Green Giants – Episode 100

[02:29] Howard Wenger:

Yeah, I mean, I would go to these conferences, the solar conferences back then, and I would know everybody there. There might have been 100 people. That was a good conference, 100 people. Now you go to the conferences, there’s tens of thousands of people. It’s astonishing and really what we’ve worked and dreamed about. Yeah, it’s exciting.

[02:47] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely exciting. Kind of through that, do you remember that first project that maybe made you think, man, this might actually scale, like this is gonna happen?

[02:56] Howard Wenger:

In 2004, so 20 years into my career. Dan Shugar and I, Dan’s the founder of Nextpower. We were together at a company called PowerLight with Tom Dinwiddie and a bunch of the people that are here with us at Nextpower today. In 2004, we built the world’s first 10 megawatt solar park. It was called Bavaria Solar One.

It was located in Southern Germany. For a company that we had about 120 people or so in Berkeley, California, doing the world’s first 10 megawatt solar project, the previous record was 7 megawatts by Siemens, much bigger company. We thought, okay, we’re onto something. From there, we started to build kind of like how the skyscraper race began.

Like, my building’s bigger than your building. We started building bigger and bigger plants, and that led to a lot of scale.

[03:50] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely incredible. That scale really over a short period of time. Now we talk about gigawatts and kind of looking at those early projects and stuff like that too. It’s so cool to see that evolution happen.

Kind of like fast forwarding to today, when you look at today’s market, what feels just fundamentally different, not just bigger, but just structurally different altogether?

[04:04] Howard Wenger:

Well, think the thing we always It’s really the players, the ecosystem. I think that’s thing one. You have very big, mature independent power producers, utilities, the scale across the world. Like it’s not just in the United States where we operate in 45 countries as a company. It’s kind of the breadth of where it’s happening and it’s all over, whether it’s in India, Australia, the US or Europe, LATAM, Middle East, like that’s happening at a scale that was very difficult to predict. Then the maturity of the players and the strength of the players. I’m talking about, we always dreamed about, like the tier one EPCs, engineering procurement construction companies getting into solar.

Once they and utilities participated, we hypothesized, OK, we’ve arrived. That’s happened. I think the IPP world, the developer-owner world, has around the world, really driven the scale of solar power for large scale solar. I’ve been in off-grid, DG, resi, CNI, Utility scale. If you’ve worked in this industry for 40 years, you’ve participated in all these segments. Our companies focus on utility scale. I’m leaning more into that. But yeah, we have amazing tier one EPC and developer partners and utility partners now that we only could dream about 20 years ago. That’s been a big driver. Also, the financial industry has embraced this technology and their critical part. And then, of course, there’s the policy side. Once we proved that the technology works and works reliably and it can be economic, and then you have these mature players, that’s like the ecosystem just catapulted the industry.

[06:03] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely. It’s incredible to watch that ecosystem just continue to just build and build and build and like that snowball effect happening. Throughout your career too. You’ve helped build these companies from just tens of millions to billions in revenue, just scaling and growing companies. What actually sort of breaks inside a company when you scale energy infrastructure that fast?

[06:13] Howard Wenger:

Well, look. First of all, what does it take to scale? I’ll put it in a positive light. I’ll speak to the breaking part too, but I think it’s really important to have a unified team that’s around a purpose that’s higher than just making money. Our purpose is much higher than that.

The mission of the company, we’re unified around that. We want to really drive a largely renewable grid, change the way electricity is made. Then as a company, we want to be a leading company doing that. I think we’re doing that now. When you have a team that’s unified around purpose, mission, and like and a real drive for innovation and customers, that culture has really helped Nextpower get to the next level and beyond and continues to fuel our growth.

What can break is when you go from, you said, kilowatts to megawatts to gigawatts. You know, it takes a lot of capital. It takes a really robust supply chain. It takes a lot of process. Just boots on the ground and coordination and a lot of people. What can break is the cohesion and the customer experience. It’s very important that that doesn’t break. The customer experience, and that is from design through delivery to plant commissioning to making sure that the plant delivers on its energy promise.

All those things need to happen at scale and otherwise, if one of those things breaks down, you’re in trouble. We’ve seen, there’ve been a lot of companies that have gone bankrupt because they haven’t been able to scale. One of the heartening things is we’re seeing a lot of strong companies, kind of rise to the top.

Not to toot our own horn, but we’re really happy about getting investment grade status, which I think we’re one of the first companies, if not the first in solar power to achieve that. That shows that the industry is maturing and coming of age. It takes a lot not to break as you scale. But you mentioned, we’re shipping tens of gigawatts per year now.

I think there are certain companies that have proven they can keep pace and scale.

[08:30] Wes Ashworth:

It’s incredible. I asked that question because I knew it’s not easy to do and so many do miss it. But I love where you went that really about people, you know, and about people and teams first and foremost. I think that’s the point a lot of people miss. That they have this great technology, great software, the great systems, processes, whatever. But it’s the people behind it and driving it. It gets much easier to scale when you’ve got those right

people in place that are rowing in the same direction, kind of bought in, believing the culture, those sort of things that makes all the difference in the world. I love that you went there. As the industry evolves sort of this this idea of structural change is really at the heart of what I wanted to explore today and there’s a lot of discussion right now around solar moving from just a collection of components to something much more integrated almost like a platform.

I’d love to unpack what that actually means in practice. With it going from more components to integrated systems, when a project goes wrong today or when it goes right, where does either that lack of integration or the integration itself actually just show up first on site?

[09:30] Howard Wenger:

We changed the name of the company in November from Nextracker, it was quite a trusted brand and still is for solar tracking, number one, last 10 years in a row, maybe 11 now. But we changed the name to reflect really what we’re becoming, which is an integrated platform. We changed it to Nextpower, which is more all-encompassing. We kept the X icon logo and you know our call letters are the same NXT so sort of the heart and soul of the company is still intact in the new name. But we want to deliver an integrated platform and the reason for that is customers are increasingly seeing the value of that and wanting us to do more.

Because if you think about what happened in our industry, it helped scale the industry, this disaggregation, where, OK, you have an inverter company that’s doing inverters, and you have a tracker company, and you have an eBOS company, and then you have the SCADA company, and then the foundation company, and the panels.

What that did was it forced, it was economies through focus, economies of scale through focus, but it forced the EPC, the contractor, to do the design optimization. Then they had to coordinate and still do, for the most part, coordinate with all these companies. If something goes wrong or if material doesn’t land on site in the right sequence, they have to contact company A or company D. There can be finger pointing if the system doesn’t work right, like between the eBOS and the inverter or the way it was installed.

There’s a lot of reasons that are driving us to become more of an integrated platform where we invest about $100 million per year in R&D, our company. A lot of that is around how do we marry these components together in a way that, from an engineering perspective, design perspective makes sense, reduces cost, speeds installation, increases performance? We’ve done that with foundations, tracker, eBOS, steel frames around the panels. You can see where we’re going, where we will be offering everything but the panel for solar. A lot of what we’re doing can apply to storage as well, where we see a lot of synergies.

We’re really happy with how customers are receiving this integrated platform. We’ve very focused on the engineering and design. We’re a product company. We have, hundreds of engineers and PhDs working on optimization. It’s kind of back to the future years ago, where twenty years ago we had an integrated system at a different company and then we disaggregated. Now we’re coming back to this unified platform.

[12:11] Wes Ashworth:

It’s a very real ground level way to understand integration and kind of like how that’s evolved and happened. I think it really does kind of expose us to the weakest link in the traditional model. Interesting how each phase optimizes locally, but not for the system as a whole. You talked a little bit about sort of the traditional model, who is owning everything and it kind of gets passed along and you’re looking at this person, that person. It does make a lot of sense.

I think that ambiguity feels like one of the central tensions in the industry right now. Obviously, integration is a huge path to solve that and continue to grow.

You’ve mentioned a few kind of like values of integration. What’s maybe the most underestimated value of integrating? Is it speed, cost, reliability, or something else that only becomes obvious at scale?

[12:53] Howard Wenger:

You’re good, Wes. I think it’s all of those things. I think it’s what we see all those reasons to do it. I think cost is a big one and reliability, because there’s some things that are very underappreciated. For example, wire management. I’m talking about like you have wires that go from the panels to the inverters. A lot of people are using zip ties and other things that worked for a while, but weren’t designed for 25 year power plant. If you have incorrect wire management, you can abrade the wire and cause a short. Maybe even cause a fire, and there have been incidents of this.

If we take that on and we have all of the engineering testing for our tracker specific to that, that’ll lead to a more reliable system. We’re all about proven performance. That’s like proven performance for 25 years or 30 years plus, okay? That’s what Nextpower’s about. By thinking about the wires and the wire management and then the steel frames that go around the panel instead of the flimsier aluminum frames, you have a more robust frame, less microcracking, better performance in the wind, faster to install, lowers cost, more reliability, more performance. Those are just a few examples, but we have a lot more with foundations and other elements.

[14:23] Wes Ashworth:

I was literally thinking through that of how simplistic it is thinking about wire management, but the true power that that can be if it is controlled and you think about that with all the other kind of components that go alongside of it and being able to have that piece. You multiply that across the entire system and you get some huge value points obviously, that hit all those areas we discussed. Any specific project where taking a more integrated approach really changed the outcome in a meaningful way? Like one that just comes to mind as a good example.

[14:51] Howard Wenger:

I mean, we have dozens of projects like that now. One that comes to mind, we have an extreme terrain following version of our tracker, which means we are looking to reduce or eliminate grading on site that keeps the top soil. It’s good for the natural runoff and flood management and reduces costs. Our tracker literally follows the terrain up and down.

Well, by marrying that with, we have unique foundations. These are the things that go into the ground that could actually enhance the amount of terrain following you get for the contractor and for the developer. What that does is speeds installation, but also it opens up the envelope of sites that are buildable.

In the old days, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, it was all about, I need a really flat site. If it’s not perfectly flat, I’m going to grade it and put a fence around it. Now you’re seeing systems that are following the natural terrain and leaving the topsoil intact. That’s one example where, if you’re just a tracker company, by having the foundation, it really gives you more degrees of freedom to build the system.

That’s just one example.

[16:04] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely. I love the specific example. I think it really kind of brings the concept to life. It’s helpful to see how these decisions actually play out in the field. All of this, that we’ve kind of talked about, is happening at same time as demand is changing in a pretty dramatic way. There’s a lot of conversation right now around AI, data centers and a potential electricity super cycle. Thinking about that, how real is that from your vantage point and what are your thoughts around it as you look at it?

[16:26] Howard Wenger:

Totally real. But we are hearing that some data centers won’t get built that are planned by developers to get built. It’s like anything. There’s a lot of truth to what’s happening, a lot of fact. There’s some fiction, but it’s mainly fact.

The large hyperscalers, as they’re called, like Meta and Google and Amazon, they want data centers. They’re building data centers. They’re investing in them. The demand is extreme and very rapid and real.

It’s just a question of can the market and can utilities and the industry keep pace with what they actually want to do? We’re seeing huge demand for this. There’s just no question. It’s helping drive the market. But I think there’s also electrification in general.

In this country, many of the states still want to have clean energy. They have on their books, still plans and goals and targets to transition to clean energy. I mean, the last piece of what’s driving this growth for us is just the economics are overwhelmingly and speed, speed and economics like speed to the grid. It’s overwhelmingly in our favor. You couple it with solar and storage, it’s kind of a perfect combo.

[17:41] Wes Ashworth:

Definitely. You know, obviously I asked the question, there’s a lot of noise around this. It’s helpful to just ground it what you’re actually seeing. I had a hard time actually asking how real is it, just knowing that it is very real, but you know, there’s still some hype and still some things, as you said, that maybe aren’t quite perfect, but it’s happening.

When you talk to utilities or you mentioned hyperscalers today, what are they asking for that maybe they simply weren’t asking even two years ago?

[18:04] Howard Wenger:

OK, go faster. Go bigger, go faster. I mean, when you look at our use of AI just in our company, we really weren’t using it two years ago. Now it’s pretty much, I think, 90% of our employee base that works in offices is using it every day for various reasons and various AI tools. You’re seeing more autonomous vehicles. I drove last night in an electric vehicle that has autopilot on it.

Dumbfounded. Take me to Walgreens. We’re in a parking spot. It’ll tell you, well it shows you choices, and you press a button, and it takes you there, and then it parks the car for you. It knows which spaces are open. I think there’s AI in there, and there’s electrification, and our world has changed from two years ago. Totally different world.

[18:36] Wes Ashworth:

I view it as a very similar shift to, you know, initial electrification or the dawn of the internet. I mean, it’s we’re in that type of change era with AI and what’s happening there. Absolutely incredible. It’s amazing over just a two year time frame. You usually would talk about two years, you know, changes happen, but not that dramatic. But these are dramatic changes happening.

[19:16] Howard Wenger:

I think we’ll look at like the last three or four years as this massive inflection point with AI, robotics and the internet and hyperscalers and these chips that enable to have a true neural network. That’s driving a lot of, it’s all about power. If you have power, you can do remarkable things. There’s a race for power.

[19:40] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely. Obviously you talk about speed, all those sort of things. That’s where solar comes in, perfectly positioned to meet those needs, a lot of those needs. If this demand continues to accelerate, which we anticipate it will, what physically breaks in the system first over the next 24 to 36 months? Where are those constraints and where do you see it as how that unfolds?

[19:58] Howard Wenger:

Well, think it’s really a lot of it has to do with policy because the supply chains are there to meet the demand and meet the moment. But it’s a global supply chain. We’ve domesticated our supply chain. We deliver 100% domestic content according to the government rules. Like we have 30 factories in the US that are feeding our supply chain.

But if the policy changes and say, hey, you can’t have any more international parts. Okay. Or name your country, like China, no more of that. That could and will put a dent in the speed of deployment and the cost of deployment. But I appreciate how the government wants to build more here in terms of production and job creation and it makes sense to me. I think there’s a really good balance there that we’re threading right now as a government. I think the government is threading the needle right now fairly well actually. I don’t see really anything that can break from the industry perspective.

It’s really the policy and then one more thing is the grid. Making sure that there’s adequate T&D infrastructure and points of interconnection and that the process of approvals through the regulatory agencies and the government continue to keep pace. It’s a tall order and there are bills to reform that, but it’s moving along. There’s a lot happening.

[21:27] Wes Ashworth:

You see the progress happening and you use the word balance, which I agree. I think that’s a really core part of it that needs to happen. Finding more balance, finding more ways to make it happen and come together. You mentioned obviously one of the biggest things is that that sort of pressure for speed to power. How does that actually change how solar plants are designed and delivered? How does for speed to power actually play out and how is it changing sort of how you operate and how you design and all that?

[21:51] Howard Wenger:

Well, of the things that one of the movements in our industry is towards more automation and robotics. There are many companies that are working on automating the construction process, which is very labor intensive. We’re supporting those companies, companies like Terabase or AES is working on a system called Maximo. We’re supporting all of these robotic companies. Which means actually developing parts and different things to enable them to utilize our system with their system. We want to be, in this case, not Apple, where it’s fully integrated. We have our own robotic system. We think it’s too early to figure out what exactly is the right approach.

We’re just supporting, with our platform, those companies. That’s one area that I think is for the speed to deploy could be a game changer. But these CPC companies are doing a fantastic job scaling up. A company called SOLV led by George Hershamn, you interviewed him.

[22:51] Wes Ashworth:

Yeah, he’s been on the podcast.

[22:53] Howard Wenger:

They’re a public company now, so their information’s available. You see what they’re doing. They’re really scaling quickly. It’s proof positive that the industry can scale.

[23:04] Wes Ashworth:

It’s amazing kind of the problems we start to solve as that pressure increases a little bit. It’s great to see those companies. George’s included. I’ll link that episode if anyone wants to check that episode out. Another layer to this shift is solar is no longer physical infrastructure. We’ve started talking about this. It’s increasingly becoming a combination of hardware, software and data. We’ve touched on this throughout a little bit, but solar used to be steel in the ground. Now it’s all the software controls and data. Who truly owns performance in that world?

[23:33] Howard Wenger:

Well, look, at the end of the day, it’s the owner of the power plant and they have to have a very reliable system and they have contracts for the energy typically. If things aren’t working, it first goes, the owner will know about it because we’re dipping into their pocket. They’re going to turn to the contractor that put it in, if it’s in the first year or two of the warranty of the system. Beyond that, they have an asset manager. Some of them do that themselves, or they have an independent third party do it. Then ultimately, it’s up to whoever’s taking care of the system on behalf of the owner, they have to figure out what’s wrong with the system.

Or why is there under performance and do a root cause analysis? Then it goes from there. On the top of the Pareto for solar it’s been the electrical part of the system has been at the top of the Pareto, but it can be anything. It could be a panel problem. It can even be a tracker problem. Of course Nextpower doesn’t have many tracker problems, of course, but it can be anything in the system that’s causing below performance.

[24:37] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely. Thinking about, specific to Nextpower and some of the things that you’re doing with deploying systems like TrueCapture or NX Navigator, what decisions are now being made by software or using some of this technology that used to be made by people?

[24:51] Howard Wenger:

I’m really glad you asked about that because we’re increasingly leaning on automation and AI to help the decision making or actually implement decisions on its own that can’t be overridden by a human. Let me give a specific example. We rolled out a new tracker about a year and a half ago called Hail Pro. This is for regions of the country that experience big hail stones. We have the leading tracker in that category. It will stow at 75 degrees versus a 60 degree angle. It’s more vertical, more upright so that the hail stones can glance off the system and don’t break panels. We’re very proud of it because in the last year we’ve had thousands of automated stows and dozens where we have documented hail stones that are even bigger than three inches with no damage so that’s really good news.

The automated part is we’re connected to a weather service, the system, and it’s detecting an oncoming hail event and the user can specify, hey if the hail event or if the hailstorm is within a 10 mile radius of our power plant, go into stow. Or if the hail stones are bigger than one inch, go into stow. Or if the wind speed is XYZ, go into stow. We have built in features that if the operators aren’t aware, it serves as a backup or even the first line of defense for systems. More and more, I like where you’re going, there’s a marrying of software and hardware. The owners of the power plants are increasingly demanding that those systems work like a symphony and so that’s what we strive to do.

[26:34] Wes Ashworth:

Thinking about that symphony, all working together, you know, from an operator’s perspective, how much more complex has running a solar plant actually become over the last decade? You kind of look at this evolution and you’re adding layers and data and AI and all these different components. How much more complex is it today than it was?

[26:52] Howard Wenger:

Well, we have 1400 patents and patent pending in our IP portfolio and that speaks to innovation and complexity and our company seeks to make the complex simple. The complexity is sort of behind the curtain and to make it simple for the owners and the operators of the plant do a good job and operate the plant in a favorable way.

I think all these tools are actually making the systems raise up in terms of reliability and performance. That is being reinforced by the owners of the power plants who are demanding higher reliability and performance. When you think about these data centers that are going in, they want Five 9s of reliability. The requirements are getting increasingly more stringent. But so far, our company and others are able to keep pace.

[27:49] Wes Ashworth:

If the software kind of continues to become sort of central to performance, you know, that we’re seeing that in dealing with weather events and preventing hail damage and those sort of things like, huge implications of value when you are able to use this kind of software successfully and automation successfully. If that software does become central to performance in the industry, does that change who ultimately wins in the industry? Like how does that change the playing field?

[28:13] Howard Wenger:

Well, we bought a company called OnSight. It’s a really good example. We’ve made a number of acquisitions to fill in our platform in addition to the organic innovation that we’re doing by our team. OnSight, what they have, they have two principal products. One’s a robot that looks like R2-D2 in Star Wars. It weighs about 500 pounds. It is connected via Starlink.

It has a thermal camera and a vision camera and it rides up and down the rows. It’s about maybe three and a half feet tall and it’s looking at everything below the panel and it can detect hotspots in the panels, the DC wiring connections, integrity there. Even if the dampers were installed on the tracker correctly, all the wire management is done correctly, and so it’s checking for 40 different things through hardware and software and robotics. That’s called Ranger, that product.

Then we have a product called Vantage, which is a 360 degree camera equipped with AI. It can detect smoke automatically. It sits on a pole. You have one of these cameras, it looks like a security camera. Is it being used for that also? Because it has thermal imaging and vision also. It can detect if there’s humans on site atan inappropriate time. But it’s mainly for detecting any kind of thermal event or smoke, fire on the site. It sends an auto alert to we have an operator team and they will then look with their own eyes to say, yeah, that fires within the plant, not somebody burning brush on the perimeter of the plant with smoke, coming into the plant.

It’s this sort of, there’s a symbiosis between robots, hardware, software, and humans. Humans are still very important in this equation.

[30:07] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely, increasingly important to embrace all of that and these companies that are really getting it right and kind of see that full adaptation of bringing all those components in. Those are really cool pieces of technology and I appreciate you sharing.

[30:17] Howard Wenger:

We’re incorporating AI in designing and engineering the plants. Every project is a unique, it’s like a snowflake, different. As a company, we’re incorporating AI and software tools. We have quite a large software team actually in-house.

[30:34] Wes Ashworth:

I see that trend to continue to grow. More and more of these software folks entering the industry as well too, which is good for us. As we’ve touched on a lot of things, the last piece of the shift I wanted to explore is just resilience because increasingly resilience is not just an engineering question, it’s a financial one. You talked a little bit about sort of like the extreme weather and hail and wind and how that’s shaping design decisions and kind of seeing those influences happen a lot more currently.

Overall though, is resilience today, is it more of a financial and insurance problem than a pure engineering problem? Like how do you see it?

[31:05] Howard Wenger:

It’s both. What’s gratifying is to see the insurance industry not walk away, but embrace new technology and technologies that can be resilient. We’re working with the major carriers and underwriters. We’re providing data to them on our sites, of course, with the permission of the owners of the plant.

We’re participating in building up the actuarial database to do insurance calculations and employing independent third party engineers that do assessments for hail and damage by site as an example, or fire or flooding or anything that can impact the performance of the plant. Hurricanes, wind events.

The insurance companies are really active and wanting to help the industry actually, and are providing preferential rates for companies that deliver a more resilient system. We believe we’re at the forefront of that. It’s going quite well.

[32:07] Wes Ashworth:

It does really reframe resilience in a really important way and just showing how all of those pieces are intertwined and kind of like redefining that definition. Anything that you see, so developers or asset owners, maybe are still kind of missing or getting wrong about risk that could just materially impact project outcomes?

[32:24] Howard Wenger:

Not really. I mean, I think what’s happened is the developers and most of the owners have their own development capability now. They’ve integrated it. They’re developing the sites and then they’re owning them. They’re not flipping. That shows them the maturity of the industry. They’re holding on to the assets long term. They’re taking a long view now when they do development and they become increasingly sophisticated and they have huge multi gigawatt pipelines that they’re managing, lots of money behind them and a lot of pressure.

I mean, they have pressure to perform and we’re just finding that what we call tier one owner developers are doing a really fantastic job in developing projects that and integrating with the community in a way that the community wants the project and realizes it’s going to create jobs, going to create tax revenue and be part of the community. If these projects are developed in a thoughtful way, it can be a real win-win for the community and the owner developer. I don’t think they’re really missing anything.

They’ve made, I think one of the biggest things that we’ve seen, is they’re doing increasingly amounts of more storage. If you look at the queue in the United States for new power generation, 80% of the two plus terawatt queue is solar and storage. To put that in perspective, like the entire US electric grid is about 1.3 terawatts 1300 gigawatts. There’s 2x that in the interconnection queue waiting to be approved. 80% of that is solar and storage.

I think the developers are doing a fantastic job, keeping up with technology and marrying solar and storage. They don’t necessarily have to be interconnected together, but they can be co-located and we’re really proud to work with the industry. They’re just great people and great companies.

[34:18] Wes Ashworth:

I love it. I love it. It was great to hear you say like, not really, not really missing it, they’re doing a good job. I love that. It definitely paints a picture when you’re talking about what’s in the queue, what’s coming. So incredible. As we get closer to time, I kind of want to bring this all together and I want to look forward. If everything we’ve discussed just continues to play out, the industry could look very different by the end of the of the decade even.

If we fast forward to just 2030 and beyond, what does a fully integrated solar power plant actually look like and what would surprise people most about it?

[34:52] Howard Wenger:

Well, first of all, the industry can compete on an unsubsidized basis. If you strip out tax credits that in 2030, which is the plan in the United States for large scale solar, that’s okay. The industry is rallying behind that. Okay, it’d probably be better if there was a ramp down and it’d be even better if subsidies were stripped for all energy technologies, not just solar. I think, you know, the integrated power plant of the future is going to work seamlessly together like a symphony with big companies, warranting the performance and like being in the car with the owner and with the EPC. Those are the three, the equipment provider like us, the technology provider, the contractor and the owner really working harmoniously together.

I think it’s working well today, but by embracing a more holistic system, I think we can get a lot more out of it, much faster, higher performance, higher reliability and more insurable. All the things you’re talking about. We have to, to make the energy transition happen in a way, I wish I was a younger person in a way, because this is the time we’ve hit this inflection point where solar is the least cost option and the fastest to market and to install.

The fun is actually happening right now and for the next 15 years, because we need to install hundreds of gigawatts in many countries to make this transition happen. It’s going to be, it’s really exciting times ahead and a lot more to do.

[36:27] Wes Ashworth:

It is a very exciting time and again looking at the future, even the near future, a lot to be hopeful for there and an encouragement to lots of young folks starting their careers to get in this industry. The time is now, it’s exciting, it’s a great place.

[36:40] Howard Wenger:

Get in the industry! As my father used to say to us, with my brother and I, “get in the game!” Because we would be messing around, this is when we were much younger, he would yell at us get in the game when we worked at his–he had a store that we worked at. I encourage younger folks to get in this industry because get in the game. It’s a contact sport, full contact sport. We need great minds. We’ve grown a lot. Like our company has 2000 employees now. Four years ago, we had maybe 500 employees. The industry is growing. We need great bright minds.

[37:19] Wes Ashworth:

Absolutely. Great way to put a bow on it. Just get in the game, come join us on this journey. It’s fun and exciting. It’s full contact sport as you said, it’s great. Howard, this has been just such a thoughtful and wide ranging conversation. I think what just stands out is it isn’t just about scaling solar anymore. It’s about redefining what a power plant actually is from integration to software to resilience to speed. It feels like the industry is really entering a completely new phase. Thank you for sharing your perspective and helping us unpack what this really looks like.

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