Talked with TJ from SMA America about their upcoming 3-in-1 rapid shutdown device at RE+ this year!
The SMA Smart Shutdown is a 3-in-1 device (1 SSS can shut down 3 panels), and is RAIL-mounted, not panel mounted. Could be a pretty great option. It’s not string shutdown yet, but design-wise, the install process looks to be better than any other rapid shutdown device I’ve seen out there so far.
SMA says the SMA Smart Shutdown is coming in Q2 of 2025, along with their larger Sunny Boy Smart Energy and Home Storage products.
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.
A luxury upsell, to increase the installer’s revenue per project
Allow for selling smaller systems, reducing cost to get more customers through the door
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.
Started chatting with PVStop a number of months ago about their firefighter safety product. I asked for some samples, they sent me some, and I finally hit the perfect job to try it on!
For more info about PVStop: https://pvstop.com.au/distributor-network/
Got to talk to @MayfieldRenewables ‘ Laurel Hamilton about Mayfield, their education summit that’s coming up, and how her experience helps to bring it all together. Mayfield Renewables’ Education Summit happens on Oct 3rd in Austin, TX. You can sign up here: https://www.mayfield.energy/education-summit-2024/
This week, my YouTube channel was victim to some malicious copy-strikes from a home inspector in Arizona. Short story, I exposed his arrogance in a blog post on electricdramatic.com last year, that post was used in a hearing against him earlier this month, and he chose to lash out.
The videos he copyright-struck were on a secondary channel from my main channel, and they were uploaded as unlisted, used only to support proper embedding into the blog post, and to avoid losing parts of the record. This is clearly a “fair use” situation.
Clearly pissed about my post being used against him in court (unbeknownst to me, might I add), he copy-struck ALL videos uploaded, including videos he did not own. This is against the policy for how the DMCA takedowns feature is allowed to be used, but YouTube has very little recourse for a smaller creator like me to fight malicious actors who know how to play the system.
The secondary channel was taken down, obviously, but what I didn’t realize was that any YouTube channels on the same Google account are also often disabled when this happens. And so, the solarboi’s YouTube presence disappeared. All videos, all subscribers.
Yes, YouTube has some tools for submitting for a repeal of this decision, but it’s extremely limited, and I’ve exhausted all the ones I can find already.
I’ll be doing my best to rebuild what I’ve lost, but I need all of YOUR help with this, too. I don’t intend to be cowed by well-known but insecure entities, but that only works when others feel the same way.
If you enjoy what I do, and support my work to inform the solar industry’s workers and customers, please consider sharing this post and subscribing to my new YouTube channel! To all those who have already shared the new channel and subscribed, thank you all so much for your support, it’s very appreciated. ❤️
By the way, please do not attempt to find the person responsible to harass or bully them in any way. He’s not worth it, I’m fully past the possibility of getting my channel back, and I don’t want to get into it with him any further. He’s a silly boi, and he’s playing games and finding out the hard way all on his own. I’d just like to wash my hands of this entire situation and move on.
This coming week, I hope to release a video where I’m playing with arc fault testing, which promises to be fun, and start a conversation around needing better tools for maintenance. Hope to see you there. 😄
For those of us who can’t get enough of solar troubleshooting info, I present to you your “SolarFix”, where I’m highlighting what the larger solar community is able to share when it comes to troubleshooting and maintenance of PV installations.
Every season presents its own set of opportunities and challenges for solar energy systems, but the elevated temperatures of summer can be particularly tricky. One common issue is overheated breakers, which can lead to system failures. This case study conducted by Energy Support Services (ESS) explores a scenario where overheated breakers impacted multiple project stakeholders, and how innovative solutions were implemented to address the problem.
Great little case study. I’ve known similar situations with direct sun on an AC combiner box to be dealt with via some kind of extra sun cover. If you can interrupt the sun’s radiance before it ever hits the box, you’ve probably already fixed your intermittent breaker-tripping issues. The other solution is spacing your breakers farther apart, but often that’s not practical, depending on how the system was originally built.
If you’ve seen something that should be highlighted in SolarFix, or would like to submit a guest post, let me know!
