derek the solarboi Posts

I get press missives now, and I guess Mercom Capital sends the press a “top 10 startups” list after RE+ every year. I had fun looking through it – there are some eye-rolls, as there always are when big-money folk try to assess what technology has a meaningful chance to make it big, but one, in particular, stood out to me.

Ladies and gentlefolk, may I present Sundial, a supposed universal tracker.

Sundial is billed as three things:

1. A luxury upsell, to increase the installer’s revenue per project
2. Allow for selling smaller systems, reducing cost to get more customers through the door
3. Offer retrofits for customers who are unhappy with the performance of a system they were sold

On the plus side, I’m sure getting parts for this thing if/when the moving parts fail would not be difficult, because it looks like something built in someone’s garage. All the promo videos appear to be sped up, and the motor is extremely loud.

Considering this would be ADDED to a “normal” installation (fastened to whatever racking system you have, with the module attached to the Sundial), you need one for every single panel in an installation. Imagine 20 of those motors on your roof, whining throughout the day.

It also looks extremely inflexible. It says it can be for seasonal tracking or daily tracking, depending on orientation, which is laughable to me. For instance, on a residential system with a few rows of modules in an array, just about any individual panel tilt is going to end up shading another module unless you design the system with farther spacing. The tile angle only goes in one direction, starting with the face of the roof. There are very few situations where this might have a meaningful impact on production, which all but eliminates selling point number 3.

That’s not even the worst part about trying to sell this to dissatisfied solar customers. To install this, you’re adding extra weight, and you’d need to redo engineering/permits. You’re adding greater system complexity with motors. If God forbid, one of the 10-20 motors you installed on someone’s roof fails, and they’re ALREADY unhappy? That’s a nightmare for customer experience.

As for selling points 1 and 2, number 1 is a despicable reason to pick up a product by itself. Luxury upsells are fine, but you need to be talking about how they bring the customer value. For number 2, I cannot see a way that this will result in less cost overall for customers unless they have an incredibly good price point and an amazing ease-of-installation story.

To be frank, I do think it’s a fun idea. But maybe just for hobbyists. It’s not a product that has real potential in the larger market. Its failure will be from trying to accommodate far too many situations without an extremely good reason to exist.

Rocking Solar, another company featured in Mercom’s startup list, is an interesting contrast here. Their scope is extremely narrow, and they do a lot of work to emphasize the reliability of the parts they’re using. They aren’t for retrofit. They’ve narrowed the motor/panel ratio to potentially 1:100. It’s still added complexity and a bunch of moving parts (which by default makes me grumpy), but they have numbers to support the product and specific, sensible reasons why you might use it.

Ultimately, I’m ranting because the big-money people often don’t understand the products they give attention to. I feel like Sundial either had excellent connections to get this sort of attention, or someone at Mercon said, “oh cool, a residential tracker, I haven’t seen that before, so it’s gotta go on our list.”

It’s a fun demo but a stupid product, as it stands right now.