Utility Solar Asset Management, Operations and Maintenance

January 18, 2017

Welcome to the Solar O&M Insider, the first podcast series dedicated to Solar PV operations maintenance and Asset Management. This series is brought to you by Alectris, a global solar asset care innovation firm. I’m Glenna Wiseman of Identity3, your host.

In this episode of the Solar O&M Insider, we address utility-scale solar asset management in the United States.

This year, SEPA, the Smart Electric Power Alliance issued its first resource guide for a utility-scale solar operation called “Utility Solar Asset Management and Operations and Maintenance.

The guide outlines the industry’s current siloed O&M (operations and maintenance) model and its problems and how a comprehensive delivery model would optimize plant performance. Today, we have with us John R, Balfour, president of High Performance PV, co-author of the SEPA guide.

In addition, is our great pleasure to have with us today Bob Holsinger, PV Solar and Fuel Cell supervisor for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).

PG&E has been a member of SEPA since 2004 and Steve Malnight, the utility’s senior VP for regulatory relations, currently chairs SEPA’s board of directors. SEPA has also repeatedly recognized PG&E’s leadership in the integration of solar onto the grid, naming it number one of the top 10 solar utilities adding the most new megawatts per year for seven years in a row. In 2015, it was number two.

This episode of the Solar O&M Insider features:

  • PG&E Solar Fleet and O&M, AM Review
  • High Performance PV and its Role in the SEPA Guide Development
  • Implications of Tracking Solar Capacity Performance as a KPI
  • Developing a Spare Parts Strategy
  • Siloed Operations and Maintenance, and Asset Management versus Integrated Systems Model
  • Emerging Industry Standards
  • PAM: Pre-Emptive Analytical Maintenance
  • Utility-Scale O&M and AM Trends
  • Solar Power Asset Management & Performance Event, January 19-20, 2017

Alectris_Utility-Scale_Solar_O&M_AM_in_the_US_TwitterFull Transcript

Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

John Balfour (JB): Thank you.

Bob Holsinger (BH): Thank you, Glenna, for inviting me today. I’m Bob Holsinger. I’m responsible for the daily operations and maintenance of Pacific Gas Electric’s PV Solar and Fuel Cell assets. I’ve been involved in the power generation O&M business for over 40 years having begun as a laborer in a coal plant and spent the last 20 years building and managing combined-cycle plants, a five-megawatt concentrated solar demonstration plant and most recently PG&E’s fuel cell and PV solar assets.

Along the way, I’ve had the honor of working with some of the industry’s finest professionals. What I’m going to share with you today is what I believe works in the industry and what you need to focus more on to do better. Thank you.

Glenna: Excellent, Bob. We really appreciate you joining us today and bringing your long-standing operations and maintenance experience to this discussion. Let’s start by asking you to describe your current solar PV portfolio and how you handle asset management and O&M.

PG&E Solar Fleet and OM, AM Review
BH: PG&E owns and self-performs O&M services and asset management for 152 megawatts of utility-scale PV solar. We began construction back in 2011 on three solar stations totally 50 megawatts per year and continued to build three new stations each year for three years. We finished our construction program in 2013 with a total of 150 megawatts of installed capacity. All this capacity are ground based, fixed pitch stations with exception of one which is a single axis tracker station.

In addition, back in 2010, we had built a two-megawatt demonstration solar plant to make sure that we had our specifications correct and our building concept correct. So if you add the two megawatts with 150 above  there’s 152 megawatts. All the stations are connected at the 12.47 KV distribution grid voltage.

We also do have three small commercial installations in San Francisco area. One of them was on a rooftop of a professional sports team home stadium and one is a roof of a commercial building and the last is a single-axis tracker system over covered parking.

Asset management is pretty much left to be handled by O&M team, myself and others and with the support of corporate teams as necessary.

High Performance PV and its Role in the SEPA Guide Development
Glenna: Okay, excellent, and John, tell us a little bit about your firm and how you got involved in this SEPA initiative?

JB: Well, thank you. I got started in the industry in the ’77 and then that time since have been a PV integrator which is now called an EPC, consultant, a published author and have been active in transitional best practices and standards development, which is where I spend a fair amount of my time these days.

What the High Performance PV does is, we address issues that are in the industry that are resolvable. And for example, we identify and resolve organizational, specification, design, engineering, construction, commissioning and O&M issues that raise risk and cost. We provide tools to address and resolve owner and asset manager challenges impacting cost performance and revenue issues caused by the health and condition of the system.

And then finally, we wrap it all up with the process of delivering transitional, transformational and technical systematic processes, procedures, models and approaches. Basically, what we do is we take a look at systems from specification on and work with owners and developers and others to make sure that their plants actually do what they expect them to do.

Glenna: And you got involved with the SEPA initiative?

JB: I was asked to co-author this publication that we did and when we got started, the whole idea was to address some of these issues that are becoming quite global in the industry where things are not always as pleasant as they appear to be. And the industry is getting to a point where we’re going to see some very serious changes in the way people look at systems and delivery systems.

I kind of come from a school that says, “We believe that the existing business model is broken and needs to be modified and in the process of modification begins to address the issues that are going to be the long-term issues instead of just the short-term ones.”

Glenna: Okay, excellent. In part one of the guide, it outlines solar asset management and O&M issues brought on by “a steep industry learning curve and contractual challenges.” John, can you tell us about some of those issues that you uncovered?

JB: A lot of the issues we see go back to specification, and the existing process puts the specification and design up for bid. What we’ve discovered is that if it’s not clearly detailed in the system specification prior to design, it will not be in the final product, therefore it should not be expected. This includes things like reliability, availability, maintainability, testability, safety and viability.

Part of the reason for this is that people have the assumption that PV systems are basically simple and they’re not. They’re big in many instances. They’re complex. They have a whole lot of parts. They have people that are designing, building them and operating them that have broad ranges of skill level and ability level without having the standards and the education and certifications necessary to provide consistency throughout the industry.

So we fall back on one of the more mundane issues and that’s the stakeholders must communicate effectively and continually and accurately while understanding all of the technical consequences. That learning curve is not an easy curve. It takes time and the whole industry is having to do it at the same time which creates a few challenges.

Glenna: Well, and so let’s move over to Bob.  With 152 megawatts under operation, we were really grateful to have your point of view today on these issues. Can you give us some insights into the
AM and O&M issues you’ve seen to date for the project your utility has in its portfolio?

Implications of Tracking Solar Capacity Performance as a KPI
BH: Sure, Glenna, With any new technology you try and leverage as much as possible what you have effectively used on other generation projects, though try as you might I think you’ll all agree that, new technology comes with new challenges. When I look at the assets from the asset management standpoint, early on the project, PG&E decided to track plant capacity rather than equipment availability. The first few years of our operation, our solar capacity performance was being penalized for loss of capacity due to issues outside our control.

And so this is a disincentive in that, you know, you work real hard and do everything you can only to find that you still didn’t make your capacity  goal. So we got looking further into this and realized that on numerous occasions we’re finding our transmission lines were unavailable for a variety of reasons such as relay protection failures or maybe a car/pole accident,  storm damage, or other sort of things.

Or in several cases, we found what we have planned substation maintenance or upgrade outages and some of these outages were six weeks long in duration. During that period obviously, your solar generation plants could not run. Also, recently, we began to real-time dispatch our solar assets by the California independence systems operator based on their needs that curtail the asset during periods of localized congestion or market pricing.

After numerous discussions with senior leadership, we agreed that the lost capacity that was occurring on our solar stations, beyond our control, should be credited back to our performance calculations.    Thus this made us whole as far as our performance and is greatly appreciated.

Another item that has been especially helpful for us is for the past three to four years PG&E has been working with three of our neighboring utilities to share best practices and most recently we standardized our performance metrics and KPIs.

This effort started out as localized networking among the utilities with the help of SEPA and EPRI facilitating for our efforts. Last fall, we became more formalized when we got approval from the Electric Utility Cost Group to stand up with a PV solar committee to benchmark PV performance and best practices among all utility solar members. This committee is actively engaged to be in a position to seek out other utility solar asset owners by mid-2017 to participate in this program. I believe this will be a great value to the industry as a whole.

On the O&M front, one of the first challenges we identified, imagine this, involved personal safety which is one of our highest priorities in the industry. We discovered early on when we were in construction that, “Hey, we started doing our arc flash modeling on 1000-volt DC systems,” and realized that we didn’t have the software available to do that study. So, over the course of a few months, we were able to obtain the software and complete the studies in time for the commissioning of the assets and thus mark all the arc flash hazards on all equipment.

Solar equipment vendors seem to be very volatile with OEM vendors coming and going and along with them goes training, warranty, support, spare parts, etc. In fact, of the three OEM’s for our inverters and all of our stations, that all of them are no longer manufacturing the inverter platforms we have in the field and this has occurred in less than five years’ time.

Thus I encourage everyone to do your research upfront to select vendors who appear or look like financially and through historical data that they will be around for the long run. We have recently put together an action plan team to look ahead as to what this means when the inverters have reached their end of life or when parts are no longer available, what do we do then? It’s better to have a plan now than when you reach this point and go, “Now what?”

Developing a Spare Parts Strategy
Also, I encourage everyone to identify and implement a spare part strategy early in the project development. Some parts that are available today may not be available next month, next year or in five years. And as we all know improvements in efficiencies are resulting in cost savings and always driving change. When we first built our first little two-megawatt plant 600-volt DC systems were the rave at the time in 2009-2010, a year and a half later, it was a 1,000-volts DC system and now we recognize you’re at 1,500-volt DC systems and we’re going up from there.

What if parts for the thousands of DC inverters or modules that you have in the field day are no longer available in five years? Now, what should we do? I encourage everyone to implement a spare part strategy in the project development stage. Spare parts that are available today may not be next month, next year or five years from now.

Improvements and efficiencies and resulting cost savings are always driving change such as when we built the 600 volt two-megawatt facility in 2010, that was the approved voltage at that rate, and in 2011 when we went to the field it was a thousand-volt DC system, and by the time we got done three years later also folks had moved on to 1500 volts DC system. What if the 1,000-volt DC inverters and modules that you have in the field today are no longer available in five years.

I encourage all to recognize this change and do your research and find modules that are manufactured two to three years ago, or no longer in production today. The replacement modules that may work are available. They may be of a different manufacturer, possibly a different physical size, and most definitely typically a different wattage. So, I encourage you to identify your critical spare strategy now and put it in place.

Siloed Operations, Maintenance and Asset Management versus Integrated Project Model
Glenna: And Bob, you’re just bringing up such a great point because the spare parts program has a perfect example. In the SEPA guide, one of the things that they point to is that if you treat something separately from the rest of the PV system delivery process, you’re going to have problems. And so, John, I think Bob has given us a perfect example of that with the spare parts program, and so maybe you could elaborate a little bit on how this disjointed approach that you outlined in your guide affects plant operations on the long-term basis and what are some of the solutions there?

JB: Sure, I’d be happy to. And I subscribe to everything that Bob said there. And Bob and I have discussed these issues many times. And what’s taking place is when we have a process started for delivering a PV plant versus delivering a PV project, and let me differentiate the two. Delivering a project starts at concept and ends at the commissioning. Delivering a PV plant or a PV system begins at concept and that ends at site restoration. So, the considerations are completely different.

If you’re driving towards the least-cost first cost, then what ends up happening is you discount things like O&M. You discount things like the parts that you’re going to need over time, and you discount a number of different issues because number one, it seems to drive the price down. But what it does is it leaves you short-handed in the long term. When we take a look at this process, we’re encouraging people to start saying, “Okay, you need to begin at specification prior to design. You need to come up with a good specification.”

And then bid it out so that everybody is bidding on the same plant, and therefore that gives you more control over the process especially if you’re going to be the owner, or even if you’re going to be the utility that’s doing the PPA and it gives a much more stable platform for what’s going to happen during that plant’s life.

Glenna: Excellent. Bob, let’s get your insights on this current practice to treat O&M separately or to i.e. after the plant is built or to integrate it upfront in a more integrated more model like the guide is talking about. And also, if you could address, if your operations maintenance and management activities are handled in-house outsourced or a combination? I think you address that a little bit previously, but maybe you could give us a little bit more insight into that.

BH: Sure, Glenna. The PG&E utility model has an asset management team that is based in our general office down in San Francisco, and the day-to-day asset management functions fall upon the line of business, which I lead for the solar assets. And so I pretty much, though we are siloed from the standpoint there is an asset management team, their input to my day-to-day asset management is pretty remote and if I started talking about technical issues with them, they would not have any idea.

I’m very grateful for the way our model is set up that I can manage my own asset management and that includes the physical solar assets safety, our performance of our equipment that we’ve got on the field my budget, regulatory compliance, etc. And if I need the asset management team support, I can grab it as needed. So that’s really helpful to have that support as needed.

One of the things that we find quite often is we also leverage the asset management team because they have a team of performance engineers that are available to us. And this really helps me from the standpoint that the performance engineers then will gather data on a monthly basis to help me by calculating the plant capacity and compare the actual capacity against what was modeled and report out at the end of the month. That’s fine.

The problem I find with that is once the month’s over and if my numbers don’t look good there’s nothing I can do about it. So, working with the asset management team and their performance engineers we were able to come up with a real-time model that is very useful in trending station capacity on a real-time basis rather than being held accountable for your results after the fact. So, the asset management team in the general office, though they are there and they’re supporting us, the day to day work is being done by my team here in the field on asset management and O&M.

Glenna: Okay, and I hear that you take into consideration from the very beginning when a plant is being envisioned all of these other aspects of the operations and maintenance, management of that plant, but what I see in that the O&M industry overall is it was something that John was referring to earlier, which is this is sort of an aftereffect. An afterthought after the thing is built. Do you have any other advice that you might offer the industry that would be helpful in terms of why you should be bringing this in early into the design and envisioning phase?

Emerging Industry Standards
BH: Yes. One, I’ve been involved in the industry with combined-cycle plant construction, and fortunately with PG&E when we started thinking about constructing this 150-megawatt portfolio, the operations and maintenance team was brought into the discussion early on. We participated with specifications review. We also participated with the various revs of drawings that came in and were a part of the team effort that was making comments or making changes, suggesting changes, so that was very helpful to us.

And it also ultimately gave us a much better project that is more easily maintained, more reliabe, and provides more value to the customer. I’ve also strongly believe that carefully worded standard specifications would be helpful ensuring a project will reliably return value to our customers.

A standard would also serve as a tool to help, carefully vet and select all equipment manufacturers. So, when we went to the field, we had an approved list of I think it was five inverter manufacturers that had been vetted and we were soliciting contracts from an EPC vendor who were to provide the inverters. And because we had five, it gave them a limited selection of inverter manufacturers that we felt at the time would provide inverters on a competitive, reliable basis.

So that helped a lot and I believe that if there are standards in place that had some detail  it will lend confidence to your construction management team, to the EPC contractor, and their subcontractors that we’re looking to build a quality product and one that’s going to be reliable.

Also, it’s very important that your team, from your construction management, your EPC contractors, and any subs working in this field they have a detailed knowledge of  your specifications and contracts so they know your requirements, expectations.

Also we want to make sure that the people that are on the field are properly trained and qualified to install your equipment per the manufacturer’s specifications. We’ve had a bit of a problem with one of our sites because it was installed by a contractor that was marginally qualified to install solar racking and it’s causing problems to this day. So making sure that the contractors are properly qualified to the manufacturer’s specs is very critical and that can easily be addressed in your original specifications for the plant.

Glenna: All right, listeners, well, Bob just gave you a rundown of all the good reasons that you should be building in O&M and Asset Management expertise into the very beginning of your project planning and design phase. And now we’re going to talk to John about the integrated model which basically has some similar advice, right John, in terms of the integrated model of information and feedback from plant specification all the way through to management? Maybe you could describe this model that’s outlined in the document and give us some key benefits?

PAM: Pre-Emptive Analytical Maintenance
JB: The model we call PAM, Pre-emptive Analytical Maintenance, and interestingly enough it is very, very, very similar to how the utility industry has delivered small, medium and large projects and systems to generate electricity over the last 150 years.

It begins with a process where basically everybody’s brought to the table at the specification prior to design part and that includes O&M, that includes whoever is going to do the commissioning and hopefully it’s going to be a quality assurance kind of commissioning that is continuing to take place throughout the whole construction process.

One of the most critical parts for the O&M team is to bring the lessons learned from their projects and other things that they’ve learned and have those not just referenced, but inserted early on into this design process, this specification process because that’s where you save the most money. That’s where you reduce risk. That’s where you end up eliminating the vast majority of problems if you’re thorough about it.

I think Bob and many others in the industry are running into the frustration that they may be very good at O&M, but that flow, that feedback, there’s no consistent feedback loop to allow for that to happen, and yet in their other technologies and Bob probably confirm this, they’ve done it quite successfully. So, we’re not talking about anything new, we’re talking about the application in many instances of technologies and of processes and procedures that have been used elsewhere and that need to be applied to the PV industry, so that we can get down the road to maturity a little bit earlier.

BH: John, I totally agree with what you’re saying, this was one of the things we found early on when we finished building the year one sites. At the end of the project  we  all leadership team sat down around the table with the EPCs and their subcontractors and our vendors and  we had a lesson learned meeting.

That was really eye-opening as we went on the table and said, “What did you learn here? And what should we do better?” We make quite an extensive list from year one. We applied those to the year two specs, changed the specs a little bit for year two, went back to the field for year two with what we learned and at the end of year two, we did the same thing. So, year three was better than year two and two was better one just because we were in a learning mode.

So, if we can share as an industry, share these lessons learned with others, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They don’t have to feel the pain and the expense of making bad decisions. So, I’m totally supportive of your position on that.

JB: Well, you know, the other thing about this that really is interesting is, my position has always been that if we got enough people in the room, we could probably solve 98% of the problems because of this kind of a process where you may not have had a problem that somebody needs a solution for, but somebody else may.

And I really encourage the utility industry with this working group, this O&M working group that has been started and I support them absolutely and completely, because they’re going to probably do this much quicker than the rest of the industry because they have a history of doing this. The utility industry has a history and is very proud of their record of reliability, of the ability to have safe systems and to produce low-cost energy.

Their difference between what they have done historically and what our industry is doing is our industry is all focused on least-cost, lowest cost and we’re forgetting about the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) which is the real name to end of the game is because that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for plants that are going to last a long time. They’re going to operate consistently. They’re going to be able to be easily tested and so what you end up with is you end up with knowledgeable people at each different step of the process.

BH: That’s the critical component of any organization successes is knowledgeable people and the right people in those positions. And one of the challenges we face sometimes is knowledgeable people and the right people may mean more than one or two people. There may need to be a team of knowledgeable people to make sure that you get what you have specified and what you have contractually purchased. If you don’t have that level of detail and quality assurance in the field, you’re running a very real risk of getting something less than you paid for.

Utility-Scale O&M, AM Trends
Glenna: Excellent. Well, gentlemen, let’s spend just a minute on trends of what you see evolving in utility-scale solar, O&M and Asset Management. We’re looking to create a more integrated model or a more integrated approach to the various aspects of the plants development in plant life cycle. What are the trends, Bob, do you foresee happening in this space?

BH: Well, there’s a couple of things going on. I see the evolution of standards. I know that John is on a standards committee that he’s working with as well and he and I have been collaborating on comments and input to that standard that has to do with the solar O&M performance. And I believe that the standards will benefit the industry as a whole, help us be more efficiently design, construct a quality solar project and above all and obviously once it’s constructed in the ground maintain the solar assets.

And I also believe with the advent of the new SEPA O&M best practices working group that was just formed and the new EUCG PV Solar committee, I see the solar industry taking a giant leap forward in safety, reliability, and affordability. And I think these gains will be the result of sharing of lessons learned and best practices as well as standardized performance metrics among the utilities. And I think all of these will add more value and provide a better product at the end of the day.

Glenna: John, same question to you.

JB: I agree what that Bob says and I’d add to that, but we’re just on the cusp where we have a new performance standard for measuring performance and plants called IEC61724-3. It is very, very strong on the performance end of things. However, what we have is, we have a dichotomy in the industry where we have people that do performance and that people who deal with the equipment they’re so siloed that often what happens is it almost as if you’re looking at a virtual plant that has no equipment, it just produces numbers.

And I think the next big step is going to be, and this is one that Bob and I and others have been working on, is to bring to the forefront this whole concept that PV plants are physical. That you must understand what’s going on with that plant health and condition and that even though your performance numbers may look absolutely marvelous today, the confusion that we have from terminology and the way contracts are written is going to allow that to continue a little bit further, but you may have a degrading or a deteriorating plant that at year six seven or eight may not be able to make those numbers because there was not enough emphasis on the O&M portion of the project from the beginning.

And what we’re starting to see is O&M issues are not just O&M issues, they are manufacturing issues. They are design issues. They are policy issues. There’s a broad range of things that are taking place in the background that are turning these systems over and over, and I think we’re going to see some clarity between now and 2020 where we’re going to have better terminology. We’re going to have more consistent definitions, taxonomies, and ontologies. We’re going to be able to have a much better sense of communication between the different silos, so that problems are seen for what they are and not just seen as somebody else’s problem.

BH: I totally agree with what you’re saying, John. And I offered an example of that. We all recognize typically the DC field of the solar station is overbuilt to correspond with the projected degradation of the solar modules over the life of the plant. So consequently, you can be running along making your AC output capacity numbers and think everything is great not realizing that you have problems developing in the DC field.

And if you’re not aware of those problems and you don’t take the initiative to go see if you’re healthy on this DC side of the business, sooner or later it will come to a point where all of once you cannot make your AC commitment because you don’t have the DC capacity or the “fuel” if you will to supply the energy you’re looking for.

Recently, I’ve been looking at data over the last couple of years and of course everyone wants to sell you some pretty complicated piece of equipment that diagnose strings and individual modules.  Though helpful we found this to be very time-consuming and time evolves to personnel on the ground and personnel on the ground is dollars and that’s a budgetary issue real quick.

So we started looking at alternatives and we’ve been through several different conferences and talked to numerous people, we’ve been investigating infrared aerial platforms to look for solar module problems. And that opened up our eyes enormously when we saw a problem throughout the field that we had no idea it was out there. And what it did is it allowed us to go ahead and pursue in my case an extended warranty that was in place and allowed me to pursue the vendor for remedying the deficiencies under warranty.

If I had not found those issues and the warranty had expired, it would have been a problem for the utility as to having to face and do the repairs ourselves, and more importantly, it would have been lost revenue like John is saying probably in year five to seven somewhere along that time when yourun out of the overbuilt DC field and it’s going to start hurting you. So, that’s a really good comment, John. I really appreciate what you’re saying there.

JB: It’s also identifying, which you said Bob, is identifying the fact that the way we are doing root cause analysis in systems is not cost-effective. We can’t put enough people out there for a few enough dollars to do this and that there are technologies, many of which are still not being applied in our industry, that can do an accurate root cause analysis, can give you that data so that you’re sending people out not to find problems, but to confirm problems and make the fix, if there’s a fix or if it’s a warranty issue, take care of it as soon as possible.

Because in this day and age, it’s not just a matter of running out of warranty time, it’s a matter of running out of warranty manufacturer. And when these new technologies, like I said, come from different industries and we apply them, there’s going to be quite a difference in what the cost is for labor versus what the cost is for resolving the issues and it’s going to be a very positive thing both for O&M and for PV.

BH: Understood, and in that particular technology, I happen to run into an individual who was already a PG&E vendor and he had been using their aerial platforms to survey substations and transmission lines looking for hot spots on the transmission system. So,  “Wow, we’ve already got the equipment. We’ve already got the cameras, what about this?” And it turned out to be a great relationship and it certainly is efficient and it gives me a really good starting point to find out where the health from my DC field is.

Solar Power Asset Management & Performance Event, January 19-20, 2017
Glenna: Well, gentlemen, you have provided our listeners with a very robust conversation today that sounds to me like we could really dive into in other sessions down the line. Let’s talk for a minute, John, I understand that we’ve got an event coming up that both SEPA and SEIA are hosting called the Asset Management Performance show, can you tell us a little bit about that event and why you think it’s important for the industry to attend?

JB: Last year, we had the first one and it was really good. And one of the reasons that I think that it was such a good conference was it was not a huge conference. You can get in there, you have the opportunity to get to meet the people that are speaking. You get the opportunity to ask people questions. People are a lot friendlier because they’re not as much in a hurry to go from one place to another. And this year, there’s going to be some very interesting things coming up. I know that we’re going to be doing a panel that will be rather eye-opening for people, but I think that when you consider the location is San Diego. When you consider the facility, everything is going to be in one place and I think that people will walk away with some real knowledge, not just a taste of it. Getting their teeth into some of these issues and actually getting some answers.

Glenna: Excellent. Let’s be sure that everyone’s got the right title for this conference. It’s the Solar Power Asset Management and Performance event in San Diego beginning in January 19th.

I want to thank Bob Holsinger and John Balfour for joining us for this all-important topic of utility-scale solar operations maintenance and asset management.

I’m Glenna Wiseman, your host. The solar O&M insider podcast series is brought to you by Alectris at alectris.com.