Paul Grana, Founder of Helioscope, Sales & Design Software for Commercial Solar | EP167

For all of us to focus more on what processes are we doing? And why? And what are we getting out of it? Because everyone competes differently with some people. It's about white glove with some people. It's about speed with some people, it's about automation. There's not one right answer. But for whatever we do, there's a process underneath that, and getting smarter about, hey, what changes should we be making this year to either be a better white glove or a faster fast or a more automated automation platform? You know, like, that's where I think we're gonna get beyond just a 15% contribution of soft cost reduction.

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Today, on the Clean Power Hour, we're gonna be talking to the co founder of Helia scope. Helia scope is one of my all time favorite tools for solar design, and integrates with my other favorite tool, which is energy tool base. Paul, Gramma the co founder, and managing director of Helia scope within Aurora, because Aurora bought Helia scope a couple of years ago. So we're just going to really focus as much as possible on Helia scope. But But welcome to the show, Paul is this is a long time in the coming i I've wanted to interview you for a very long time. And it was through that through the Awaroa con, you know, conference this year that we got to know each other a little bit. That was a great event. We were we were talking about the IRA and the influence of the IRA on the industry. It's heady days, we're at already plus here in Vegas, already 2023. Together with 30,000 other energy professionals, 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. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Paul, how did you get interested in solar? And what inspired you to create Helia Scope?

Sure, absolutely. See, and yeah, similar? Happy to be on, you know, kind of a longtime listener first time? Caller type of situation. Thank you. So yeah, so my journey I started Oh, wait initially with so for those that have been around a bounce solar, trying to make a module fab out in Colorado doing CAD tell. Then from there, I went into power electronics. And so this was now oh nine, where I was, I worked for a company called E IQ and then Tygo both doing dc optimizers. And I spent about four years in the hardware side of the industry. And so it was honestly a great place to cut my teeth because selling DC optimizers is was super complicated. You know, you get module level data. How do you how do you tell a value story about that? You have low voltage safety shutoff capabilities, how do you tell a value story about that? You got design capabilities, you can have longer strings, how do you tell the story about that you've got more energy, the thing that everyone thinks about so like it was a really interesting value prop to have to kind of bring to market and a great way to like, really get deep into the solar industry. And then that's what led to Helio scope. So So to kind of connect the hardware to the software side in about 2010. I had an intern, my now CO for my future co founder. And so that summer, we were actually negotiating so it's gonna go way back, we were negotiating, if you recall, so metric. So of course Sanai manufacturer. They have the sunny design tool and still have present tense and sunny design tool at the time. So do you remember solar magic from National Semiconductor? No, they had a button in sunny design tool. That was add solar magic. So again, this is 2009 there were about a dozen venture backed or venture backed equivalent startups. One of those was National Semiconductor, obviously massive player had a DC optimizer product. So they convinced so metric to put a button into the software that said, add solar magic and get a power boost, get an energy boost. So we were like, Oh, great. Somebody solved the problem. We're just trying to sell hardware was. So we were licensing that from from the from the symmetric team. And then at the 11th hour, they actually looked at the code that had come from National Semiconductor. And to their credit, we had signed, we were, we were like, tell us where to send the money for a nonexclusive, right just to use the math. And they said, Please don't send us the money. We don't want to take the money, the code isn't isn't worth anything, like, we're going to take this out of our own product. So that was so like that knowledge of there really was nothing for calculating how much more energy you get with module level optimization versus central optimization, right, like Central inverter. And again, at the time, 2010 Solar engine and phase weren't yet the winners, it was just like a dozen venture backed companies. But Paul Gibbs knew that a couple of them were gonna win. I mean, I don't think any of us knew how big they would get honestly, between the two of them. But that's a story for another day. And so he started building this software back in business school, in his second year, he kind of went back to school, he's like, I know, there's a problem. The world at this time is just PV system. PVWatts. That's it, you know. And then, so he started building what we thought of as module level PVC. just fast forward a couple of years, he graduates, we started working together with him as a consultant with you know, I was still with Tygo, we would have a neutral customer who would say, Hey, I've got a commercial rooftop, I've got shading, I expect that optimizers will give me more energy. But I don't want to hear a marketing speak two to 10%. I want to hear engineering speak. So if you can give me like a real answer, with real math, I will potentially buy this stuff. And so we did that for about two ish years, where he was building the software, he would run a model for a customer, and then we would kind of present it. And of course, he was part of how we would sell it Tygo system. And then of course, as as that grew like, it was natural for me to join him as a co founder. And then we kind of like, did our thing from there. And then the last point that I mentioned, there is notice a lot of the value is module level PVCs. So when we launched in 2014, we thought of ourselves as module level PVCs, that happens to be based on the cloud that happens to have some design capabilities. And then as soon as we started charging for it, we found that there was a lot more value in the easy to use AutoCAD, like alternative that for especially commercial sales teams, any basically one hour of training, and they were off to the races and able to do their own designs. So it wasn't a pivot, per se. But we really changed our messaging to be at 20 modulo PVCs. And then a little bit of AutoCAD two, we are cloud based, you know, easy to use AutoCAD, then anyone on your team can use. And oh, by the way, the physics is actually really darn good. But like, that's probably not what you're buying, you're probably buying because of the design capabilities. So yeah, that was kind of our kind of initial. It's incredible

how easy it is to learn how to use Helia scope, I was just instantly in love with our platform. And I'm not afraid of learning new software. Oh, contraire, the ramp on the energy tool base was brutal, comparatively. And, I mean, that really caused me some grief. But once I got it dialed in, it was it was amazing. So Well, I had no idea that you worked at Tiago. That's cool. Yeah. And it's funny when you talk about MLPs as a way to get more energy. I you know, for me, as a designer, it's more about rapid shutdown or some other objective. And an often I had some headaches, you know, getting it to work. And so I would always try to do string inverters if I could, no MLPs. But anyway, it's neither here nor there.

I'm not gonna touch that. I'll let you be.

So, so when did when did Helia scope become a commercial product?

February, February 2014. In fact, Valentine's Day, it was a Friday was the day that so we had about 800 beta users, so free trial users. And then February 14 20 2014, was the date that it was like, if you haven't paid us, you're losing access to it. So

and and truly, you were you're disrupting PVWatts really more than anything, right? The the DLP free platform, and I mean, PV cyst. It's amazing how PVCs has persisted to this day, with this very, you know, command line, crunchy old school approach to software, which I abhor now. And I've never and you and you have to be quite technical to use PV cyst as well. You know, now there's plant predict, which is probably giving PV SR run for its money. I had David spill down are on the show. I like I like that platform a lot.

Yeah, you know, we we expect them to, I'd say a couple of things. Well, I think we were just like both PV CES and plan predict what I'd say PV cyst is. They deserve credit. I mean, they did invent the physics that's used on all of our big biggest solar projects, you know. And so, at that level, they deserve the physics credit. And, you know, the way that I the way that we think about them, so we coexist with them a lot. Like, in fact, let me say it this way, whenever a customer comes up to me and says, Hey, I'm thinking about canceling PV cyst, I say to them, please do not do that. Please don't. Because PVCs can do 100 things, you know, when you want to handcraft a weather file. PVCs can do that when you want to handcraft an inverter and say, I'm going to buy a megawatt inverter, but firmware limited to 985, and a certain power factor PVCs that you do that we don't have an inverter editor. Now we support OMD files, we support pan files. So we love to coexist with PVCs. So it's like if you want to do something fancy and weird, PV sis has the tooling to do every fancy, weird thing you could imagine. And then just upload that pan file into Helia scope. But let's say it's a module. And then you can still use Helio scope for doing a lot of the early work iterating with a customer value engineering, things like that. And so we it's like, there's a long tail that PVCs does, when people cancel PVCs then that means the next month when they need to edit a module, they're gonna be mad at us for not having that module or inverter or whether file editor, you know, so so we actually, you know, kind of respect them and have no problem coexisting because frankly, as far as we're concerned, Helia scope can still be used for the what I think of as the most important steps in the process, right? Getting the customer engaged, figuring out what you're going to build squeezing out cost of value engineering. And then if the last step, you have to run a PVCs report, okay, that's annoying, but it's whatever, it's it plays a role, you know, like there are, there's elements of paint, frankly, the fact is, that it's desktop software has good like defect, you can put it on a thumb drive has good benefits for the industry. We're cloud based, we're never gonna let you download a huge scope to a thumb drive and attach it to your wet ink to sign contracts. Right. So like, there's a lot that's built into the to the PVCs process, it's way harder to unseat than it seems. And but to your point, when, when first solar showed us what they were building with, with plan predict, one of the things that I was like, dang, you guys really are building a PVCs killer. And like I said, when we started, we were like we're going after PVCs. But then within 30 days, we were like actually, we're going after AutoCAD, but they really focused on going after PVC, just so it'll be interesting, see how it goes.

So then I started using Aurora, just on a very side basis helping a friend in California who had a resi company. And it was resi only, I come from the commercial EPC world and you know, big flat roofs that was our bread and butter. And Aurora was a little steeper learning curve. Different though it i As we were saying in the pre show, I consider them apples and oranges. You know, they're very complementary, but different. And, you know, you can get a three dimensional design out of Aurora, which is very sexy. And I think that does appeal to consumers. But I find that when I talk to other installers, they're, they're quite strongly opinionated, that they prefer Helia scope for commercial and often prefer Aurora for residential. Aurora, I see the acquisition and you tell you tell me, but I see them that play as a way for them to get a good commercial tool in their toolbox, right? Even though they were chasing commercial with our own platform, and talking about things like using AI to identify key pouts. I mean, key bots are one of the veins of a designer's existence when you're on a big roof with you know, 500 small keypads. Yep, that is just time consuming, and it's a good use case for automation. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America. The maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 25 to 275 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 252 75, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts, the 250 to 75 pairs well, with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to chintpowersystems.com To find out more. But tell us about the acquisition. How did that come about? And what has it been like integrating Eureka company into this totally other company.

Yeah, totally. So the acquisition was, as you said about two years ago. And to be honest, it was started by a third company who shall remain nameless, where, you know, we were heads down just doing our thing building Helio scope. And then his other company said, we want to buy you guys, we got to a number that was like, we would be remiss not to say yes to this. And we were very close to signing with that company, when the Aurora press release went out that they had raised $250 million. And up until that point, they were not on our list of potential acquires, because they had raised about 75 million at that point. But when you raise five, and then 20, and then 50, like, which don't get me wrong, is a lot of money. That's like, that's the kind of money that funds payroll. But when they then raise 250, you know, it took us an hour or two, and we were like, wait a minute, that's not you can't spend that on payroll, it would be impossible to spend that on payroll, like, that's got to be a rainy day fund. And so, literally that day is when I called up, Sam, my counterpart over at Aurora. And we hammered up all the details within four days. So it was a super fast process

that you were about to sell to a different company. That's Yep. And realize that Aurora was now in a position to make an acquisition. And you said, Hey, would you consider Okay, yeah. And but you had a relationship with the owner over there?

Yeah. Both Sam and Chris, we knew we knew pretty well, not just from being at conferences, but you know, we would text each other back and forth. You know, we were friendly competitors, you know, so we were friendly enough that it was straightforward to just, you know, shoot attacks and get on the phone that same day. So and then. So yeah, so like, that was the sort of acquisition process. And yes, to your point, like, their strategy for the most part was, hey, they're the leader in resi. We were the leader in CNI. Frankly, I think that one of the somewhat philosophical points, and I've been meaning to ask Sam and Chris, this question, my hunch is that. So you recall, they had announced a commercial product a couple times, and tried to launch a commercial product a couple times. And my opinion is, neither of them got much traffic and traction at all. And I think that, ultimately, the fact that they did that really helped them decide to acquire US. Because, you know, think of it officer if they had never done it, but it was still on the roadmap, they they might have told themselves, well, we could build versus buy, but we can probably build just as good. But once they had like, tried and realized, hey, this cup was pretty sticky. People love that thing. We can't wrestle their customers away from them, it's easier for them to justify acquiring us when the opportunity came up. So yeah, so anyway, so that takes us to about two years ago. And then to your point, the the products are different. I would also say the the applications are different, right? Like the the world of residential, solar and the world of commercial solar, are just very different products are very different worlds. Residential is all about speed, standardization, as much as possible automation, I often use an analogy of like a manufacturing plant, you know, like a candy bar factory to use the old like, you know, you know, comedy sketch example. So Aurora, like residential, not just ROI. But residential generally is like, ideally, it's like a candy bar factory. And of course, every site is different, but you do your best to make sure every site is as close as possible to the others. Obviously, in commercial, it's not like that, right? Like every project is big, every project is unique, every project is going to have a unique bottleneck. That's, you know, you kind of know the world of bottlenecks, but every product is going to have its own constellation of whether it was about roof conditions, or interconnection or whatever. And so it's just a different mindset for everyone going through those processes. And so that's part of why, you know, as we were chatting, kind of before, as you were just saying about, like, there's applications of automation in both. But it's a lot more impactful in the residential part of the world, because you're starting from a place where the people who are growing the fastest are doing their best to standardize and automate as much as possible. So AI helps to kind of supercharge that. Whereas in CNI, it's like a relatively smaller impact of automation. And then, in terms of the products themselves, you know, one of the things I often talk about is, the core design experience is probably always going to be different. Because fundamentally, if the user is laying out 30 modules, you do things differently from when the user is laying out 30,000 modules, you know, it's just a different set of like way that you write the software. And so but on the other hand, I'll give you a very recent example. We use the same LIDAR data set. And so people use Helio scope, use LIDAR and huge scope. Aurora has headliner for many years And that's, by the way, one of our one of the new new things in Helio scope. As of yesterday, we now have LIDAR available on our Pro Plan. So any of our users today can go to the website, just by access to LIDAR for 100 extra a month per user, and they're off to the races with LIDAR. And so that's a shared asset between both products. And the reason I say that is, alright, bring that up is recently, auroras LIDAR team was able to get a big upgrade to the coverage of our LIDAR dataset. And guess what, overnight, that was a that was available in Helio scope. And so what we're trying what we try to do is be smart about which things should be different, because they have to be different, the users are different, the projects are different. On the other hand, which things should just be the same, because if you got one team building one really good asset, and we can both leverage that, it's just gonna be a better a better product, we'll be able to ship new things faster. Again, if he had a separate, he was gallbladder, we wouldn't have that coverage upgrade that just came through. So you know, so it's like, the devils in the details, because really, there's about 30 different parts of the product that you're talking about between component databases, and whether databases and the imagery layers and the designer, etc, etc, etc. So there's a lot to it. But the reality is, it's going to be kind of a hybrid approach to how we think about these products.

And so is the future of Helia, scope Helia scope, or is the future of Helia scope, Aurora, with helium scopes capabilities,

that's probably that probably TBD, to be honest. So, for example, at the product level, they're going to be different. But to your point, in the future, should a customer be able to pay one bill and get access to both? That's not the case today. But in the future that might be in the future, should a customer be able to have one login and have access to both? That's also not the case today. But in the future, it might be? If anything, what I would say is, we are following the things that our users care about. And as of now, our users are not really asking for the ability to have one login work for Aurora and Helia scope at the same time. They're asking for designer capabilities, and we're working on building those as our capabilities, you know, so, you know, basically, these things are definitely on the table. And we just need, and I'm sure it'll happen more over time. So again, but you hear what I'm saying is definitely not a no, it's just, hey, you know, it's just pragmatic. And as soon as it matters enough to our users, it'll move up our list.

Well, in our last couple minutes together, Paul, what do you say to CNI, energy professionals? Who are, you know, either looking for a platform or, you know, looking to grow the existing platform that they're using, like, what is on your mind, I guess, about the future of these platforms that have become such an important part of our, our everyday work?

Yeah. What I'd say there, and I'm going to be talking a little bit about this later today at the I'm doing a talk at the whatever the innovation lounge, okay? It's all about process. And one of the things that actually Aurora has, has always done a really good job of, and I'm really glad that we can draft off of this with Helia. Scope, is they've got a whole team of I think of them as process engineers. So this team, we call them sales engineers. So this team will talk to a customer of ours, map out what they do, map out what are the highest points of leverage and map out? Where should that we automate, say, from Salesforce into Helia? Scope, or Aurora? Of course, this applies on revenue side as well. Where should we automate from here the scope in Aurora back into your Salesforce tenant? when, how, who's doing it? How is it triggered, who has access to it, etc. Those types of things are super important for First of all, helping all of us reduce cost. In fact, I saw for example, a some MIT report, which I wasn't a super fan of, but I'm going to give them I'm going to like mention them, where they basically said that, in the last 20 years, hardware cost reduction has driven something like 85% of our overall cost reduction. And so soft costs are only responsible for about 15% of our cost reduction. So I'm going to take some exception with our methodology, but ignore that and assume there's something there. So that's where I'm going is for all of us to focus more on what processes are we doing and why? And what are we getting out of it? Because everyone competes differently with some people. It's about white glove with some people. It's about Lead with some people, it's about automation. There's not one right answer. But for whatever we do, there's a process underneath that, and getting smarter about, hey, what changes should we be making this year to either be a better white glove or a faster, faster or a more automated automation platform, you know, like, that's where I think we're gonna get beyond just a 15% contribution of soft cost reduction. So that's where API tie ins, which, you know, we've always been a fan of, right. Like, to your point, we have hundreds of customers that use API's automatically, to have the data flow from here, this goes to energy tool base, that's an example of what I'm talking about. But like, let's put that on steroids. You know, it's really should be Helio scope, energy tool, base, PV bid, all these other products, and our our customers own internal processes that are in Salesforce, or Oracle or Google Sheets, you know, but really getting smart about those things. And automating as much as we can, is, I think, how we're going to keep the cost curve going, because harder is only gonna take us so far for the next 20 years.

While reducing the cost of solar, the soft cost, the hard costs, it's very, very important. Right? As you and I know, it's American Solar is too expensive. On the global playing field right there, we need to reduce the soft costs of solar to be competitive. 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. Well, we're out of time, unfortunately, it's great to see you here. Enjoy the show. And how can our listeners find you? What's your preferred way to connect with our listeners?

Probably the easiest would be LinkedIn. I try to be responsive there. I'm not perfect, but I try to be. And then other than that, I mean, that's probably going to be the best one.

Excellent. Yeah, well check out all of our content, I clean power hour.com Give us a rating in a review on Apple and Spotify, so that others can learn about the show. And please tell your friends and colleagues about the show. There's so many people that have never heard of the Clean Power Hour. I know, shocking, but true. So please tell your friends about the show and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with my listeners. And I love hearing from you. And hey, maybe you too can come on the Clean Power Hour someday. So reach out to me. I'm Tim Montague. Thank you, Paul gharana, General Manager of Helia scope at Aurora. Thank you so much. Thank

you, Tim. It's great to be here.

I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar. Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about. You are part and parcel of the energy transition, whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional. So thank you, I want to let you know that the Clean Power Hour has launched a listener survey. And it would mean so much to me. If you would go to clean power hour.com. Click on the About Us link right there on the main navigation that takes you to the about page and you'll see a big graphic listener survey, just click on that graphic and it takes just a couple of minutes. If you fill out the survey, I will send you a lovely baseball cap with our logo on it. The other thing I want our listeners to know is that this podcast is made possible by corporate sponsors. We have two wonderful sponsors today cin power systems, the leading three phase string inverter manufacturer in North America and Dena watts, a performance monitoring platform for utility scale solar. So check out CPS America and Dena watts. But we are very actively looking for additional support to make this show work. And you see here our media kit. With all the sponsor benefits and statistics about the show. You know we're dropping two episodes a week. We have now over 320,000 downloads on YouTube, and we're getting about 45,000 downloads per month. So this is a great way to bring your brand to our listeners and our listeners are decision makers. in clean energy, this includes projects executives, engineers, finance, project management, and many other professionals who are making decisions about and developing, designing, installing and making possible clean energy projects. So check out clean power hour.com both our listener survey on the about us and our media kit and become a sponsor today. Thank you so much. Let's go solar and storage