A Least Cost Approach to Ground Mount Solar – Earth Mount Solar® PV with Jim Tyler, CEO, Erthos | EP157

Jim Tyler: 0:38

But the reality is, is that the adoption of this technology is inevitable, because it's the lowest cost form of energy. And it's it's no different than the adoption of single axis trackers where it was inevitable, because it was the lowest cost form of energy. And so it's just a matter of time until all the modern providers recognise that and, you know, ultimately sign up to this technology.

intro: 1:04

Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, I want to go deeper into decarbonisation. We do two, we're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it. Together, we can speed the energy transition.

Tim Montague: 1:32

You know, when you think about ground mounted solar, you either think fixed tilt or tracker, and increasingly tracker. Certainly that's the case here in North America. But there is a third alternative now and that is flat to the ground solar. You heard me right. I know it sounds a little wonky at first, but after you listen to this interview, I think you will be convinced that there's a there there. My guest today is Jim Tyler. He is a storied energy professional. He was the vice president of EPC. At first solar. He was the co founder of DEP calm and now he is the CEO of a company called Erthos. That is revolutionising utility scale solar. Welcome to the show, Jim Tyler.

Jim Tyler: 2:17

Thank you, Tim. Fantastic beer.

Tim Montague: 2:20

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts digital twin benchmarking technology, you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results. The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at Denowatts.com. That's D E N O W A T T S.com. Now back to the show. I'm, you know I'm a geek for racking. And you're you're trying to do away with racking. Now, Jim. So this is truly a disruptive technology that you have innovated. And I look forward to bringing this to our listeners. You know, solar is growing at a unsurpassed clip right 90% of new energy on the grid is wind and solar now. And we're just getting started really, the easy part is cleaning the grid but but it's an important part of the you know of decarbonizing the economy and, and stepping back from the brink of climate change. And I know that you are a mission driven entrepreneur, but give our listeners a little bit of your history, you'll have to keep it short, because it is very storied. And then let's get into what is Erthos most and why is this a compelling product, but give us give our listeners some background on yourself, Jim?

Jim Tyler: 3:46

Sure. I definitely appreciate the opportunity here, Tim, my, really the beginning of my experience in industry was in food processing. And in food processing, a tremendous amount of energy gets used. And I did many, many things with, with steam in that in that world of food processing. But I really got into the solar industry in about 2005. Company. There was several companies but in particular, I started working on projects where there were thin film solar manufacturers in the Silicon Valley, really the very present the very beginning of these concepts of utility scale solar companies like nanosolar and me SOA, and I was designing machinery to help manufacture that equipment. I became aware of the industry at that time. And then in 2007, I became aware of a company called off disorder, which really was changing the nature of the industry. In my opinion, they had gone out and secure 1000s and 1000s of acres of land and interconnect queue positions in the state of California and help facilitate the renewable portfolio standard in state and I had the opportunity to go to work at opti to build their manufacturing facility in Sacramento and then head up the EPC group at opti with the first solar plants built in, in Sarnia in Canada 2008 along with everybody else I you know the stock market crashed and it was a venture capital funded company and you know, venture capital dried up and for solar had the opportunity to come in and get a tremendous group of people and a fantastic set of projects. And I was one of the few that got an opportunity to go across first solver and start to build their their EPC division and that will Luxury has to be paired with so many incredible talented people at that organisation. The, as the market grew for solar grew at, you know, huge volumes and installation capacities that we were doing at the time. And then the market really started to shift in the technology of crystal and silicon just got better and better and better. And I had a, I had a colleague tell me one time never bet against silicon. Others, it's one of the most studied materials on the planet. And that was really very true. And they they have really done a tremendous a tremendous things to bring the cost of solar down. And so in 2000, and I guess 2014 or so, went across and founded DEF CON power with a couple of colleagues and grew depth comm to what it is today. It's one of the one of the top EPCs in the country, but really started to recognise, you know, it's the same thing over and over, you keep bringing these technologies to bear and it you know, I had done just about everything you could do within the industry from the EPC the manufacturing, developing projects. And I was riding my bike one day and just said, Well, what would happen if the solar panel, the price of the solar panel were free? seems like an odd question. But when I started the solar panels were $5 plus a watt. And when I exited in 2018, they were 27 cents a watt. And and there's a very real answer to that question. Economically, it makes sense at about 50 Odd cents a watt to put the solar panels flat on the ground. It's just the nature of economics and how things work within within the product. And so that idea happened in 2019. And that's when I really began to look into the intricacies of what would it take if you said okay, yeah, that works financially doesn't work technically. And that was the impetus of the advent of Erthos back in 2019. So

Tim Montague: 7:47

I mean, the it is incredible, it's almost too good to be true that the cost of solar, you know, has fallen more than 90% Since, say 2013. And all the while that technology gets more efficient. You mentioned for solar, with their thin film technology, still a major player in utility, solar, and then, you know, a slew of polycrystalline competitors nipping at their heels, so to speak. But the industry is driven by the financial stability and the cost of installation when we're talking large scale solar. And so that is one of the compelling things about Erthos to me is that you're achieving and LCMV a levelized cost of energy that is perhaps 20% lower than other technologies on the market. And, and, you know, I want to talk about what, why that is? And what are the pros and cons of making this innovation. There's always trade offs it with with any technology. But you know, why did nobody do this before you Jim?

Jim Tyler: 9:06

And those are great questions. I've been asked that question many times, you know, having been in the industry myself, all the way through from the very first fixed tilt systems, thin film you know, with for solar and then the crystalline silicon and then moving to trackers from fixed hills. If you harken back to around 2010 ish, that type of a timeframe. Pretty much all solar that was being installed of utility scale was being installed fixed Hill. And while there were several companies that were looking at doing trackers, including for solar, we acquired one of them. You know, ATI was looking into it. Next tracker came along right in that time window, you know, there was quite a few companies SunPower had had their own tracker, the dilemma. The trackers provided a financial advantage. They did right around 2010 As the price point of the solar panel continued to drop and the technology the trackers got better and better. The efficiencies, Rose, it made financial economic sense to move to a tracker. And however, there was a huge number of risks. What's going to happen with the Behringer What about harmonic you know harmonic dampening and stuff. I mean, the other module is going to be able to sustain when they're up at you know, 60 degree tilt angles. There's all these variables, the variable of interest shading and you know, just Dozens and dozens of variables. But the value the reason trackers, they finally said Go is because the economics drove robot forward, the levelized cost of energy is the sole driver. It's the price of the electricity that matters, because the buyer is the utility, they buy the electricity, they want the cheapest price they can get. And so as the industry move forward in those early years, 2008 910, and those PPAs started to change, it was always about the price of the electricity. And so trackers had a financial advantage over fixed Hill. And they started to be adopted, even though the risks were huge in comparison, there was no contest. And then over a period of seven years, trackers went from zero market share to 70% market share of the US, driven by one variable, the cost of electricity that comes out of the plant is cheaper, even though there was more risks and other things associated with and we've all seen the pros and cons. And I've installed many of them. Personally, I'm a big fan of many of the different tracker technologies and companies that have come out so. So it's simply a question of the economics of the levelized cost of energy that matters. And when you introduce a new technology, what you know whether that's a new tracker, a new module, pick whatever the new technology, you have to get that technology adopted. And there's early adopters, the early adopters are typically the most financially constrained projects, they're the most underwater, they're most pressured to try to get that new technology up. But they take those initial risks. And then as the technology gets adopted, and the banks start to become familiar with it, the industry starts to become familiar with it, it just starts to grow naturally on its own, because the power purchase agreements that are being signed by the utilities are based on price. And so there's a natural draw to reduction in the cost of electricity that drives the industry forward, and are those is simply the next step in that reduction in the cost of electricity. Now, you asked the second question, Why didn't anybody think of this before? Because the reality is it it made financial economic sense, at about some, it depends on geographic location, but about 47 to 5152 cents a watt. Well, we crossed that threshold in 2017 2016 timeframe. Well, there were companies that were doing something, there was Pegg, and there was five B, which were doing a high density, solar, all pressed together, still held up off the ground, but it was high density solar. And they saw those economics, they saw that shift. And so all Erthos did is take it to the last stage, put it all the way to the ground. And that putting it all the way to the ground. It totally eliminates all the steel, 35 tonnes of steel per megawatt. Just think about that number of 35 tonnes of steel for bet per megawatt. And we're going to put in 23,000 megawatts of solar in the United States this year. That's a massive shift. I mean, think about how much steel you're talking about in the amount of energy it cost to take to make all that steel and all the labour it takes to instal it and all the transportation costs to get it there. You eliminate all of that. It just changes the economics, dramatically dramatic shift in economics. But there's a lot of headwinds to the technology. You got to get these various people, companies and industries to say yes. And that's what we have been doing over the last two years since we announced our technology is getting through that technology adoption process.

Tim Montague: 14:43

So let's let's address some of my initial scepticism. Okay. I worked for a large EPC in Northern Illinois. I saw the switch from fixed tilt to trackers. It was like a light switch being flipped. It was like all of the designs from the developers we worked with went from fixed tilt to tracker overnight. And then we never looked back for for anything a megawatt or above for ground mount right. And that's an that's true today. It's even more so. Now if you go to Canada, things are different right at very high latitudes, trackers lose their advantage. But here in the Great Lakes, certainly trackers are the technology of choice. But when you put solar panels on the ground, they are going to be more exposed to some elements like water. We have a very flat landscape here in Illinois, Illinois used to be a giant swamp basically They are what prairie to say more romantically, but and so drainage is a major concern. And so when you submerge a solar array like that, that sends up red flags for me, what what are the, what? You know, what, how do you account for that? Can solar arrays sustain being submerged?

Jim Tyler: 16:02

So when I first began this process, I was concerned about two things. One of them was temperature, maximum temperature, the module and the other was water. Those were the first two things that that were of concern to me. And before I ever said, Let's go hire people and go ask other people to invest. I wanted to prove to myself that those two things were, were viable. And so began the research on those two fronts. So with regards to water, interestingly, that, that problem, I became aware of the process of manufacturing solar panels when I was working at for solar, there is a process where you submerge the solar panel in water, it's in an electrolyte to run a test. It's called a effectively a leakage current test where you put full sunshine on it. But I was really surprised when I saw that and like, it didn't really dawn on me that a solar panel could be submerged. And then I started, you know, discussing it with the various people that are colleagues of mine at for solar, and they say, oh, yeah, they're, they're completely waterproof. And we think about energy, and we think about module performance over time. And if you go back in time into 2004, or 5678, damp heat was the number one category of degradation, the thing that caused things to degrade faster. And everyone was putting effort and energy into solving damp heat, because it was the, you know, Bane of everybody's existence. So the edge seals and the, the materials of choice for the connectors, and so on and so forth. They just got better and better and better. And so when you think about a solar panel that has to be out in the rain permanently, it's effectively whenever it rains, it's under it's it's it's, it's not underwater, but it's exposed to a tremendous amount of water. The natural thought is that a solar panel should should be completely waterproof. But when you say I'm going to physically put it underwater, people go even when you can't do that, right. There's a there's a mental break that engineers often have. But the reality is, it's no different than a piece of wire. The wire has an electricity running through it, but we bury wire all the time. There's just insulation around the wire to prevent the electricity from getting out or aka the water getting in solar panels, the same thing. It's a great big insulated wire. And it's got insulation all around it. And so it turns out the, you know, of all of those parts of insulation, the plastic parts are the susceptible part. Well, plastic absorbs water over time. Well, solar panels are generally rated to IP 68. Ip 68 means one metre submerged for 24 hour rating. We've done a lot of testing on this subject, it can go underwater for a lot longer than 24 hours at a metre. But but the reality is, is that solar panels when you put them on the ground, and when it rains, you don't go design solar plants where there is a natural floodplain. That's just it's not generally good practice for anyone to build a solar solar system in a natural floodplain. Right. But when it rains, and you get two or three inches of water, and then that water runs off and it goes into the ground. The reality is, is the solar panels, they'll be underwater for a short period of time. And they're very, very shallow water. And that depth, duration is actually the metric or the variable that matters. And so we have what's called a depth duration spec, that the solar panel the solar plant is designed to a 500 year storm event which limits the depth duration combination to a the number associated with the IP 68 rating. And, and it turns out it works quite well. And people just don't it's hard for them to appreciate that solar panels are actually waterproof.

Tim Montague: 20:20

And what about the Balance of System What about the connectors? And you know, potentially junction boxes things like that. Can they also sustain being submerged?

Jim Tyler: 20:32

Are there as an as an object to plastic parts just like the plastic are thinking insulation on a wire. All of those materials are made to be immersed in water. And the the subject of interest is the the rate with which the water goes into the plastic, and changes the insulation resistance of the plastic. There's actually a term called leakage current in all solar panels. And there's an allowable amount of leakage current, according to spec. When you change that insulation resistance a little bit, it allows for a slightly higher leakage current. But there's natural protection devices built in that they're like circuit breakers, they turn off when the leakage current gets too high. The inverters protect for things of that nature. But what we have found through now, over two years of operation of our first sort of the first plant we installed, even after it's gone through two years, and it was in California with all those crazy rainstorms, the we've we've proven that that leakage current subject is a non issue, it's a trivial result, relative to the losses that you can expect, I think we were losing 0.5% of the energy as a result of leakage current losses in our first plants, which is a, you know, all things considered when you look at the total energy production. We're, we're I think our first plant is running at 90 creeping up on 99% performance index, that's all losses included, like soiling, losses, and shutdowns, grid and grid connection issues, you name it, it's all losses combined. And that first plants running at 99% of performance index, typical industry, they'll run it 93% of performance index. So we're proving without a doubt that the solar panels can be set flat on the ground and perform the way they're supposed to and not degrade actually not just not degrade. They're degrading slower than we predicted.

Tim Montague: 22:46

Want to I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the degradation. Walk us through though before we talk more about that and the overall performance. Walk us through a typical installation. What are the parts and pieces so to speak of an erthos, array, so our listeners can understand this just paint us a picture if you would?

Jim Tyler: 23:07

Well, for those of you that are familiar with the industry, you put solar panels or sitting up on racks whether they're fixed Hilter or trackers, we physically eliminate all of the steel from the planet. And the solar panels are sitting on the ground, the the frame of the solar panel is in physical contact with the dirt. All the solar panels are sitting side by side edge to edge end to end, there is a there's a cable, which we call it an aircraft cable 1/8 inch diameter aircraft cable that spans through a series of holes in the sides of the panels that are installed in the sides of the panels. And those cables. All they do is tie the solar panels to each other so they don't move vertically relative to each other that the cables not tensioned or anything like that. The cable runs out to the boundary of the array and it goes through a little concrete block. And then the concrete block sits on the ground and then we connect the cable to concrete block. And that runs through every single panel in both directions. So you can think of it as a big mesh of flexible mesh made out of solar panels that sitting flat on the ground with a concrete perimeter block, protecting it from things like erosion, water erosion that might want to go underneath the panels and things of that nature. That concrete block performs that job. So it's a very, very simple set apart the solar panel, the steel cables, the concrete blocks, and then the DC connectors that go from the solar panel strings all the way back to the inverters. Now there's a there's a magic trick that occurs with all of this. And I learned this lesson when I was at for solar. We had we had the world's least cost electron at first solar with this with the solar panel and that solar panel was patented. And so we were taking we were taking a industry leading position as a as the solar module manufacturer, patented lowest cost technology. We're gonna design standardise plants, and we developed standard shapes and sizes for arrays and inverse sizes and racking spacing and so on and so forth. So we got really, really close to being able to standardise kind of like an apple or an apple mac computer versus a you know a computer you know the PC based computers are those because we've passed patented the solar panels on the ground the fundamental underlying technology of how it's assembled, we get to control the standards with which you design the plant. And that's what we've done. So we've standardised the fundamentals of the design with string level inverters. And when you do that, you're able to standardise many aspects around the plant. And that standardisation facilitates further reduction in cost of those components that you'll ultimately use because you get to use high volume of those standardised components. We were on the precipice of being able to do that for solar, and then crystal crystal and silicon paths in lots of inverter technologies come along. So but without those because we have those patents, we're able to control those standards and reduce that cost to an absolute minimum threshold. So it's very powerful, powerful part of the underlying technology is that standardisation. And so all the cables and the hardware, the physical, those are all through marketplace that we've been developing with our suppliers in the supply chain that that feeds all of these parts and pieces.

Tim Montague: 26:50

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Jim Tyler: 27:49

So having installed it, I think, was up to about eight gigawatts of personal that I was involved in, you know, capacity and volume over my career with First Solar and depth comm. The there's a very important metric that we always used, which is man hours per megawatt, how many man hours did it take to instal one megawatt DC or plant. And it was very accurate at predicting on a given project. What that meant hours per megawatt would be, through the initial analyses, we determined that it would take about one quarter of the man hours per megawatt to instal an erthos system than it would to instal a, let's say, a next tracker, tracker system, modules grading everything all inclusive, about so for every 100 man hours for a tracker based system, it would take us about 25. Now, that's when you get to scale. So with the very small projects we've done, we're running down in about 30 to 40% of that total volume. But at the end of the day, because you removed all of the racking, all the steel, all the pile driving all the underground cabling, you've cut the links, there's no row spacing between arrays, you've cut the links between the inverter stations, like less than half. So all the cable that you run in the ac is less than half all the trenching that you got to do for all of that, there's just so many places where the labour is, is reduced. And as many of your listeners know, labour is one of the highest risks for any solar plant. And the construction is that labour and the time duration to build the plant. If you have to build a plant and Mississippi through the winter, it's a real difficult place to do that. Mississippi Mud is kind of rough, for those that have done it. And by cutting the land use and half and the time to build more than in half. With half the number of people all of those risks are reduced. Are they still are there still risks there? Of course there are. But the relative risk to building a tracker plan on the same location is dramatically changed. Because you're disrupting less land you're not having to drive piles and all the ground everywhere. I mean, all of those variables change so it's a huge impact is the is the labour pool require drop? You know when you move into the Oh nm like you were saying? That's a that's another thing if you don't have any racks to worry about. That's one of the component costs of Oh Nm. There's another big one. And you know the image behind you with your setup it doesn't really show it but a lot of solar plants have a real issue with grass, grasses growing up and in between the panels and they've automated they've attempted to automate grass mowing, it turns out grass mowing is a very expensive Oh nm part or Oh nm component just mowing the grass. Well, not only do we have half the land, the land is covered by 92% solar panels, and the other 8% is the roads. So there's almost no grass associated with the solar plant at all inside the fence. So while there's minor things to do, it's really not a variable so that that one alone dramatically reduces though an M cost the variable part of an M cost. You remove the trackers, that one's gone as well. So our total Oh nm price comes down. I think we're about 30% Lower Oh nm, aggregate all in versus an equivalent tracker plant at the same size.

Tim Montague: 31:28

So you mentioned the footprint of the plant being half. So if I hear you correctly, 100 megawatt plant with Tracker's, we would assume five acres per megawatt 500 acres for 100 megawatt plant with Erthos, so you're suggesting that you could squeeze this down to 250 acres? Is that right? 230 to be exact. Okay.

Jim Tyler: 31:54

So yes, if everything is apples to apples, just, you know, just take a regular sight whenever you can. A tracker plant generally is going to consume about five acre five acres per megawatt. There's a lot of variables that go into that, that's a big random round number with Erthos, it's not a random round number. Because the the ground coverage ratio is always basically going to end up at 92%. Just because of the nature of the beast. Whereas with trackers, row spacing, Intro row spacing matters, it might be 17 foot rows, but in some locations, you might want to get all the way up to 21 foot rows based on interest shading and elevation shifts and all these other variables that are quite complex to analyse whether those is flat, there's nothing to analyse. You put it flat.

Tim Montague: 32:48

The only caveat there I guess, the only caveat there, Jim, I guess is that you're going to use a higher DC to AC ratio with Erthos because the panels are flat to the ground, right? So you're getting a lower insulation value. What is that? What is that preferred DC to AC ratio? It let's say in setting this out in the desert southwest in in Southern California or Arizona,

Jim Tyler: 33:09

roughly speaking, based on the price of solar panels today, let's say a solar panel that you can buy your panel for 35 cents a watt, just big round number picture, pick a number, the DC AC ratio in the southwest and United States is going to be roughly 1.75 That'll be the optimal DC AC ratio. Okay. As the solar panel price drops, the price, the monitor goes down, the DC AC ratio is actually going to go up. As the price goes up, the DC AC ratio is going to go down. So there's an interplay between those two. And then depending on where you are geography, if you're in Northern California, versus New Mexico versus let's say down in Florida, you'll actually use higher DCAC ratios down in Florida, for instance, odd, but that's the reality of an optimised site. So So anyway, so that's the reality. But as the solar panel price gets lower, that's you're basically using more panels to do the same thing that a tracker was doing. So the solar panel guys love it. Right, you're gonna build a gigawatt AC of solar, you're gonna do 1.8 gigs, DC versus 1.3 or so from a tracker plant. So you're just displacing who's who's getting paid. It's this. It's the module companies that are going to be making the money rather than than the tracker companies.

Tim Montague: 34:30

Right. So you've gotten some projects under your belt. Now, what are the reactions so far from your developer partners or IPP partners? What objections do they have? And how are the projects going so far?

Jim Tyler: 34:46

Yeah, so great question. So just like you take if you go, like I said, harken back to 2011, before trackers took off in tracker design started happening in 2008 2009. So they started doing their very small test plants back in those that point in time. That is where are those was two years ago, we were installing our first test plants. So now you you progress forward. We've got seven test plants in operation. We've proven energy yields, we've proven performance prediction. We've proven the robotic cleaning of autonomous robotically, we've proven all these variables that we knew we needed to get done. And now you're putting your projects, the developers, they're putting in bids, right for our RFPs only they're using our technology in the bid for the RFP. The first of those bids started a year ago when they started putting in bids with our technology. So those RFPs are starting to come true. And people are starting to win RFPs with our technology in it. So that's the critical variable. Once you've won a bid, with our technology in it, the price point that you won the next guy, what is he going to bid, if you got five competitors into the same RFP, who's gonna bid what price. And if you're able to reduce your LCD price that you're bidding into that RFP by, let's say, 5%, theoretically, you could move it all the way down by 20%. But you don't want to do that, right? You want to you want to keep a lot of the money as a developer, you want to keep your money in your own pocket. So you reduced by 5%, or 6%, you win the bid, your competitors, your developer competitors, they go, Well, how did they win that bid? How did they get their price that low? There's only one way to get the price that low. And it's to use an alternate technology. So that that developer now has to go in and bid his next round. Now that technology slowly gets to gets integrated into the process of bidding. We're in that process right now. So to date are those has right up at 200 megawatts of projects under contract. We're getting ready to instal our first foot column five and eight megawatt scale project. So significantly larger footprints, various installed locations around the country. I think by the end of this year, we'll have eight or nine megawatts of those plants installed. But the big ones, the ones that 20 megawatts up, and the 100 megawatt and up, we have one contract that many people may have heard of on 100 megawatt project in Texas. And so that project is under contract, we have several more 100 megawatt projects that are approaching contract for us. And it's just it's the process that you have to go through to go through get that technology adopted. And we are absolutely in that chasm right now getting ready to cross over that chasm to the larger scale projects being adopted.

Tim Montague: 38:07

You referred to 100 megawatt project in Texas that's with industrial sun, what is the status of that project?

Jim Tyler: 38:15

That project is in that it's in its development cycle. So it's an interesting part about the Erthos business model. People often think of us maybe as a, like a tracker supplier, or they think of us as an EPC. To key aspects of the industry. And reality, we're neither of those. We are a technology provider that provides some materials, but not all, but where the engineer of record for the developer. So but when we begin the engineering cycle, we begin that cycle very early on in the development cycle of the project. Typically, the engineer the developers, they might hire a Black and Veatch or burns McDonald or a, you know, one of the engineering firms to support their development cycle, they'll hire us to support their development cycle. So that's a bit of a shift in the concept. So we are, we start at that very early stage. So in the in the industrial Sun project, we're in those stages, so land control, interconnect, we're assisting them with the all of that aspect of power purchase agreement, all of those things, we're assisting them through those cycles in the development of those projects, unfortunately, they along with everybody else in the country, are constrained by the interconnect queue cycle times. And it's hitting everyone. And that project is not immune to it any more than anybody else's project. And so the lead time to getting the project online and built and so on and so forth. I mean, in Texas, you can get permits fairly quickly. The interconnect queue is the sole long pole in the project, we would be able to go to cons today if the interconnect queue is available. But we all know that's a universal problem for all the speed limit by which our country is bound to instal new solar into our grid. And it's a huge problem, because it was, you know, four years ago, I was we were doing interconnect queues were two years long, now they're up and for your timeframes, and that's just a massive. I'm not the expert at that. I've done it a lot been involved in a lot of projects, but that problem has to get is all for us to help facilitate a faster adoption of solar and wind and so on into our electric grid,

Tim Montague: 40:48

your major pain point for the solar industry. I want to talk about solar modules, you are working with a variety of solar panel makers, what is the process that you go through to onboard those companies and then let's talk about module reliability and degradation because that that is a unique story to tell with are those.

Jim Tyler: 41:14

So fundamentally, part of our our business model is we create what we were calling a solar marketplace, where various companies that provide certain aspects of the technology are licenced we are licencing our technology to them. And so we have a we have a contractual relationship. So the module is now 65% of the cost of the total cost of the plant is is, is in the module itself. So it's obviously a key the key variable that we have to look at. So I think we are today we have nine of the tier one module providers in the world are signed up to our, our module licencing. agreement. So if you're if the if the marketplace is going to be filled with all of these module providers, and Erthos is pushing our technology of putting modules on the ground, we have to do some level of qualification of the most of the module provider. Right. So that's an important piece. So a simple statement tier one, that that's easy, just straight up tier one, that's you've got to you've got to meet that that criteria to be even be considered. But we push the module through further, you know, further review, aside from that, before, we are comfortable with that module provider, you know, us signing up that module provider to our contract. Now, we don't control who is the provider have the module on the project, the developer does that they signed the contract with the module provider, but the module provider has a contract with us around the intellectual property that's associated with the module. So so we help to facilitate getting that marketplace in order. And so far, we've got, like I said, nine of the tier ones under contract, several of the others are there ready to go, they want to see adoption of the technology, and you know, they want to play, you know, the way we see game, because they're the biggest ones in the industry, but but the reality is, is that the adoption of this technology is inevitable, because it's the lowest cost form of energy. And it's, it's no different than the adoption of single axis trackers where it was inevitable, because it was the lowest cost form of energy. And so it's just a matter of time until all the modern providers recognise that and, you know, ultimately sign up to this technology.

Tim Montague: 43:48

So early in the interview, you said, your two main concerns were heat and moisture. Why is he to concern? And how does that play out for modules that are flat on the ground? What are the pros and cons of, of putting modules flat on the ground?

Jim Tyler: 44:04

Yeah. So heat was, frankly, my number one concern, because I already was aware of the water side of the equation. But it was difficult to understand if you're going to put a solar panel on the ground is it going to get too hot for the maximum temperature, maximum allowable temperature. And I live in the desert, Southwest and Phoenix. And so I literally built a plant in my backyard to do some initial concept testing to prove it. And it turns out, the physics actually makes sense once you've done and proven these tests. But if you put a solar panel on a rack up in the air, there's a certain rate of heat dissipation that the air will do at the solar panel. If you take that exact same pole, that solar panel and put it on a roof on the on the roof of a house, and let's say it's, you know, two or three inches off that roof, there's a certain heat dissipation, that the roof and the air cooling around that module on a roof bring those two extremes, those are the boundaries, the roof mounted solar is what actually is the trigger of the maximum allowable temperature for the solar panel, which is like 85 degrees C. And it turns out that if you put a solar panel on the ground, on the dirt, it's almost exactly halfway between the temperature you would find on a roof, and the temperature you'd find on a rack. The variables are 2922 and 15 is a term of a variable that's in the energy calculation but, but nonetheless, when you put the solar panel on the ground, that temperature To the maximum temperatures that it sees, are almost exactly halfway between what you would see on a roof versus a rack. Since we've figured that out, it became a moot point, because rooftop is everywhere in the world. And they don't have any problems, you know, degradation, all those types of issues are, are managed, because they've figured out damp heat, you go put a solar panel on the roof in Florida, you've got damp heat as hard as any other place in the world. Right, you put a solar panel on the ground. And in Phoenix, damp heat is fundamentally it's not an issue, as it turns out, so. So that was the temperature problem. But there's turns out there's a bunch more variables that lead to degradation. People think temperature number one source of degradation. But as they've gotten better and better and better at making solar panels, dual glass modules, by facial modules improved the performance of solar panels pretty dramatically, just because they eliminated the back sheet. And the back sheet was one of the sources of degradation, water ingress through the back sheet. Well, when you went to glass glass, that stuff mostly went away. So but there was another variable, that glass glass enhanced, it's called microcracking. microcracking was a big problem, it was one of the sources of accelerated degradation. Go to glass glass, a lot of this microcracking stuff reduced, well, what's going on? Well, when you sandwiched the module between the two points, it changes the position where the module or whether the wafer is at the deflection point in the module. Well, microcracking, when they started really looking at that, it turns out, if you are able to reduce microcracking, as a natural characteristic of a solar panel, you can reduce its degradation. If you put a solar panel up on a rack up in the wind, and it's flopping around in the wind all the time, you're going to induce microcracking. Versus if you put it flat on the ground, there is no wind, there is no effective wind that influences the solar panel, it's one of the reasons we can go to 194 mile an hour winds zones. So the function of microcracking drops dramatically. There's one other function that drops, differential soiling. This is another key variable that Erthos effectively eliminates, because we cleaned the panels every day with a with a robot that goes out and sweeps all the dust sweeps off the differential soiling, bird poop is a good example. For bird poop lands on a on a solar panel, there's a hotspot right under the bird poo. And that hotspot causes the microcracks to propagate and causes other problems over time. Well, solar panels are all spread out, some of them get bird poops, I'm gonna get a little bit of dirt on and other parts and pieces. Some of them are a little more microcrack or and others. So you'll get differential degradation from one module to the next, which causes interesting differential in degradation, and further causes degradation to happen in the plant. So there's a whole bunch of versions of things that get reduced. By setting it flat on the ground, you're able to clean it reduced differential soiling, there is no wind microcracking goes away. And and this is a the last one, it's fascinating. When you're up on a rack, as the temperature goes up and down, it goes, you know, cloud goes in front of the sun, that temperature change changes quickly. A thermal change rise and fall of the solar panel itself happens fairly quickly. When it's sitting flat on the ground. As it turns out the temperature of the module slowly rise and slowly fall because there's a heatsink that they're connected to. And that same rate of rise and fall of thermal is actually less damaging to things like microcrack propagation. So it's a whole litany of things. These are hard to prove. Only time really does that. And now we have projects to have enough time to show it. And it's quite powerful, the outcome is quite powerful. So I mean, we

Tim Montague: 50:05

might expect half a percent 0.4 to 0.5% degradation in modules per year. You know, when you look at the output from an array it just slowly ticking down. You still have 80% plus productivity at the end of 25 years. What what is the expectation with Erthos? Oh, so what are you learning from the field so far about degradation? So we modelled

Jim Tyler: 50:30

point five in all of our plants and we haven't changed that. That's still the standard assumption. It would Be fair and reasonable to model 0.4. Just based on what we've seen, given another year or two of performance data, in the field actual life performance data, I believe that that number is going to come down to 0.3. Ish. And but it's really interesting because there's degradation, individual module degradation, but then there's differential degradation from one module to the next. And that mismatch degradation actually has a bigger effect over time. And that's where I think our biggest influence comes rather than just the absolute degradation of one module. It's the spread of degradation from across the 100 modules, what's the one with the most to the least, the modules and an Erthos plant will degrade very close to one another, whereas ones on a tracker will degrade in a larger spread or distribution. And I think that has the single biggest effect is the time base change of differential degradation will prove out to be the biggest benefit from a degradation perspective and solar solar panels with their dose.

Tim Montague: 51:55

Very well. Well, we're almost out of time. I, I harken back to my conversations with Matt Campbell, who's the CEO of Terra bass energy, one of the things that he points out is we as an industry are chasing penny per kWh, solar electricity that unlocks mass, green hydrogen, for example, when you think about the future of large scale solar, what are some of the things besides interconnection, you know, that you see as the biggest challenges or opportunities for us as an industry.

Jim Tyler: 52:39

So I'm not, I'm a very firm believer that we are not going to electrify our way out of the problem. It's not possible, we don't have enough time to electrify our way out of the problem, the US grid would have to get two and a half times bigger than it is today, if you want to change all the automobiles to electric. And that's just not it's not viable. And so, so we have to solve the problem another way, we have to find a replacement for fossil fuel. I'm 100% firm believer that hydrogen is that replacement, it's the right fuel to replace fossil fuel. It's just too expensive. That's just the bottom line. So the introduction of the IRA was targeted to drive that price down. And and that's happening. So you're seeing all kinds of projects being announced the cost of the input electricity to split the hydrogen into or split the water into hydrogen and oxygen is everything. It's a huge component variable, Erthos levelized cost of energy in certain geographies will be somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to $26 a megawatt hour compared to a single axis tracker with a for solar or crystallin, silicon bifacial, that'll be 31 $32 per megawatt hour, everything apples to apples, those that have you know, was our variable, LLC, we, you have to get to below $20 A megawatt hour. And there are ways to do that, there are ways to get to below 20. If you take away interconnect, that's a significant impact. And then you look at some of the other variables that impact the cost of a solar plant. financing costs of solar plant are huge. One of the biggest single risks on any solar installation, is you've got a single offtake you got one contract with one PPA, and then what happens when that PPA is done and you want to do a merchant plant, what's the projected merchant value, and so on and so forth. Those risks cause the financing to extend out and that financing cost is a significant variable. When you go to hydrogen, solar produced or hydrogen produced from solar, at the energy hubs that they're describing, right, they're talking about hydrogen hubs all around this part of the country. The off take of those hydrogen hubs there will be multi-dimensional off takes lots of different types of off takers, not just one. And that construct will help lower the cost of financing for those assets. Because you'll have many off takers. And the competitive product is brown hydrogen, or hydrogen from fossil fuel, or it's, you know, fossil fuel itself for purposes you know, for combustion for transportation or otherwise. Since that becomes your competitor competitor, you're no longer just competing with solar. You're competing with that product. And as long as you're able to produce a product that's cheaper than that product, you'll always have an offtake. And that, again, influences the financing and the economics of the project. So hydrogen is here, it's ramping, all the beneficial reasons no interconnect multiparty PPAs. To reduce risks, development cycle times can be very, very short. Rather than, you know, four and five years development cycle time, you can actually go to execution in a year, you know, for from the land development perspective, we're going to be bound by the supply chain, that's going to be the constrained supply chain of electrolyzer supply chain and poly silicon. And bringing those into the United States supply chain of electrolyzers. And supply chain and poly silicon is absolutely everything for the future of hydrogen in this country. And, you know, we'll talk about it in some future podcasts, what are some of the things that Erthos is doing on that front, but I'm a firm believer that that's the future of the industry. And when you do that, when you disconnect us from the grid, solar will grow asymptotically for several years, it will ramp into the you know, like we've got 150 Odd gigawatts installed since the inception of time for solar, doing 2324 gigs a year, we will get up into the 5060 gigs gigs a year, once we get hydrogen happening, and disconnect from the grid. So

Tim Montague: 57:06

I love that subject, though. I love it just going around the interconnection altogether, building a power plant that produces hydrogen from Green electrons. Well, thank you so much, Jim Tyler, CEO of Erthos, how can our listeners find you?

Jim Tyler: 57:21

Oh, go to the website https://www.erthos.com/ that's the that's the best place. Certainly to you know, we were heavy on LinkedIn. You know, but our general customer base is the developers. That's that's who we sell and market to. And, you know, I know there's there's quite a few of them that have been been looking at us. So you know, but get in touch listening to clean power hour with you, I think is a is a very good, very good source of starting to pay attention. Listen, good stuff.

Tim Montague: 57:51

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results. The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at Denowatts.com. That's D E N O W A T T S.com. Now back to the show. You can find all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com. Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And most importantly, tell your colleagues about the show that is the greatest way you can help the show and help others find the show. I want to thank Jim Tyler for coming on the show today. Look forward to seeing you in Vegas that already plus, this episode will drop prior to that. So we're going to Vegas, September 11 to 14th Erthos will be there, the Clean Power Hour will be there. And you can meet up with us there. So with that I will say let's grow solar and storage. Take care, Jim.

Jim Tyler: 59:00

Thanks, Tim.

Tim Montague: 59:01

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