5 Solar Innovations That Will Change The World. And One That Won't
[Music] on solar quotes tv this month solar innovation what's new in solar in 2021 inverter face-off innovative micro-inverters put to the test how australia became the world's biggest solar innovator we go inside a smart home of the future we talk to a solar installer with a difference on the other side of the world all that and a big solar quotes announcement on solar quotes tv hello and welcome this month we're looking at innovation what's new and innovative in solar in 2021 but before we go there let's take a very quick look at the greatest innovation of them all in my humble opinion i started in the solar industry in 2007. back then a grand total of 1 115 teeny tiny solar power systems were in operation across australia early adopters were paying about ten thousand dollars for a one kilowatt array on their roof and systems would take 30 years to pay back their cost fast forward just 14 years and there are almost 3 million solar systems in use with an average size approaching 10 kilowatts today in 2021 if you pay 10 000 you can get a top quality 10 kilowatt system the cost of quality installed solar has dropped by 10 times in 14 years and we've gone from 0.01 to almost 30 percent of aussie homes having solar panels australia has the cheapest residential solar in the world and the highest uptake how did we get here with the rarest of rare things an innovative government scheme that actually worked believe it or not it all started with this rabid greenie australia will more than play its part to address climate change in may 2007 six years after he created the renewable energy target liberal prime minister john howard announced an eight thousand dollar rebate for anyone installing solar panels at a stroke climate change denying john howard had reduced the simple payback for solar from at least 30 years to a much more attractive five-ish years that's the innovation that kicked off the solar boom in australia it was improved over the next five years by subsequent labor and liberal governments until it settled on the esrez scheme which offers a point of sale discount that reduces gracefully over the next 10 years until it zeros out in 2031. this rebate paid for by polluting energy retailers has launched thousands of solar install companies mostly good but a few baden's too and over 14 years they've honed their installation chops to become incredibly efficient at what they do it's a big reason that we get for five thousand aussie dollars what costs americans twenty thousand dollars to put on their roofs now i'm no fan of government but credit where credit is due the scheme that became known as simply the solar rebate has got to be one of the most innovative and successful solar subsidies anywhere in the world thanks john howard now how about believing in global warming eh our david versus goliath field test where we see how end phase micro inverters perform against the much hype new fronius gen 24 inverter we're here in the suburb of richmond south australia where there's been a really detailed inverter study going on specifically testing the fronius gen 24 versus infa iq7 plus micro inverters solar nerd gold right i'm here with sam craft from nrg solar sam what exactly have you been up to here over the last three months we've been watching how the systems react to different types of shade and which ones perform better under certain circumstances so the theory that we've all been taught and that you know to be honest i've been telling everyone for 10 years is that if you have a string inverter and a bunch of solar panels on that string and you shade one of those solar panels it brings the whole string down is that what you're seeing well that's what we've all been told but that is definitely not what we've been seeing oh that's really interesting so we're going to be running two tests to answer the question which type of inverter handles shade better a good string inverter or a good micro inverter so we're going to be testing big shade and little shade so i thought to myself what are the two biggest obstacles to solar energy in australia and the answer was obvious number one is matt i love cole canavan number two is angus don't worry guys i've got this taylor so those are big obstacles and now we're gonna need two little obstacles so on the same theme i've got matt canavan's hand and i've got angus taylor's hand and that's just to shade one cell whereas this one will shade multiple cells so you've been doing this really in-depth study for many months you've put an enormous amount of time and effort into it but solar quotes we don't do things like that we want to get results in real time in the next 20 minutes what do you reckon let's do it so the panels have got no shade on them at all we've got 2.7 kilowatts on the end phase and what's that one sam 2.82 now oh so they're bouncing around sometimes the end phase is winning sometimes the fronius is winning they're within what 200 watts of each other i think we've got to call that a draw with a no shade situation let's see what happens when we put a little bit of shade on each string i'm going to put this over two half cells which in theory will reduce the current in one of the strings of cells and the theory is that the reduced current from that panel on the fronius will flow through to all the other panels but it won't affect the other panels on the end phase we're going to see if that's true i'm here at the fronia string and i'm going to place this onto the top corner of the panel we've waited 10 minutes for the powerpoint tracking algorithms to settle down a bit and what's your saying sam mine's at three kilowatts exactly 3.19 kilowatts
so they are bouncing around a bit the fronius is slightly beating the end phase but within the margin of error so the string inverters handling that little bit of shade amazingly well i'm not sure that's what the micro inverter fanboys like me want to see another really exciting bit it's time to get the big guns out and see what big shade does to the string inverter versus the micro inverters [Music] so we're going to put the big shade objects smack in the middle of the solar panels and we're going to do that because these are half cut solar panels which each have six cell strings three at the top three at the bottom and i want to take out all six strings of cells okay angus do your worst finn's just put his picture on the end phase system and i'm going to put matt here on the fronius so we're giving it 10 minutes what's your saying sam on the front 3.21 kilowatts i'm doing 3.12 kilowatts so again within 100 watts that's really interesting that froze is handling the shade as well as if not better than the micro inverter so the question we asked for this month's field test was what type of inverter handles shade better the en phase micro inverters or the fronius gen 24 string inverter we put a teeny tiny leaf size bit of shade on two of the half cells again couldn't see a difference between the micro inverters and the string inverter and then we put a much bigger shade object covering all six of the cell strings on these half cut panels and yet again the fronius the end phase within 100 watts of each other so sam that goes against conventional thinking i've been telling porcupines for the last 10 years so is the industry so obviously this was a fairly shallow test if you want to see detailed results taking over months the company that sam works for nrg solar have got an amazing in-depth video and we'll link to that in the description check it out as i said there's a much more scientific and detailed experiment in the video from energy in the description after our test eddie may rocked up and he did this which just goes to show kids cricketers and solar don't mix as solar and in time batteries become more and more part of our everyday lives people are increasingly investing in smart homes homes programmed to maximize self-consumption of solar hello my name is thompson i'm from gola south australia and welcome to our home from outside may look a little bit daggy but from inside we got a lot of things to unwrap and show you firstly we put solar then we realized that we got too much solar so we put the batteries in then batteries could be filled up so we got a card to help us out now we don't have enough soil again so there's a problem i'm rachel bojanovic married to tom and as well as the solar and the battery and the car that we had to get to capture everything else we've got a few devices that help make our life a little bit easier in terms of understanding what's happening with our energy so we've got a zappy car charger which helps us charge the car we've got watt watchers which is a monitoring system that helps us know how we're using electricity in the house and we've got a switched in device which lets us turn things on and off or control the battery and control the solar the switzerland device that we purchased for the reason of curtailing our solar because at the beginning of our journey we're realizing that you know too much solar being on a spot market as we are with our retailer will costing us a lot of money so for export of 28 kilowatt hours once we paid eight dollars a penalty so we are fully exposed to the market and switch the device really so to help us manage those costs and also kind of take advantage of the negative pricing two weeks ago we had a negative prices for quite extended time and the weather wasn't that good so we were able to charge our battery car and a home at the same time at negative price so pretty much we were paid to consume the energy and now we're actually using using it to monitor and control the battery because we don't want our car to charge of the sun and battery while it's charging during the day for example in the house i think that we can see about eight or ten different layers of things we can see what the solar is producing what our whole house is using what the battery is doing but as well as that we can see what the hot water system is doing what the dishwasher is doing what the oven is doing what our little entertainment like basically the lounge room stuff is doing and what the laundry's doing so yeah we end up being those people who can actually tell when the kids are having a party because stuff's on and it shouldn't be in terms of cost we were lucky that we were able to to qualify for south australian home battery scheme the system like this would normally cost anything between 15 to twenty thousand dollars our system i think cost us overall with the charge around eleven thousand dollars it's very hard to so to talk about payback because now we have a car so we don't go anymore to the petrol station which is kind of in addition to this i hope you feel energized with all this information we shared with you and empowered and i you know like our home is open for everybody if you're stuck in goal and don't have anybody anywhere to charge your car there's a free charging point here so welcome thank you for all the youtube comments here's one from aaron sparrow how much did tesla pay you to continually sell their product it seems they appeared in every segment in some capacity is this a genuine review for all batteries available to us consumers or aim to push tesla power i'm in the market for an australian option thanks for the comment aaron i would suggest you go and you have a look at our blog scroll back to when it really kicked off and the first post that i wrote that was popular which was heavily criticizing the tesla powerwall one warranty because it was a bit of a joke it got quite a lot of airplay in america because i pointed out how bad the warranty was tesla really freaking hated me for it trust me that was back when tesla had a pr department i was public enemy number one to those guys then i sneaked into the tesla powerwall 2 launch in melbourne and i listened to the then head of tesla energy or solarcity at the time who claimed that you could get an 8 returner for your money if you bought a tesla powerwall 2. i wrote a blog post that said that's absolute again tesla pr freaking hated me we have a reputation in the australian solar industry for being anti-tesla which is a bit ridiculous because i drive a tesla car and i've got to test the power wall too but there are a lot of problems with tesla i think the problem is they think the ends justify the means and their means when they're exaggerating about their products can be a bit dodgy in my opinion so i call out tesla when they say and i praise them when they do good things the good things they do their products in my opinion are freaking awesome the tesla power wall 2 is amazing and i'm sorry there were a lot of shots of a tesla power wall 2 in the last solar quotes tv but that's what i've got in my house and we're on a bit of a budget and we're at birth time pressure so you're going to see a lot of shots of that tesla power wall too but i hear what you're saying we will try and get footage of other batteries the problem is most people have tesla power wall twos but hey thanks for the comments i just want to clear that up also go to google search battery comparison table you'll see we compare every battery we know of on the australian market have a look there there must be two dozen batteries there including a bunch of australian ones compare the specifications if you want an australian battery go for it last month we were in mudgy the month before tazzy but this month we're going global for installer profile with a difference we're taking you to india to talk about pollinate a fantastic australian charity that is helping bring solar to some of the poorest regions in the world hello to praveen in hyderabad who installed solar systems like this hi praveen hi finn and thanks solarfools for your support of all net groups work over the past past few years i'm talking to you from desert community which is located in hyderabad was founded in 2012 by a group of six university students from australia the students traveled to bangalore and saw that the people living without access to electricity running water and reliable communication so the student decided to recruit local sales agents called pollinators to provide these communities with access to reliable and affordable clean energy so praveen just how many solar systems like this have been installed in the community so since 2012 our sales agent have distributed over 200 000 clean energy products like solar fans solar lights and solar home systems to improve the lives of over 70 000 people are living in poverty so how many tons of emissions have been avoided by installing these tiny little panels by replacing traditional sources of energy like kerosene and biomass with this clean energy products our communities have become safer healthier and cleaner our products have also had a great impact on the environment by saving more than 60 000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions can you tell us about the decision that was made by pollinate in 2018 in 2018 to only recruit women in our sales agent network since this time we have trained more than 900 women in successfully sell clean energy products in their communities what are some of the benefits to the community of products like this before joining polynet as surya mukhi she has like she had very less connections and now she learned business skills now she is confident enough to start a new business venture thank you so much lakshmi garu and thank you so much finn thank you so much solar codes for letting us share our work in india with you thanks praveen you guys really are small installers making a big difference solar quotes has been supporting pollinate the last two years and over those last two years thanks to people like you getting quotes we've been able to contribute over 130 000 australian dollars to help get these products in the communities and train up those female entrepreneurs so they can have thriving businesses that help some of the poorest people in the world install solar now this is working out for me just fine again i'm handing on my two minutes of solar tech to someone else last week it was simon hackett from redflow this week it's cameron knox from alum energy a really innovative company that one day may just deliver solar energy to your apartment over to you cameron thanks finn so a loon is a melbourne-based company committed to making rooftop solar accessible to people who have traditionally been missing out namely we focus on the over 2 million australians living in low-rise apartments with the roof space for solar but no affordable way to get access to it with rooftop solar being so financially and environmentally compelling in australia we didn't think this was fair so we built the soul shell which is the world's first and only behind the meter solar sharing system it allows a single rooftop solar system to be optimally shared by separately grid connected and separately metered units within that building for the first time making rooftop solar easy to install on small apartment buildings the social works by monitoring and responding to the instantaneous usage each of the units that are connected to send them their solar allocation at a time and to a quantity that maximizes their savings the sole share is made here in melbourne and has been recognised by the clean energy council innovation award it's already extended rooftop solar to over a thousand apartments in australia and we are set to double that by the end of this year we're also excited to be bringing this aussie invention to the world with current implementations underway in both the us and the uk with over 22 million americans living in low-rise multi-family buildings and over 40 percent of europe in the same boat we didn't see a world where it continued to be the case that such a large portion of the global population were missing out on access to rooftop solar so we're really excited to be driving that change so if you're a community housing provider or a property developer looking to extend cheaper cleaner power to your customers or tenants we would love to speak to you that's me out of time uh thanks for the opportunity to chat uh finn hopefully i can get over to adelaide at some stage soon and catch up and looking forward to getting more solar on apartments over there too thanks guys if you're as obsessed about solar tech as i am you can read for hours on our blog at solarquotes.com.edu and click on the blog link now it's time for where's ned the segment where we try and track down our reviewer of reviews ned where are you this week finn can't you see i'm busy doing research i'm here at adelaide's museum of discovery mod for short i thought what better place to look for innovation and i've also got a review of the month for you as always this one comes in from roslyn it's a review of along e panels it goes something like this i got 10 kilowatts of longy panels with perk monocrystalline half cells installed by uni industries even the installer said they were an excellent panel i've heard they say they're top of the range for chinese solar panels panels on three strings to the eight kilowatt sun grow inverter no problem so far while there may be better panels out there considering the price of my system i considered it would be cheaper to replace these if required than buy a system for double the price plus if i did have to do this i end up with a more modern system i encourage you to do the math well that's the review from rosslynce you gave five stars to those longy panels now i'll continue to do the maths here and play with my little gadgets back to you finn [Music] thanks to everyone that followed us on instagram after we pleaded for more followers last month we're also on facebook twitter and please subscribe to our youtube channel then you'll never miss another episode of solar quotes tv [Music] and i'm joined once again by our blogger extraordinaire mr ronald brackles always full of ideas what are you hiding behind your chair ronald oh i've been working on my own version of the most hype innovation of the 21st century what's that blockchain oh yes and that's a very realistic assessment of it i think you might need to keep working on it i think the best thing we can do is just give up on it and throw it out no no no no blockchain blockchain i know all about this i've read about it are you ready about it amazing innovation it's going to transform buying and selling of energy what you can do is you can put your electricity on the blockchain and then when you have surplus solar you can sell it into the grid and it's blockchained and then someone can buy it out of the grid also blockchain and then you know that your solar has been sold to those guys no one can cheat you you know exactly where it's gone they know exactly where it's come from they know that it's clean and then it's green because it's blockchained and it's gonna change the world mate it's brilliant what sorry there's companies worth gazillions of dollars that have created a blockchain of energy okay and are they doing anything that wasn't already happening i agree with you actually oh that's absolute horseshit well yeah um the way i see it is i think blockchain has its uses i think crypto has its uses for proof of work for some things i don't think energy is one of those things do you want to tell people what a blockchain is i have no idea what a blockchain is oh do you know what a blockchain is i i thought you knew what a blockchain was so i was too embarrassed to say i didn't know i know what it's meant to do oh okay well what tell us that then so the idea with energy is that if you use blockchain you have proof of what you've put into the grid and you can track it somehow and you have proof of what you've taken out of the grid the flaw with that argument as far as i'm concerned is everyone who's connected to the grid has got a meter that is highly regulated that is proof of what's gone into the grid and proof of what's come out of the grid so blockchain is completely redundant and this idea that you can track your energy from your grid to someone else's grid is absolutely ridiculous yeah yeah basically yes so you've already got electricity meters measuring the energy going in and out of your home and that is what you're going to be charged on if you put a a blockchain meter on your home they're not going to use that meter instead of the one the official one that's already there sorry and yeah you can't send energy to your cousin in albany using a blockchain that's not how the grid works uh under consumer guarantees we have this thing which says products and services must actually do what you say they do anyone telling you they can send your solar energy to your cousin is lying what they're doing is sending them a bill for their services which is unnecessary let's talk about blockchain in energy specifically what are the disadvantages blockchain is just a method of having a transactions without a central register so you and i can send stuff to each other to be secure without anyone else being involved sounds great but because no one's in control and because it's a blockchain it tends to be slower less user-friendly more energy-intensive even if it's well-designed because you got a lot of files a lot of blocks to transmit from the internet and it's there's no central control so it's very hard to troubleshoot fix things or improve things so yeah it's uh it's basically comes down to if i call something blockchain can i get money out of you for it because it's not going to offer you a service that improves whatever you're doing already whether it's sending solar energy into the grid or buying energy from the grid or from using a vpp so ronald and i reckon blockchain for energy trading is we're humble we're open to be persuaded otherwise but if you can persuade ronald that blockchain can add value to energy i promise you ronald will eat his hat what do you reckon ronald what show us your hats you've got to be joking mmm looks delicious come on guys you can eat it no i want to see him sat at a table with a knife and fork chewing on that thing man you know i've done a lot for you but this is the limit i'm not eating my goddamn helmet well someone will have to convince you that blockchain for energies adds value first oh okay then you know then it's looking a little bit more appetizing you can do it viewers can i have a chocolate helmet [Music] i want to end today's show with an innovation at solar quotes that i'm super proud of before i got into solar i was an engineer i designed control systems from nuclear power plants to coal mines my first proper business was selling a guide to tuning control loops that i wrote it did pretty well when i started solar quotes i wondered if it was possible to apply control theory to the solar buying process now hear me out control theory is all based on the concept of feedback loops you constantly get feedback from sensors in the real world and you adjust your inputs to correct any problems it's that simple in 2009 i realized that to remove the problem of bad installers from the solar buying process i needed to build a fast acting feedback loop that feedback was consumer reviews of solar installers so against my lawyer's firm advice seriously i actively asked everyone who visited the website to leave a review of the installer they chose when we get bad feedback about an installer in the solar quotes network we jump into action and find out what went wrong on the rare occasion that the installer has done the wrong thing and is not prepared to make it right we do remove that installer from the network that feedback loop has been running for over a decade and we're about to hit 60 000 reviews that is a lot of data points what we've realized is that the pruning of our network in this way has resulted in very few installation issues these days despite the fact that we dispatch about 20 000 quotes per month that's given us the confidence to formalize a guarantee one that we've actually informally had since we started it's called the solar quotes good installer guarantee we're proud of our network of heavily vetted solar installers and the quality of their work in the unlikely event that you use our get quote service choose one of our referred installers and they do not deliver a well-installed system to the specification promised we will work with you and the installer to resolve any issues with the system in the even more unlikely event that one of our referred installers still do not install what they promised we will engage another installer at our cost to make it right thanks for watching solar quotes tv episode 8 the innovation episode tune in next month for episode nine i have no idea what it will be about because i'm totally out of ideas anyone got any good ideas ronald's chocolate of course well thanks again for having us and don't forget to follow us on our socials instagram facebook twitter if you want to send in some chocolate for ronald the address is three stroke 39 grenfell street adelaide 5000 subscribe to our youtube channel you won't miss the next episode thanks guys see you next month [Music] [Music] you
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