Last week I did two things I’d like to talk about: One, I watched the movie Don’t Look Up, a new Netflix Original; and two, I looked at some public solar power systems. The movie is a satire about climate change, and our company monitors the solar systems that are intended to help solve that problem.
However, as the movie shows, sometimes things don’t always work out as planned when business, the media, and government get involved in saving the planet.
So like Jennifer Lawerence in the movie, I was doing some research. We are looking to expand our customer base and I realized that many proud system owners provide a public link to view the production of their solar system.
So, I used Google to do some digging. I looked at maybe 10 to 15 systems across different types of platforms. Some systems offer an easy way to look at the historical production; that’s where it got interesting. I found inverter outages on three of those sites, typically impacting 25% to 33% of their production. In one situation an inverter had been down for almost two years and appeared to be recently fixed, but in the other two the problem was still occurring.
So I tracked down contact information for both those sites, sent them an email describing what I saw, and, if they found this helpful, also offered our services in the future. One responded the same day, and the other hasn’t yet replied.
But this really made me think about the movie and what we each need to do to address climate change. Our experience has been that these types of underperformance problems are way too common and often go unaddressed.
Over two years ago, when we first started building our solution, we stumbled upon a portfolio of systems owned and operated by a large manufacturing company. One of our team members noticed that one of their sites had an inverter down and this was costing them over $15,000 a month during the summer. We were just starting out and didn’t have a solution created yet, but I wrote a letter describing the problem and dropped off copies at the problem site and the nearby head office.
Like Jennifer Lawerence, I heard nothing back. A few months later it started working again. Eventually we made some direct connections within the firm and treated them to lunch. The initial contacts were excited and said they would talk to the people responsible for the systems and get back to us. Reminds me of the scene in the movie where the general charges the scientists for the free Whitehouse snacks.
You guessed it, we heard nothing back… but they did put a password on the sites so others wouldn’t stumble across the same information we did. On the bright side they didn’t put a bag over my head and take me away in a car, like in the movie.
As a company we are committed to trying to help our planet and nothing frustrates us more than seeing systems not performing as they should. Our concern is that these types of problems with systems are quite common, but, like in the movie, not everyone wants to acknowledge or talk about it.
So, if you want help with your systems let us know – however, if you want to take the attitude of “Don’t Look Up” well then we probably aren’t the company for you.
Here are links to those three public sites if you are curious: Girl Scout HQ – Mackintosh Academy – Makkovik Arena
For me the final one was interesting. This is a system on the arena of a remote Inuit village of 360 people on the coast of Labrador without road access. One of the four inverters appears to have been down since September 2020. I’m sure the village, like many remote communities in Canada, is using diesel for power generation. Here I was half a country away discovering a problem in this tiny village and letting them know.
So, we may not get a customer, and perhaps these systems won’t get fixed, but at least I’ll know I tried.
