

The third factory was announced preIRA passage, but First Solar’s total Ohio manufacturing capacity was increased by 900 MW after manufacturing tax credits were included in the bill.

Federal support of solar manufacturing did lead to First Solar announcing it would invest up to $1.2 billion in a fourth thin-film solar panel manufacturing facility somewhere in the Southeast. The new facility will have an annual capacity of 3.5 GW and should open by the end of 2025.

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MINNESOTA: EXPANDING FLORIDA: OPERATING

Heliene – Minnesota & Florida Heliene opened its second solar panel manufacturing facility in Iron Mountain, Minnesota, in October 2022. This 420MW facility is nextdoor to its original 150-MW factory, which president Martin Pochtaruk said Heliene will increase to

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PANEL TECHNOLOGY

300 MW by April 2023. These two upgrades were committed to before IRA passed.

With tax credits announced, Pochtaruk told SPW that Heliene wants to open another module line and eventually a solar cell manufacturing facility to stop depending on imports. No official decisions will be made until the administration of the manufacturing tax credits are better established.

Heliene also operates a 100-MW panel factory in Riviera Beach, Florida.

EXPANDING JinkoSolar – Florida Chinese megacompany JinkoSolar opened a 400-MW panel assembly

plant in Jacksonville, Florida, in late 2018. The manufacturer largely supplies the utility-scale market in the United States, and its small domestic manufacturing capacity has long been tied up in gigawatt-supply-deals with NextEra and Florida Power & Light.

There have been questions surrounding what type of companies may take advantage of IRA credits, and the industry waits for final guidelines from the Treasury Dept. Although firmly established in the United States for years, Jinko’s Chinese background may influence whether any credits are available to the company. Jinko did not provide SPW with an official statement on its future manufacturing plans in the United States.

OPENING 2023 Meyer Burger – Arizona Swiss solar technology company Meyer Burger first announced plans to start solar module assembly in the United States in September 2021. The company chose Goodyear, Arizona, for a 400-MW capacity facility due to its proximity to customers and scheduled production to start by the end of 2022.

But when manufacturing tax credits weren’t included in early infrastructure bills, Meyer Burger put its U.S. plans on hold.

After the IRA passed, Meyer Burger announced it would restart construction on the U.S. factory and make it even bigger — the company now plans on reaching 1.5 GW of

Meyer Burger

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PANEL TECHNOLOGY

panel manufacturing capacity as soon as possible. Production at the site will be split: 1 GW of utility-scale panels and 500 MW of solar panels for the DG sector will be made in Arizona.

OPERATING Mission Solar – Texas Small-scale panel assembler Mission Solar has been opening its San Antonio factory for more installer tours lately, but its 200-MW manufacturing capacity is stalled until it can update its lines to the larger wafer sizes coming to dominate the market. When asked at the RE+ show how large the factory can become, Mission’s VP of marketing Paul Mutchler said that is dependent on the quality of supply its upstream vendors can provide.

Mission Solar announced in late October

YEARS

2022 that it would increase its capacity to 1 GW by 2024.

EXPANDING Qcells – Georgia The country’s largest crystalline silicon solar panel assembler, Qcells will expand its Dalton, Georgia, manufacturing capacity to 3.1 GW by Summer 2023.

Already operating a 1.7-GW plant, the company owned by Hanwha Group is building a 1.4-GW factory next door.

Qcells committed to this second factory before the IRA passed, so more Hanwha investments to the supply chain are coming with the guaranteed credits.

Hanwha invested in polysilicon maker REC Silicon, and plans are underway for ingot, wafer and cell production to set up somewhere in the United States. It

was reported by local news that Hanwha is shopping sites in Texas, Georgia and South Carolina for a potential 9-GW integrated plant. Scott Moskowitz, senior director and head of market intelligence, public affairs and marketing for Qcells North America, told SPW that the company is working on its plans.

“There’s lots of incentive for folks to move quickly, given that the credits start on Jan. 1 and begin to phase down in the latter part of the 10 years,” he said.

EXPANDING Silfab – Washington Canadian panel assembler Silfab operates twin 400-MW manufacturing facilities in Washington, and executive advisor Geoff Atkins told SPW that the company ordered equipment and was

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proceeding with plans to add two new production lines at one of the plants prior to the IRA passing. The manufacturing tax credits in the IRA have “accelerated Silfab’s plans for greater expansion in the United States,” but nothing has officially been confirmed.

Besides expanding its 800-MW annual module assembly capacity in the United States, Silfab is developing a new module design using proprietary back-contact cells that would require in-house manufacturing. Silfab solar cell manufacturing may be setting up in the United States, but the company told SPW it was not yet ready to announce firm plans.

EXPANDING Solar4America – California The former Sunergy solar panel factory in Sacramento was restarted under a new name in January 2022: Solar4America.

The brand name is owned by parent company SPI Energy, which has had no shortage of ambitious plans to announce throughout 2022. In addition to solar panels, the company is the distributor of the all-electric EdisonFuture pickup truck and plans to bring 1.5 GW of wafer manufacturing stateside through an outfit called SEM Wafertech. The wafer plans were announced just a few weeks after the IRA was passed. The group of SPI Energy companies were unable to confirm details to SPW. Regarding the solar module assembly plant, Solar4America fluctuates in the stated capacity of the factory. Believed to be operating today at 650-MW annual capacity, the company has also stated it could reach either 1.1 or 2.3 GW by

early 2023. Datasheets show modules using a range of wafer sizes, from oldschool M2s used in traditional 60- and 72-cell modules, on up to the two largest in the industry: M10 and G12.

If lines are already equipped to handle the largest wafer sizes, gigawatt-scale expansions could be possible in 2023 by Solar4America.

OPERATING SunSpark – California SunSpark, a small-scale OEM in Southern California, has been operating a 250MW facility in Riverside since 2015. A portion of that plant’s output had been distributed through a co-branding deal with local installer SolarMax Technologies. Company reps at the RE+ show told SPW that the company has opened a second factory in nearby City of Industry, California, that is making two new updated modules, also revealed at RE+. No other details could be confirmed by press time.

OPERATING SunTegra – New York SunTegra caters to an exclusive group with its solar shingle product made in Binghamton, New York. The company told SPW in the past that it completes about 50 roofs each year, mostly in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in the Northeast. SunTegra’s annual production capacity is around 10 MW and is unlikely to grow much larger due to its unique application.

EXPANDING Toledo Solar – Ohio The only other CdTe thin-film solar panel

maker in the United States, Toledo Solar caters to the residential and small commercial markets at its 100-MW annual manufacturing capacity plant near First Solar’s HQ in Perrysburg, Ohio. CEO Aaron Bates told SPW that the credits included in IRA give more confidence to the finance world that solar manufacturing is a bankable investment.

Steps are in motion to increase Toledo Solar’s capacity to 300 MW, with plans to reach 2.8 GW by 2027.

“We already committed the capital, and that will increase [with IRA credits],” Bates said. “It allows us to further lower the cost of manufacturing, which is critical for a level playing field. These are not small numbers. For us, you’re talking $40 million per leap of growth, from 100 to 300 MW, 300 to 600 MW, etc. For First Solar, they’re doing billion-dollar projects.

These are not small endeavors.”SPW

There’s lots of incentive for folks to move quickly, given that the credits start on Jan. 1.

Solar Power World continuously updates its list and map of U.S. solar module manufacturing online. View it at SOLARPOWERWORLDONLINE.COM/U-S-SOLAR-PANEL-MANUFACTURERS

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

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INVERTER TECHNOLOGY

KELSEY MISBRENER • MANAGING EDITOR

New charger-integrated inverters can ensure EVs are powered by the sun In this era of high gas prices and increasingly severe weather events, consumers are thinking more critically about their home and vehicle energy savings and security. This evolution presents more opportunities for solar installers to expand their offerings to address the whole home energy ecosystem.

Solar marketplace EnergySage recently surveyed 1,000 consumers to find the order of adoption of various green home energy upgrades. The company found the most common entry point was smart thermostats (22%), while solar, electric vehicles (EVs) and energy efficiency audits/retrofits all came in around 13%.

For those who started their journey with EVs, 32% later installed a home EV charger, and 25% then purchased solar power. For those who started with a solar installation, 15% later purchased EVs, and 44% then installed EV chargers.

New inverter products on the market are trending away from the stepby-step, piecemeal approach in favor of an integrated and cohesive solar + EV system.

GoodWe/GE’s GEH (rolling out in Q1 2023) and SolarEdge’s EV Charging Single Phase Inverter (shipping now) both feature an integrated terminal block that can accept an AC-powered EV charger.

The charging cable is inserted directly into the inverter, and a convenient bracket is mounted on the wall to stow

the handle when not in use. For homeowners adding both PV and EVs to their homes, an inverter-integrated Level 2 charger could save them money and give them more control over their energy use.

Installation ease The first benefit of EV-integrated inverters is simpler and cheaper installation. The main electric panel in many homes is located in the basement — far from the garage where they need to charge their vehicle.

“What we find is when you go to install one of these chargers, the installation cost is far greater than the actual cost of the charger, because you need to run this gigantic cable from your basement, through the wall up

SolarEdge’s inverter-integrated charger is installed in the garage between a battery and mount for the handle.

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www.solarpowerworldonline.com

INVERTER TECHNOLOGY

the house, and then you need to get it to your garage,” said Chris Thompson, VP of product at SolarEdge.

This extra cost can be between $1,000 to $4,000, depending on the length of wire needed to reach the charging unit.

What we find is when you go to install one of these chargers, the installation cost is far greater than the actual cost of the charger.

“People actually use this as a decision factor when they buy an electric vehicle. They find out, ‘Oh boy, to get the vehicle charger installed in my home is going to be $4,000, I think I’m just going to stick with my gas car, because that’s like two years’ worth of gas.’

So it actually discourages adoption of electric vehicles,” Thompson said.

But when the charger is integrated in the solar inverter, which is often mounted on the garage wall, that long and costly wire run can be eliminated.

Another advantage of EV-integrated inverters is the ability to avoid a main panel upgrade. Standalone EV chargers typically carry the biggest electrical load in the home — at least double the size of the load from an air conditioning unit or hot tub, Thompson said. That means there’s often not enough power available on a 100- or 150-A breaker for an EV charger.

PV installations, on the other hand, usually fit on the main panel, depending on the other loads in the home.

“If you put this [EV charger] installation at the inverter, then you can avoid the main

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main panel upgrade, and that saves thousands of dollars,” Thompson said.

Jock Patterson, national technical sales lead for GoodWe, said some solar + EV owners may still opt for the standalone charger if they can afford a main panel upgrade and want a higherspeed charger.

“However, for the average person, it seems that this would be a good fit. And certainly, anybody who’s considering PV, and the mandate for electric vehicles, especially in California, are going to be incentivized to go down the EV route,” Patterson said. “Why force a service upgrade when you can just have one breaker added to the main service panel?”

Inverter-integrated chargers also have the unique benefit of a solar boost during sunlight hours. A standalone EV charger wired at a 40-A breaker is

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required to be derated to 32 A per the electrical code. But when that charger is wired at the inverter, the extra 8 A can come directly from the inverter.

“The incremental energy is coming from the other source,” Thompson said.

“It’s just clever engineering.”

Sun-powered charging Whether homeowners are motivated by the desire to pull as little high-priced electricity from the grid as possible or to be the most eco-friendly residents on the block, the new inverter-integrated chargers are the best way to ensure consumers are putting solar energy into their EVs. “This is a unique function, because the only way you can do that is if the charging system has visibility to PV production,” Thompson said. “The system as a whole knows what’s going on at the vehicle and knows how much solar is

NOVEMBER 2022

being produced. And it can make sure that the vehicle is only being charged from solar power. It has the entirety of information.”

All of the PV generation and solar charging preferences are centralized in each inverter manufacturer’s proprietary app.

Still, unless a person keeps the car a home during the day and plugged in during peak sun hours, they won’t be able to charge their vehicles 100% of the time from their rooftop PV. That’s why the inverter apps allow users to schedule EV charging from the grid around off-peak time-of-use rates to get the lowest-cost electricity.

“I think they like the flexibility.

There are moments where I need to get this thing charged right now. But when I’m not in a rush, I like to do just clean energy,” GoodWe’s Patterson said.

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Strategically using the energy produced by rooftop solar could evolve even more as time goes on and regulations catch up to technology.

Thompson said he sees a future where the vehicle plays an interactive role within the home — providing bidirectional vehicle-to-home or even vehicle-to-vehicle energy. If one EV is at 100% and another needs 10% more energy, vehicle-to-vehicle energy transfers could help avoid grid charging during non-solar hours.

Cars will be just another piece of the home energy puzzle — instead of buying numerous stationary storage units for the home, residents will just need a couple batteries installed since they’ll be able to use their EV as another form of backup power.

“The vehicle will be in the home and will be a complete asset, meaning during the day, you can charge your vehicle from solar. At night, you could discharge your vehicle in the home. During day or night, you could transfer energy from a stationary battery to a vehicle, or vice versa,” Thompson said. SPW

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MOUNTING TECHNOLOGY

A look inside the solar industry’s newest U.S. factory

BILLY LUDT • ASSOCIATE EDITOR

A crane operator hauls completed torque tubes across the factory floor at Nextracker’s Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, factory. Billy Ludt/Solar Power World

Solar Power World visits Nextracker’s Pennsylvania tracker torque tube production plant.

A steel processing plant in Pennsylvania that predates World War I has returned to operations and is producing crucial components for an industry that didn’t exist 100 years ago — solar power.

Bethlehem Steel was founded in 1904 in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, a town about 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

The factory was dormant for years, and still had dirt floors at the beginning of 2022. In June of this year, part of the interior was rebuilt to accommodate manufacturing lines for torque tubes — the rotating portion of a single-axis solar tracker — used in racking developed by

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Nextracker, one of the largest producers of solar trackers on the planet.

“This has been an industrial place for a long time,” said Matt Carroll, CEO of BCI Steel, a longtime contract manufacturer running Nextracker’s new Pennsylvania factory. “All along this river were steel mills. Mill after mill after mill — most of that is gone. This factory is a rekindling of that industrial heritage.”

The next several years will undoubtedly be busy for solar manufacturing in the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act includes federal provisions for manufacturing tax credits

NOVEMBER 2022

to bolster and support new and existing production operations for solar hardware, geared toward components used in large-scale projects like solar tracker torque tubes. The IRA also includes a 10% tax credit adder for projects that use a certain amount of domestic products — incentivizing developers and installers to buy American.

Within the last year, Nextracker opened three new U.S. factory lines with manufacturing partners. In addition to the Leetsdale location, there are new factories in Phoenix, Arizona, and Sinton, Texas, run by contract manufacturers

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We’re joined by Mike Dunlap, general manager of Roof Tech, to talk about the company’s product offerings, where rail-less roof mounts are today and what they mean for project inspections in 2022.

Below is a portion of the company’s Solar Spotlight podcast with Solar Power World, but be sure to listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app.

Now, I understand that Roof Tech Inc. has had success with its top down, self-flashing roof mount RT-MINI and the company’s moving more into rail-less mounts with RT-APEX. Why head in this direction now?

Roof Tech is actually primarily a rail-less racking manufacturer. That’s really where we got our start in Japan in the mid-90s — 1994 to be exact, which actually does make us the oldest rail-less manufacturer on Earth, not to mention in North America. But when we came to the United States in 2012 as the first branch off of our parent company in Japan to try to tackle the U.S. market, we approached the market with rail-less, and in 2012, rail-less was a thing that was just unheard of. No one knew what it was very, very early on in the rail-less market in the U.S. A couple of years later, we adapted to the market in the U.S. by offering a mount that was meant for rail, because we had this awesome flashing we’d been doing since 1994. It’s been a huge success — we have about 70% market share in other parts of the globe and when we came to the U.S. we have this flashing, but in a method that wasn’t quite accepted by the industry. To shorten that up, in about 2016 or so, we ended up coming out with the Mini, or the original product that was an adaptation of one of our rail-less bases to adapt to a rail-mounted system, which had huge success.

At that point, everyone was able to take advantage of our proven technology with our flashing and still not have to change the entire game with rail.

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

With increasing aluminum prices and supply chain issues in mind, does railless make sense in every region?

Absolutely, and those are basically the two main reasons. The larger companies have chosen to go rail-less. Reducing costs of material and supply chain issues and also internal logistics, as a third main reason. Instead of having a warehouse that stores these giant rails, you can now fit everything into small boxes on a pallet.

I think typically right now, you can do roughly one pallet of product — just a four by four pallet, 6 ft high — is roughly around 6 to 8 kW per install. That’s amazing to get into one pallet, which actually can be stacked.

The amount of space that you’re trying to warehouse products alone is a huge time saver — huge space saver. The other thing, too, is that aluminum costs have just recently over the past three years increased about 57%. That 57% was actually just within the past 12 months, so this has been a huge cost that we’ve seen spiking numbers in racking in general. But the thing about rail is the majority of their product is extruded aluminum, and quite a bit of it.

How do inspections differ between rail-based and rail-less installations? And what are mid-point inspections?

This is I wouldn’t say an anomaly but a recent development over the past few years, that some jurisdictions are now implementing what they would call a mid-point inspection or a bonding inspection.

When you’re doing a rail job, what that means in those areas is that you would only be allowed to set your bases, your mounts, your flashings, your L-feet and your rail, but then you’d have to stop the job, wait for the building inspector to come out and do a bonding inspection for continuity. They would have to make sure that everything was properly connected and bonded within that rail system before you lay the modules.

When rail-less comes into play with the mid-point inspection, all of our bonding and all of our continuity comes within the module itself. So because we don’t use rails, we actually use the structural viability of the module itself to make our spans, which also means that we bond through the modules. SPW

ROOF-TECH.US

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that also produce other tracker components. Nextracker commissioned new manufacturing lines prior to the IRA passing to address domestic supply chain constraints resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was massive congestion at the ports. Rail lines were congested.

There weren’t enough trucks or containers. In addition to that, the cost doubled, tripled, even quadrupled for logistics,” said Marco Miller, COO and co-founder of Nextracker.

“A lot of companies had to rethink their entire supply chain strategy and Nextracker — although we’ve been manufacturing here — decided to take that initiative to expand our [domestic] manufacturing base to reduce the lead times to get our products to market faster, with more predictability.”

These are good-paying jobs, and they’re permanent.

Now with IRA support, the company plans to open more new U.S. factories and expand existing operations. For the last few months, its new factories have produced components that are already being deployed in regional solar projects.

Touring the plant Bethlehem Steel is one of many factory buildings at the Leetsdale Industrial Park, a 140-acre site flanked by the Ohio River and a commercial railroad line, both of which serve as shipment routes out of Leetsdale. The west end of the Bethlehem building stretches over the river, and military landing craft produced there during World War II were dropped straight

Torque tubes to be used in single-axis solar trackers are fed through a mill. Nextracker

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into the water before sailing out to the ocean.

Photos from Bethlehem’s era of armaments production hang on the walls of a factory now dedicated to addressing another global crisis.

BCI previously manufactured components for Nextracker in its other steel facilities; however, the new line in Leetsdale is a factory strictly producing tracker hardware.

“We’ve been working together with Nextracker on supply chain and manufacturing since the start,” Carroll said. “We’ve evolved with them, and this is just the latest evolution.”

BCI began manufacturing torque tubes at Bethlehem in June following a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Nextracker executives and legislators, including Jennifer Granholm, secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Energy. A completed solar tracker stands in the middle of the factory floor with modules autographed by those invited guests. The panels face toward a semi-automated torque tube production line operated by a local workforce.

“These are good-paying jobs, and they’re permanent. Whereas field install jobs are also permanent but they’re not quite as stationary,” Carroll said. “We have second- and third-generation steel workers whose parents or grandparents worked in these mills.”

BCI’s manufacturing equipment was custom-made for torque tube production.

The current manufacturing line was operating in one of BCI’s Malaysian factories before being imported to Pennsylvania.

At one end of the factory floor are rows of steel coils, lengths of flattened metal wrapped into spools. A spool is placed in an uncoiler that feeds the steel

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

MOUNTING TECHNOLOGY

A welder connects two spools of steel coil.

Nextracker

sheet into an accumulator and tube mill that makes the metal malleable to bend into the shape of a cylinder. The long edges of the tube are welded together and cut to a length determined by the solar tracker model.

Formed tubes are taken by conveyer belt to the drilling and swaging lines. At the swaging line, torque tube ends are shaped to slide into the next tube to form a tracker row. A gang drill makes holes in the torque tube to attach panel rails and other tracker components. Then, the completed torque tubes are inspected for field use.

When one sheet of steel coil is finished, another is added and welded onto the last to keep the line running, and the cycle repeats.

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

“We manufacture locally in most of the regions where we actually have projects,” said Yves Figuerola, VP of global sourcing and supply chain at Nextracker. “We’ve been producing in the U.S. for three, four years, but not at a high volume due to, basically, cost. It takes time to set up these facilities.”

Nextracker is opening manufacturing lines to serve immediate regions where there is demand for solar tracker projects, including northern U.S. states where

the terrain and weather conditions were not always conducive to singleaxis trackers. The company has opened project development in those territories with NX Horizon - XTR, a single-axis tracker system with higher tolerance for undulating land. Completed torque tubes are loaded onto flatbed trucks and taken to regional projects.

“It’s going to the Midwest and Northeast,” Carroll said. “There’s a lot of country that’s a day drive from here, so

We manufacture locally in most of the regions where we actually have projects.

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that’ll be it primarily. There’s enough there for us to stay busy.”

The steel processed at the Bethlehem plant is also sourced from local mills, including from United States Steel in Pittsburgh. The steel used in Nextracker torque tubes is produced in electric arc furnaces, which emit considerably less carbon compared to traditional coalpowered blast furnaces. Portions of the steel are sourced from recycled metals, as well.

Nextracker plans to increase output at current facilities and open new factory lines in the United States quickly. Figuerola said the company is finalizing agreements with several other contract manufacturers at the time of publication.

“I was telling people that things are going to grow exponentially, and then looking back, I realized it has been growing exponentially for 20 years,” Figuerola said. “[The IRA] would just be another layer of acceleration, but it has been like this forever in solar. It’s exciting and I think it’s going to unlock an amount of projects that developers were maybe hesitant to try. It’s going to push everything.”

BCI plans to add a second torque tube line to the Bethlehem plant by the end of Spring 2023 and is setting up equipment to produce panel rails as well. The second half of the Bethlehem mill remains undeveloped, and Carroll expects to eventually cover the remainder of the dirt floor with concrete and reopen the large doors over the Ohio River to ship tracker hardware by water.

In the pursuit of a fully domestic solar supply chain, tracker manufacturers have the unique advantage of working with fewer materials necessary for production than other components found on a solar array.

“I would say the steel parts of solar systems in general are easier to make. It just takes longer to build a module plant,” Carroll said. “Not just trackers, but solar racking is going to be probably the first to be made here because we already have the inputs here.” SPW

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The manufacturing line at Bethlehem Steel is made of several different stations that take spools of steel coil and form them into torque tubes. Billy Ludt/Solar Power World

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STORAGE TECHNOLOGY

KELLY PICKEREL • EDITOR IN CHIEF

An energy storage boom is coming thanks to the new storage ITC A 21st century gold rush is upon us, as individuals, businesses and utilities sprint to install energy storage systems using the new storage investment tax credit (ITC) included in the IRA. For the first time, batteries don’t have to be installed with or charged by solar panels to receive a tax credit. Systems of any size — from residential backup to grid-scale peaking aids — will have access to a 30% ITC. This development should transform the storage market, just as the solar ITC jumpstarted the industry upon its introduction 15 years ago.

“This ITC means [storage] now makes sense at C&I, at residential, you can afford to provide resiliency,” said Jennifer

Gallegos, director of strategic sales and communications for panel-level battery maker Yotta Energy.

As stated in the IRA, the storage ITC is available to batteries over 3 kWh in the residential market and over 5 kWh in the commercial market. More details will be officially determined by the Treasury Dept. over the next few months, but this development is already changing sales conversations across the country.

Online installation marketplace EnergySage has been providing energy system quotes to interested parties for over 10 years and has found increasing interest in batteries over the last decade.

EnergySage asks its website visitors browsing solar quotes if they are also interested in energy storage, and CEO

Vikram Aggarwal said that for the last few years, consistently 70% of solar customers say yes. But that hasn’t always translated into actual battery installations.

“There is a lot of interest, but prices remain high. And because prices remain high and the financial benefits are not clear, the adoption is still pretty small. Of the 70% that say they’re interested, only 18% of them end up buying [storage],” Aggarwal said.

The new storage ITC could change that.

“Pre-IRA, that was a hard decision.

It’s not only expensive — you don’t get the ITC,” Aggarwal said. “Things are definitely going to change post-IRA. Now anyone thinking about a generator, for example, may consider standalone storage. If there are VPP programs or

SunPower

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NOVEMBER 2022

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STORAGE TECHNOLOGY

Nexamp

demand-response programs in their market, that could tilt the favor to batteries from generators.”

While storage-only installations will increase, batteries paired with renewable energy sources are still a worthwhile investment, especially now that financing doesn’t need to be tied together. Jeff Chester, global co-head of energy project finance for the law firm Greenberg Traurig, said we’ll see more storage installed alongside wind, which will provide more grid resiliency in far-flung places. Since wind projects typically take the production tax credit (PTC), there was no ITC in the past for paired-storage to latch onto. Now, those co-located installations can each claim their own credit: PTC for wind and ITC for storage.

“On the solar side, the trend has been to pair solar and storage even with the restrictions. Taking those restrictions off now, it makes the facility much more

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efficient,” Chester said. “You now can operate the battery independent of the solar project. It allows the battery to be operated in a more efficient way, thereby increasing the overall value of the project.”

To capitalize on this open market, Aggarwal said residential solar installers should pitch a battery that fits the consumer’s needs, rather than adding a battery just because there’s a tax credit available. Whereas solar is primarily a financial decision, storage provides a resiliency aspect that may be more attractive in certain markets. Cost savings will always reign supreme, though.

“Consumer education is the key to unlocking any market demand.

Installers have a view that they can sell [batteries] as a safety thing, great for resilience. For some consumers, that may work,” Aggarwal said. “If customers are interested in batteries because of financial benefits, in what markets are there real financial benefits with ITC and VPP? Position it that way with the added benefit of resiliency. When the adoption rate goes from early adopters to mass adopters, people will want to know what else the battery will do.” SPW

You now can operate the battery independent of the solar project. It allows the battery to be operated in a more efficient way, thereby increasing the overall value of the project.

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ADVERTORIAL

SOLAR SPOTLIGHT:

Managing whole home energy with SolarEdge AS THE RESIDENTIAL MARKET shifts from reliance on the greater electrical grid to selfgenerating energy sources like solar, additional considerations will be necessary for energy load management. In this special edition of the Contractor’s Corner podcast, we’re joined

by Magnus Asbo, senior director of technical marketing in North America for SolarEdge, to discuss the importance of smart energy management systems and the company’s latest offering in that space.

An excerpt of this interview is below, but be sure to listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app.

Can you talk a bit about the factors driving increased demand for solar and storage with U.S. homeowners, and some of the opportunities coming out of it for installers and the industry as a whole?

I think that most of us are familiar with a lot of the macro trends that are driving demand for solar. But I think they’re really worth restating, because they have been changing over time.

Recently, we’re seeing a lot more uncertainty with cost of fossil fuel, for instance. Just look at the uncertainty that was driven from the Russian war in Ukraine and the Texas crisis when they were unable to create energy to keep the lights on — literally. The net result is that people are feeling less certain. We’re also seeing the price of energy going up. The cost of energy is going up and people are certainly aware of that.

You mentioned the importance of approaching residential solar and storage

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as an integrated ecosystem. What are some of the things installers need to consider as they work with homeowners to build these ecosystems?

The ability for consumption and production to interact with each other intelligently is very important. However, there are some other, very practical things that you’ll have to pay attention to. One of those is that as systems become larger and as homeowners try to add more loads onto their system — let’s say for EVs or for the transition from gas cooking to induction — that there is a higher likelihood that you’re going to have to do significant AC rework. We want to minimize the amount of that rework and the frequency of that rework as we possibly can.

In order to do that, we’re really focused on DCcoupled systems. Why? Basically because the way that we see it, batteries are DC systems, PV is a DC source. Over time the expected EVs we’ll move to are DC charging and discharging.

Seeing that all of these things are large DC devices, we’re keeping them on the DC side of the inverter and off of the main panel, because we’re seeing that the AC panel is getting overloaded.

SolarEdge recently launched SolarEdge Home in North America. Can you share a bit more about what this is and how it differs from other solar and storage solutions that are available?

SolarEdge Home is in many ways what we’re calling that overall holistic ecosystem that I was talking about. It’s really comprised of a lot of different elements that we’ve already built, and it includes some things that are new capabilities

NOVEMBER 2022

that we’re adding now. So, for instance, a big element of SolarEdge Home is the Home Battery. We began shipping that last fall. It is shipping in large volume today, and we’re in the process of releasing a series of smart energy management devices that will allow you to curtail consumption when you’re off-grid and shift the time of consumption when you’re ongrid. Again, the trick here is that these devices will interact with each other.

How is SolarEdge Home helping installers, from the sales process through to installation and management?

As you say, the installer process is end-to-end. It goes from sales all the way through installation and maintenance, and we look at it from a multi-stage approach. The first one is: What is the process of selling to the homeowner? And homeowners really want size and convenience at this point. We want to aid in the process of speaking to them. Really what we’ve seen is PV + storage has moved through the enthusiast realm to the mainstream. Part of the move to the mainstream is that people want things to be designed to the convenience of their lifestyle.

That includes being able to do things like run air conditioners when the power is out. If you’re living in Texas, that’s probably high on your list of things that you want. SPW

SOLAREDGE.COM

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SPECIAL SECTION

FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to transform the solar and storage industries and supercharge project deployment.

Although many details will yet be determined by the Dept. of the Treasury, some impacts are already clear. In this special section, we take a look at the initial projections for how this law will shape the industry’s next decade.

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FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY | SPECIAL SECTION

TREASURY DEPARTMENT TIMELINE The Treasury Dept. is responsible for implementing the majority of the IRA’s climate provisions, which are delivered through tax incentives. The solar industry is awaiting clarification on many questions, such as: Which workers on a jobsite are subject to prevailing wage and apprenticeship rules? What are Treasury’s greenhouse gas emission goals that will determine the end-date of the commercial solar ITC? The department set a Nov. 4 deadline for public input on IRA incentives and held several stakeholder roundtables.

Nothing official had been announced by press time.

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NOVEMBER 2022

THE BASICS OF ITC VS. PTC FOR THE SOLAR INDUSTRY

BY KELLY PIC KER EL

The U.S. solar industry has had some version of an investment tax credit (ITC) since 2006. This one-time credit on the cost to build a solar project has been influential to the growth of the industry, with SEIA reporting the U.S. market has grown by more than 10,000% since the ITC was introduced.

Now, for the first time, solar projects will have a choice between the ITC and a production tax credit (PTC), thanks to its inclusion in the IRA. While untested in solar, a PTC has been offered to wind projects since the early 1990s, and there are many renewable energy tax equity professionals with experience using this alternative credit.

“Wind came along before solar,” said Jeff Chester, global co-head of energy project finance for the law firm Greenberg Traurig. “[The ITC] was offered to solar when solar was smaller and there wasn’t a lot of production associated with solar. It was to ensure that solar had a valuable credit not tied to production.”

Now with installation costs coming down and solar arrays becoming more efficient, a 10-year, ongoing credit related to kilowatt-hour production could prove more beneficial to the solar market than an ITC. Chester noted that it will take some time for models to be established after final rules are released by the Treasury Dept., but there is already a basic understanding that most solar projects will want to take the PTC instead of the ITC. “Many solar projects will benefit from the PTC. For those projects, it will be more valuable than the ITC,” he said.

“But it’s on a project-by-project basis.

[Depending on] the cost-per-megawatt to build the project, there’s a crossover point where the ITC is more beneficial than the PTC.” As it is suggested today, the solar ITC is a one-time 30% credit given in the year a project is placed in service.

Conversely, the solar PTC can be claimed every year over the 10-year credit period at the current rate of 2.6¢/kWh for commercial projects, with fluctuating rates going forward.

“Generally, lower-cost projects in strong resource areas will opt for the PTC, while higher-cost projects in more marginal resource areas will select the ITC. Of course, the decision will be project-specific based on a variety of factors,” said John Hensley, VP for research and analytics for the American Clean Power Association.

The solar PTC will also provide additional benefits to more investors over time.

“For the ITC, the tax investor has to be a partner in the project when the project is placed in service, and it’s all or nothing — you get 100% of the allocable ITC. If you’re not a partner in the project at the right time, you get zero,” Chester said. “The PTC is different. The tax equity investor is entitled to the PTC from the date it becomes a partner in the project, and that can happen at any time in the 10-year period.”

The dominant choice for solar developers remains to be seen, but new tax credit options will only help the industry grow over the next decade. SPW

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SPECIAL SECTION | FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY

STATES WILL BE DECIDING FACTOR IN COMMUNITY SOLAR’S IRA TRAJECTORY

BY K E L SE Y MI S BR E N E R

The Inflation Reduction Act is a boon for the entire solar industry, but perhaps no sector benefits more than community solar. Along with the 10-year 30% ITC extension, other tax credit adders meant to expand equity in solar deployment are especially suited for community solar development.

To start, a long-term ITC is welcome news for the community solar industry, since state programs take time to get up and running. Community-solar enabling legislation must be in place at the state level for projects to be built, due to their unique, multiple-off-taker structure.

Community solar developers typically set up agreements with utilities, often governed by state policy, that allow

A community solar installation on a New Jersey warehouse roof by Solar Landscape.

subscribers to receive monthly utility bill credits for electricity generated by their share of the solar project.

“You've got to first get legislation through, then you've got to set up the program, then you have to implement the program. It can be a few years before solar panels even get into the ground,” said Matt Hargarten, VP of campaigns at the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA). “Having 10 years in which to operate is going to be incredibly beneficial to community solar specifically.”

Along with the 30% ITC available for community solar-scale projects are adders that could apply to this sector more than any other. A 10% adder is available for

siting projects in “energy communities” — including brownfield sites and former centers for fossil fuel development.

“Because community solar projects are smaller-scale projects, they just naturally lend themselves to some of these brownfield sites. We expect that a number of community solar developers will be attracted to that and move in that direction,” Hargarten said.

The IRA also allows projects under 5 MWAC — which includes many community solar installations — to collect the ITC for interconnection costs. These costs have skyrocketed in recent years, as project queues grow and available capacity on the aging grid shrinks. While utility-scale developers can often afford to take on the high cost of a transformer update, smaller community solar developers cannot.

“Often, these costs can make these projects uneconomical. Now, those costs can be folded into the ITC, so they can get a tax credit on that portion of the project cost,” Hargarten said.

Marc Palmer, founder of solar finance software firm Conductor Solar, expects this provision to push projects that were on the margins into economical territory.

HAVING 10 YEARS IN WHICH TO OPERATE IS GOING TO BE INCREDIBLY BENEFICIAL TO COMMUNITY SOLAR SPECIFICALLY. www.solarpowerworldonline.com

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FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY | SPECIAL SECTION

“It's just going to take a huge lump of projects and it's going to take them from where they didn't save the host money to now where they will save the host money,” Palmer said.

The IRA also incentivizes solar projects serving low-and-moderateincome (LMI) populations — an area where community solar has already been a leader. Projects under 5 MWAC can receive a 10% adder for siting projects in low-income communities or on tribal lands, and up to a 20% adder for projects that serve multifamily LMI buildings or that provide at least 50% of the financial benefits to qualified LMI households. The 20% credit only applies to the portion serving eligible low-income households.

“Community solar has already been moving in that direction in the last five

years, where state programs across the country have been creating carve-outs for community solar to cater to LMI households, so this is a very natural place for community solar projects to go,” Hargarten said.

One such state program is in New Jersey, which requires community solar projects to serve at least 51% LMI customers. Project developer Solar Landscape has been working on these LMI-focused projects since its founding in 2012.

“That's our whole business to date in New Jersey community solar. From our perspective, it's the total essential part of community solar. It just makes a lot of sense, and what the IRA did is formalize that from a federal level,” said Mark Schottinger, president of Solar Landscape.

He believes states developing new legislation will prioritize LMI requirements to align with the IRA as well as state objectives for equitable clean energy deployment. Illinois has already followed closely behind New Jersey, creating a rubric for community solar approval based on factors for community engagement and equity.

“Community solar is increasingly becoming this very versatile tool viewed by both the [federal] government and state governments as a way to accomplish all these policy goals that have been leaned on increasingly, especially the environmental justice equity in energy,” said Stephen Cortes, senior director of public affairs and communications at CCSA. “Community solar specifically

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Solar Landscape conducts inperson training sessions to build up the community solar workforce.

WE BELIEVE THAT A LOT OF THIS MONEY IS GOING TO FLOW TOWARD COMMUNITY SOLAR PROGRAMS, WHETHER IT'S HELPING TO EVALUATE THE EFFECTIVENESS, TO LOWER THE COST BASIS OR TO DIRECT MORE FUNDING TO LMI COMMUNITIES. www.solarpowerworldonline.com

has these built-in ways to approach every renter, business, organization, church and institution that other forms of solar just don't.”

The final big-ticket item in the IRA that will benefit community solar is $7 billion in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant funding for states, cities, tribal governments and nonprofits to create distributed generation programs that benefit disadvantaged communities. CCSA expects community solar to shine in this category too.

“We believe that a lot of this money is going to flow toward community solar programs, whether it's helping to evaluate the effectiveness, to lower the cost basis or to direct more funding to LMI communities,” Hargarten said.

Community solar was already on an explosive path even before the IRA. In an early August 2022 report, Wood Mackenzie projected at least 7 GWDC of new community solar will come online in existing markets by 2027. As of September 2022, 22 states have

an enabling policy in place allowing community solar to flourish. But that leaves 28 states potentially missing a huge opportunity to access new federal incentives.

“The federal government has now drawn lines in the sand of where they want to see dollars going, but those dollars aren't going to go anywhere unless states take action and pass bills that enable the development of these projects,” Hargarten said.

CCSA lobbies states to adopt community solar legislation and helps them craft policies that work best in a region. Hargarten sees the IRA as another tool to encourage policymakers to act.

“This gives us a platform to go in to show that there's both credibility to this form of energy and there's money on the table to incentivize them to move now,” he said. “It's free money on the table. Do they want to take advantage of it or do they want to allow their neighbors to take advantage of it?” SPW

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FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY | SPECIAL SECTION

WHO QUALIFIES FOR DIRECT PAY FOR THE SOLAR ITC?

BY K E L SE Y MI S BR E N E R

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a provision allowing tax-exempt entities to receive the solar investment tax credit as a direct payment. In the past, to make nonprofit solar projects financially viable, most organizations had to partner with developers or banks that could take advantage of the tax benefits. Organizations would sign power purchase agreements (PPAs) where they would pay the bank or developer a set amount of money for the solar energy over a length of time, usually 25 years.

Now, tax-exempt organizations like public schools, cities and nonprofits can get those credits by direct pay, and receive a check for 30% of the project cost just like a tax-paying entity would receive the credit when filing taxes. Direct pay paves the way for organizations to own solar projects instead of just buying the power through PPAs. Although the industry is awaiting official guidance from the Treasury Dept. regarding the logistics of direct pay and other IRA provisions, the basic qualifying factors are spelled out in the statute. Here are the entities that can access direct pay for the solar ITC.

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NOVEMBER 2022

Tax-exempt organizations Any organization that has filed an application with the federal government for tax-exempt status will qualify for direct pay, according to Amit Kalra, partner at law firm Sheppard Mullin. This could include state colleges and universities, nonprofit organizations and more. It likely does not include homeowners’ associations (HOAs), which typically file a corporate income tax return, Kalra said.

Rural electric cooperatives Rural electric co-ops have been leaders in solar adoption because of their member-centric structure.

Co-ops now qualify for direct pay, allowing them to own their solar projects and receive credits directly.

State, local and tribal governments Any governmental entities can receive direct pay for the solar ITC. This includes an already-hot market segment — public schools. A 2022 report by Generation180 found 1 in 10 of all K-12 schools have gone solar, but there’s still lots of room for growth.

How will direct pay change nonprofit solar project financing?

To take advantage of direct pay, tax-exempt entities will likely get a bridge loan from a solar installer or bank, pay the government incentive amount back to the loan company once they receive it, then pay the rest on an installment plan, Kalra said.

The TVA The Tennessee Valley Authority is a federally owned electric utility corporation that can now receive direct pay for solar projects.

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FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY | SPECIAL SECTION

"The same parties that are currently willing to underwrite PPAs and take the credit exposure to a tax-exempt [entity], I don't see why they wouldn't be willing to underwrite a construction loan to a taxexempt [entity], or a term loan for that matter, and say, 'Here's your $100. You go install this facility and then you pay us back,'" he said.

Fellow Sheppard Mullin partner Benjamin Huffman said financiers previously set up a similar payment structure for cash grants for solar installations.

"It was essentially borrowing against that future government payment, which could be structured for this program just as easily," Huffman said.

The ability for nonprofits to own solar projects could make energy savings and sustainability an option for more organizations than ever before.

“Having these entities be able to access the systems directly and own the systems if that’s what they choose is a huge step forward for energy sovereignty,” said Andie Wyatt, policy director and legal counsel at GRID Alternatives. SPW

HAVING THESE ENTITIES BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE SYSTEMS DIRECTLY AND OWN THE SYSTEMS IF THAT’S WHAT THEY CHOOSE IS A HUGE STEP FORWARD FOR ENERGY SOVEREIGNTY.

Students play under a solar installation by Luminace at Coyote Canyon Elementary School in Rancho Cucamonga.

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NOVEMBER 2022

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FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY | SPECIAL SECTION

WHO BENEFITS MOST FROM MANUFACTURER TAX CREDITS IN IRA, THIN-FILM OR CRYSTALLINE SILICON?

BY K E L LY P I C K E R E L

Meyer Burger

When the average person thinks about a solar panel, they’re usually envisioning a crystalline silicon solar module.

Silicon-based solar panels are the most dominant model on the market, holding somewhere between 90 and 95% of the global production market share. The other main module type is thin-film solar, typically made with cadmium-telluride (CdTe) deposits.

Without getting too bogged down with historical details, the first solar panel was invented in the United States in 1954 through silicon testing, and the material has remained the dominant option in the solar market. Most early research and investment dollars were thrown at silicon designs, so today there is a robust, global silicon supply chain. But CdTe thin-film

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technology, championed by manufacturer First Solar, has found a niche supplying the utility-scale market and is still an important contributor to our greener future.

But the manufacturing processes for crystalline silicon and thin-film solar are different, and it appears the new manufacturing tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act will benefit thin-film the most at the start. Here’s why.

Solar panel manufacturing processes A crystalline silicon solar panel first starts as metal-grade silicon. A company purifies that into solar-grade polysilicon.

Then it is shaped into ingots, which are cut into silicon wafers. The wafers are doped to make silicon cells, which are

NOVEMBER 2022

then finally assembled into a solar panel.

There are a few solar companies that handle multiple steps in this process, but, mostly, crystalline silicon solar panel manufacturing is fragmented. Currently, the United States only has final solar panel assembly plants — a U.S. solar panel maker must buy solar cells from overseas, and those solar cells are probably made from another company’s solar wafers, and so on up the chain.

Meanwhile, CdTe thin-film solar panel manufacturing has fewer cooks in the kitchen. Generally, cadmium and tellurium are vapor-deposited on glass like a wafer, lasers cut “cells” in the deposit for interconnection lines and conductors and another piece of glass finishes the panel. Everything is

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SPECIAL SECTION | FEDERAL SOLAR POLICY

completed on the same final unit on one manufacturing line. Where a crystalline silicon panel maker depends on outside suppliers for its silicon product, a CdTe thin-film panel maker produces almost everything in-house.

The IRA established manufacturing tax credits of 7¢/WDC for modules, 4¢/ WDC for cells, $12/m2 for wafers and $3/ kg for solar-grade polysilicon.

A U.S. crystalline silicon panel assembler would receive $29.40 in credits per 420-W module.

A U.S. thin-film panel manufacturer, on the other hand, would receive $75.84 per 420-W module, based on the company technically making its own cells and wafers in-house (SPW determined this rough math using a First Solar spec sheet).

At first glance, thin-film solar module manufacturers have a clear monetary advantage to ramp production. But crystalline silicon panel manufacturers are also incentivized — to innovate higher-power products and bring their fragmented supply chain in-house.

How credits will change the domestic manufacturing landscape Both types of solar panel manufacturers were included in Senate Committee on Finance discussions on how best to structure credits in the IRA. Scott Moskowitz, senior director and head of market intelligence, public affairs and marketing for crystalline silicon panel manufacturer Qcells North America, said the purpose of the legislation is to make U.S.-manufactured solar more competitive with foreign-made solar, no matter the technology type.

“The Senate wanted to ensure the credit was ‘technology-neutral,’ so if you had a vertically integrated crystalline silicon PV manufacturer and a vertically integrated thin-film manufacturer (even though thin-film tends to be vertically integrated already), you wouldn’t have

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

First Solar

one disadvantaged against the other,” he said. “You don’t have one manufacturer getting more tax credits than another for a product that essentially does the same thing.”

Having a credit based on wattage also encourages manufacturers to improve their technology outputs to grab more credits.

“It incentivizes innovation,” Moskowitz said. “You get more credit on a per-watt basis if you have a higherwattage panel or a more efficient cell.”

The credits are available for 10 years, with a phasedown in the latter years. With some factories taking a few years to get started, new facilities and expansions will be announced quickly to capitalize on the credits. Toledo Solar, a small-scale CdTe thin-film panel maker, operates a 100-MW factory in Perrysburg, Ohio, and is banking on the full suite of manufacturing credits available to thin-film companies to grow its annual capacity to 2.8 GW by 2028. “[IRA credits] allow us to further lower the cost of manufacturing, which is critical for a level playing field,” said

Aaron Bates, CEO of Toledo Solar.

“Second, it gives confidence to the world of finance. That’s critical for us; that’s critical for everyone. When there’s actual commitment from the federal government, it gives the financial markets the expectation of stability — that this industry won’t get swept away like it did in 2010.

“These are not small numbers,” he continued. “For us, you’re talking $40 million per leap of growth, from 100 to

[IRA CREDITS] ALLOW US TO FURTHER LOWER THE COST OF MANUFACTURING, WHICH IS CRITICAL FOR A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

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300 MW, 300 to 600 MW, etc. For First Solar, they’re doing billion-dollar projects. These are not small endeavors.”

Qcells will spend $170 million to build a 1.4-GW solar module assembly plant in Georgia, and even the 7¢/WDC credit afforded to modules will be a big help. Hanwha Group, Qcells’ parent company, is planning on investing in all areas of the silicon solar supply chain, so we may soon see the country’s first vertically integrated crystalline silicon solar panel manufacturer.

“This is a multi-phase, multi-billion-dollar investment plan. We need to figure out how to build this complete value chain all the way from polysilicon to module,” Moskowitz said. “Folks in Washington want to see this policy work. They want to see a big investment from it.”

Thin-film panel manufacturers may see an easier path to maximizing the available credits, but all manufacturers in the solar panel supply chain stand to gain from the IRA. SPW

Meyer Burger

IRA CREDITS WILL BOOST DOMESTIC SOLAR TRACKER MANUFACTURING

BY B IL LY LU DT

Terrasmart

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NOVEMBER 2022

Domestic solar tracker manufacturing is bound to increase thanks to the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, which includes manufacturing tax credits for components found on solar trackers. The federal spending package will provide manufacturers with credits for torque tubes and structural fasteners produced on U.S. soil.

“I think the expectation is those manufacturer tax credits will trigger any tracker manufacturer that has offshored [production of] torque tubes or structural fasteners to onshore them,” said Ed McKiernan, president of Terrasmart, a turnkey manufacturer of solar racking, piles and electrical balance of systems. “As that happens, the end customers, the owneroperators of these arrays, they’re going to want to compete for lower prices. What you’re probably going to see is tracker prices becoming even more competitive, relative to fixed-tilt.”

The IRA specifically cites tracker systems and not fixed-tilt racking, as the former is the primary solar structure deployed on large- or utility-scale projects in the United States. Solar trackers produce more energy than a fixed-tilt system in a similar project footprint because the racking rotates and points modules toward the sun throughout the day.

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OMCO Solar

Manufacturing production credits will provide $0.87/kg for torque tubes and $2.28/kg for structural fasteners.

Both components are typically fabricated from steel.

“Given that there was industry input into the IRA for the manufacturing tax credit of trackers, how you measure that is probably the challenge,” said Gary Schuster, CEO of OMCO Solar, a domestic PV racking manufacturer.

“Having said that, they concluded to measure that by pounds of torque tube that goes in a tracker, which is very logical, because it is a common denominator of manufacturing a tracker.

I don’t know how else you would have done it.”

Torque tubes are the rotating portion of a tracker that extends the entirety of the tracker row and hosts both panel rails and the panels themselves.

Structural fasteners have multiple purposes. According to the IRA, they connect torque tubes together, connect drive assemblies to torque tubes and connect mechanical and drive systems to solar tracker foundations. Schuster estimated that structural fasteners

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compose about 10 to 15% of a tracker’s total makeup.

While not included in the manufacturing production credits section of the IRA, ground-mounted fixed-tilt solar racking — and other solar hardware — is still incentivized through the investment tax credit (ITC) “domestic content bonus.”

Solar arrays built with at least 40% of components that were manufactured in the United States can qualify for the domestic content bonus, which will boost a system’s tax credit an additional 10%. If projects meet other apprenticeship and prevailing wage requirements, system owners could receive a 40% tax credit on their array.

Manufacturers are emphasizing this option for fixed-tilt racking because it is primarily, if not entirely, made of steel. Steel fabrication is an active U.S. industry, and the domestic content credit just asks that steel-based components are manufactured in the United States, not including any metal additives in the refinement process.

“They’ve got to achieve a threshold for the entire project of domestic content, and, in many cases, they’re going to struggle to get there with modules and inverters,” McKiernan said. “Now, there

are domestic alternatives there, but those are very limited and very oversold for the next several years. What we expect customers to do is really focus on mechanical and electrical balance of system so they can meet those domestic content requirements.”

At the time of publication, the Dept. of the Treasury is requesting input for implementing and delivering the clean energy tax incentives found in the IRA. Questions remain on the specifics of prevailing wage requirements, product qualifications for tax incentives and the overall timeline of the IRA. “The biggest thing is not only the guidance on the domestic content definition, but then also the timing of the first projects,” said Eric Goodwin, director of business development at OMCO. “A lot of customers have questions on exactly when can I get this credit and put it forward? Will it be first quarter? Is it going to be January 1? Is it going to be retroactive? We’re having customers ask for us to make that definition on the tracker components, but again, we really have to stand by and wait until that’s confirmed at the Treasury level.” SPW

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Raptor Map

s

SOLAR SOFTWARE AN SPW SPECIAL SECTION

Solar software advancements have raced along just as quickly as new panel improvements. Savvy contractors can now automate most logistics of the solar installation process, from sales to O&M. Here’s a look at the three main categories of solar software helping contractors today.

SALES Whether an installer has just a handful of workers or is servicing a multi-state territory, sales software can help them stay organized and present a streamlined proposal to clients. Many software companies allow contractors to customize proposal templates, which explain the system cost, layout and energy savings, and include their company logo.

Solar sales software providers often also include lead generation databases to track prospective clients through the lifecycle of the sale.

Aurora Solar

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SOLAR SOFTWARE | SPECIAL SECTION

DESIGN Solar project design software allows installers to lay out solar projects on rooftops or on the ground with varying levels of complexity. Design software has grown increasingly advanced over the years, using drone mapping technology, artificial intelligence and other techniques to accurately plot solar layouts for maximum power generation with minimal shading.

As the energy storage market has grown, so too have specific design software solutions to optimize storage projects for the loads served and different rate structures.

DroneBase

SiteCapture

DRONE-BASED Drones simplify many tasks that would otherwise require intense human effort, including solar siting and monitoring. Solar companies can choose to purchase drones or use a number of different drone services that sell their extensive mapping data. Drones can eliminate the need for installers to climb roofs themselves for site assessment.

For large-scale solar sites, drone and aerial photography providers routinely monitor the status of solar panels from the air, including thermal imagery, and pinpoint any potential failures that need to be addressed.

Meet your new smart assistant: Aurora AI It can’t shake your hand, but it can shake up your solar business.

Find out how Aurora AI can estimate your customer’s consumption, create a solar design in 30 seconds, and help you close on the spot.

See Aurora AI in action

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

>> SOFTWARE

Sell more solar faster – without the change orders.

Aurora is the one platform your teams will need to sell and design with unmatched speed and accuracy through every step of a project. Sales Mode lets your reps educate the homeowner with engaging 3D visuals and customizable, branded proposals — complete with integrated financing and automated contract generation — so they can close with confidence. Meanwhile, Design Mode’s specialized CAD environment gives your engineers everything they need to create permit-ready designs with the precision of an on-site visit using HD imagery and integrated LIDAR technology. No more inaccurate quotes. No more confusing workflows. Just more solar on more roofs.

Aurora Solar 363 Clementina St., Suite B San Francisco, CA 94103 www.aurorasolar.com

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

>> SOFTWARE

56

Enact’s Software platform is transforming how solar and energy storage projects are designed, deployed and managed, with thousands of users in 20+ countries. Enact’s platform enables sales teams for Installers and Developers to design, price and sell systems remotely, prepare proposals, finalize contracts and also track project execution.

Consumers can also leverage Enact’s platform to manage their solar and energy storage transition, starting with evaluating offers / bids to tracking outcomes i.e. financial savings.

The Enact platform covers the following types of use cases • • • • • • •

Residential and Commercial Solar Rooftop and ground/mounted projects Solar alone or combined with Energy Storage On-grid as well as Off-grid operation Cash-purchase, Lease or third-party financed projects Net-metered or gross-metered projects Single-meter or multiple meters per project location

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NOVEMBER 2022

Enact 6200 Stoneridge Mall Road, Suite 300, Pleasanton, CA 94588 www.enact-systems.com

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PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

>> SOFTWARE

IMGING® Cut Redesigns with Comprehensive Data.

IMGING automates site surveys with drones, allowing you to fly a roof in minutes, auto-generate a 3D model, view shading, measure facets and penetrations, and export models into any CAD program. Your redesigns just got called-off.

With IMGING, Solar pros can sell and survey in the same visit, close more business, and maximize customer satisfaction. When they’re done, system designers have half their work already finished.

Loveland Innovations 2015 W. Grove Parkway, Suite E Pleasant Grove, UT 84062

• Cut Site Survey Times by 50% • Cut CAD Times by 50% • Save up to $.10 PPW • Shading Data Validated by DNV

lovelandinnovations.com/solar

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

>> SOFTWARE

Simplify Solar Design Without Sacrificing Accuracy Installing more projects than ever? Now you can meet growing demand without compromising the quality of your project data with Scanifly’s drone-based 3D-design software. Created specifically for the solar industry, Scanifly combines photo-realistic 3D modeling and advanced automation to reduce on-site survey time by up to 90% and provide perfect precision. Designers can plan and customize array layouts for rooftops, ground mounts, canopies, or carports, forecast production, and generate shading analyses approved by all major regulatory bodies and lenders. Whether you work on residential, commercial, or small utilityscale projects, Scanifly can help your team work quickly and safely, avoid mistakes, and exceed customer expectations.

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Scanifly www.scanifly.com info@scanifly.com

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CONTRACTOR'S CORNER

KELSEY MISBRENER • MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRACTOR’S CORNER:

New Energy Equity

A community solar developer expects substantial growth thanks to the IRA. Maryland-based community solar developer New Energy Equity prides itself on early entry into up-and-coming regional markets. After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the inclusion of incentives that apply to community solar installations, some markets that were questionable are now looking much more feasible.

In this episode, CFO Ahmar Zaman talks about the growth New Energy Equity is expecting in the coming years as a result of the federal legislation.

An edited portion of the interview is below, but be sure to listen to the full podcast for more insight on the factors that mold a successful community solar development business.

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Find the Contractor’s Corner podcast on your favorite podcast app.

Solar Power World: How did you get into solar?

Ahmar Zaman: After about 10 years working at Intel, I moved to New York City, and as the Romans do in New York, everybody was working on Wall Street, so I decided to try to get a job on Wall Street. I was lucky enough to get a job as an equity research analyst covering the semiconductor industry given my experience at Intel in 2006.

The day I joined, First Solar filed to go public. The investment bank was involved in the IPO (initial public offering) and they needed somebody

NOVEMBER 2022

to represent them as part of the IPO. Because I was the most junior person on my team, I was tapped to be that person.

The week after starting at UBS Investment Bank, I was sitting down with Jens Meyerhoff and Mike Ahern, who were at the time the CEO and CFO of First Solar. They were trying to convince me and convince Wall Street that they could achieve a module cost of $1/watt. At the time, SunPower was selling modules at $6/watt. I think the Nellis Solar Array in Las Vegas was the largest system that was installed in the world at the time at 14 MW, and it was at $10/W or something like that.

I was one of the early analysts on Wall Street covering the solar industry and so, in a way, I felt like I grew up with the industry.

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CONTRACTOR'S CORNER

Did you foresee a day where such an enormous climate bill with all these solar provisions would pass in the federal government?

I wouldn’t say that I foresaw it, but the last time the federal government passed a major piece of legislation that was beneficial to the solar industry was in 2016, I believe, when the investment tax credit was extended. At that time, I was still on Wall Street and we were looking at all the bills that were being discussed. I remember the total cost of that provision was $16 billion. This time around, it’s $370 billion. So, it’s a huge order of magnitude more beneficial.

What will the IRA do for medium-sized solar companies like New Energy Equity?

We are primarily a community solar developer. That’s the majority of our business, and the average size of our projects is under 5 MW, so we’re right in that sweet spot for the IRA in terms of getting the interconnection agreement costs eligible for the ITC,

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which is huge. It’s a significant opportunity for the economics of our systems. Many of our projects are in the 1-MW range, so even though we support prevailing wage requirements in the bill, a lot of our projects are just below that threshold, so we benefit from that.

Overall, I would say it’s a very attractive bill for community solar. We’re really focusing on new markets in low- and moderate-income communities. We could potentially have investment credits up to 50% with all those adders, so that’s extremely beneficial to our business and to our pipeline.

Do you see your company growing to be able to do even more projects with all these incentives?

Absolutely. We were looking at some tangential markets in terms of our pipeline for the next couple of years, and some of those markets were just at the precipice of being economically viable. But with the IRA, those markets are now extremely viable. That is going to significantly add to our pipeline.

We’ll now be able to hire in those markets and grow in those markets where there was a question mark around them prior. SPW

It’s a significant opportunity for the economics of our systems.

Podcast Alert!

Listen to this and other Contractor’s Corner episodes on your favorite podcast app.

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AD INDEX Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (Requester Publications Only) 1. Publication Title

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Solar Power World 4. Issue Frequency

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Courtney Seel; WTWH Media, LLC 1111 Superior Ave. Suite 2600, Cleveland, OH 44114

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Editor (Name and complete mailing address)

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Enact Systems .......................................... 53, 56

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(Include direct written request from recipient, telemarketing and Internet re(1) quest s from recipient, paid subscriptions including nominal rate subscriptions, employer requests, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies.)

10,350

10,513

8,277

9,671

0

Nonrequested Distributed Outside the on MailPS (Include Pickup Stands, Outside CountyCopies Nonrequested Copies Stated Form 3541 (include (4) Shows, Showrooms and Other Sources) Sample copies, Requests Over 3 years old, Requests induced by a (1) Trade Premium, Bulk Sales and Requests including Association Requests, Names obtained from Business Directories, Lists, and other sources) Total Nonrequested Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4))

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PublicationCopy of Statement of Ownership forWorld a Requester Publication is required and will be printed in the issue of this publication. e. Requested Total Nonrequested Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4)) a. and Paid Electronic Copies 17. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner

f. Total TotalRequested Distribution (Sum 15c and e) (Line 15c) + Requested/Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a) b. and PaidofPrint Copies

Soltec .............................................................. 21 Test Equipment Depot .................................... 27

0

0

0

0

0

8,277

9,671

1,784

325

0

0

0

0

238

513

2,022

837

10,299

10,508

51

5

10,350

10,513

80.4%

92.0%

0

0

8,277

Date

9,671

10,299

10,508

80.4%

92.0%

c.

Requested Copy Distribution (Line 15f) + Requested/Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a) g. Total Copies not Distributed (See Instructions to Publishers #4, (page #3)) I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this d. Perfect and/or Requested circulation (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b dividedsanctions by form or whopaid omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil h. Total (including (Sum of 15f and g) sanctions civil penalties).

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17.

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e.

Solar Edge ...................................................... 38

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