A number of years ago somebody said that I was a Maven. I asked what that was and they said it was a description of a type of person in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Now I went to high school with Malcolm, I respect him but hadn’t read that book so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others. Gladwell cites Mark Alpert as a prototypical Maven who is “almost pathologically helpful”, further adding, “he can’t help himself..
I laughed when I read that description and immediately embraced the label of a maven. This week when I learned that PV system installers including Sunworks were going bankrupt of course my pathological need to be helpful kicked in.
We are right in the middle of ingesting a few thousand US based publicly accessible sites. We’ve always sought out public sites in addition to our paying customers to improve our algorithms and platforms we support. When you are developing AI/ML algorithms you want as large of datasets as possible for training purposes.
As luck would have it we were already in the middle of pulling in a bunch of Sunworks systems. What a great opportunity I thought to be helpful and expand my network and knowledge!
Some further research revealed that a large block of systems were located in Sacramento Valley and connected with farming. Makes sense, given California has the highest electricity rates in North America and farming and food processing is energy intensive.
Now I put myself in the shoes of one of those system owners. You’ve done the right thing picking a large installer with I believe a full 10 year warranty. You are wanting to help address climate change but you also need a return on your investment. You have tight margins and aren’t putting in solar for green washing purposes. You’ve been too busy to know whether your system is working as expected and whether it was being repaired. You need help but who can you trust now?
Perhaps Boxbrite can help but why would you trust us? I realized the best thing I could do was offer a free performance assessment on these systems. That would help these customers know if everything is working and if not what might need to be addressed. So that’s what we’ve been doing the few days prioritizing the systems we could find that might be Sunworks customers. Stumbled upon one that is a large 2MW+ system owned by a farmer owned co-operative. Perfect I thought and so we did a full workup on their system Friday which consists of three subsystems. I’ll send that along to them and a link to this article to see if that is helpful for them.
Now why would I do that without any expectation of a return on our time? Well the Wikipedia goes on to note this about Mavens.
In this vein, Alpert himself concedes, “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own.
Our algorithms combined with our experience allow us to find all kinds of problems that can get missed even with a site visit. However, the data doesn’t tell us everything about what happens to a system. In order for ML training to be successful you need to create labels and features. The graph you see below is the normalized output from their three subsystems from August 13th to 19th 2023. We noticed in a detailed analysis of the individual inverters that something happens to improve the West Array on the 15th and then the East Array on the 17th by approximately 5%. But what was that something? Our guess would be the panels were cleaned but it also could be that damaged panels were replaced or perhaps something else. Without that label the AI could decide that performance automatically improves in the middle of August. You may laugh but rain can remove a lot of soiling but we doubt it rained only part of their system one day and on the other a few days later.
By sharing a report to hopefully help solve their problem since there appear to be some undetected inverter problems. If we help them perhaps they will help solve our problem of understanding the data and also introducing ourselves to a wider audience.
Perhaps you know an owner impacted the Sunworks (or another installer) bankruptcy that would appreciate an analysis of their system’s performance. If we can, we will try to help, trusting that in the long run everyone will benefit from this. I will humbly suggest the world needs more Mavens as Wikipedia notes:
According to Gladwell, Mavens start “word-of-mouth epidemics” due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. As Gladwell states: “Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.