Aaron talks with Derek The Solarboi, one of the few influencers in the solar industry.

Derek is a master electrician, lead technician, and content creator dedicated to showing the world the reality of life on the roof.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Derek on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

* The critical disconnect between the CEOs setting metrics and the technicians on the ground installing systems.

* The unintended consequences of the 2017 rapid shutdown codes (they introduced unnecessary complexity, cost, and points of failure to residential solar).

* Why Derek chose to rock a bright purple beard.

Quotes from the episode:

“There is a big gap between what the commentary class in solar is and what actually happens on the ground... the stuff that I find very important as a technician, as an electrician, is the stuff that affects the customers.”

- Derek The Solarboi

“I think my expectation is that [in 80 years] there will be rich people who will intentionally not install solar... not having solar will be seen as the rich person thing to do because solar will be so cheap and so common.”

- Derek The Solarboi

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Derek, public figure is not a typical career path for solar installers or electricians. Why did you decide to become an educator and entertainer?

Derek The Solarboi: Um, there is a big gap between what the commentary class in solar, uh, is and what actually happens on the ground. Um, so like, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of media out there in terms of, you know, consumer looking at the industry or the CEO talking about the industry or, you know, finance people talking about, you know, the greater economic things that are happening in the solar industry, but like the stuff that obviously I find very important as a technician, as an electrician is the stuff that’s on the ground, the things that affect the customers, the things that affect, you know, these installations and that bleed out into public perception sometimes, you know, when people can’t get service for their systems or their systems are failing that kind of thing, that I have a lot of experience with that I want to share with as many people as possible.

So the goal is to reduce the gap between the people on the ground who are dealing with the technical stuff and actually installing these systems and, you know, closing that gap with the people who make the decisions, the CEOs, the managers, all those people. Because, you know, I don’t know if you’ve gone from the level of the doing the work towards a more managerial position and realizing like, very quickly you start to lose context if you’re not super careful about it with what’s actually happening on the ground. And you’re just trying to hit metrics and you’re trying to hit whatever KPIs. And everything becomes, you know, an acronym and there gets to, you know, you want to stay in touch with the actual, what’s happening on the ground, right, so that you could be effective in what you’re actually selling and what you’re actually installing.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I mean, that’s a huge need and, you know, I really want to make what we do interesting to the public and I’m always experimenting to see what’s more interesting to the public and I consider myself a nerd whisperer. I’m always trying to take what’s technical and translated into interesting stories that people can consume, but I certainly lack the technical foundation that you have and so I’ve found your content very, very helpful.

Derek The Solarboi: I appreciate that. I appreciate that. The challenge is of course like I’m still working, you know, 40-hour week job and, you know, as a technician, as an electrician. And there’s so many so much time in the week, right? So, you know, I do want to branch out into more longer-form stuff. But, you know, when you are still driving, you know, two hours to a job site every day or whatever, you know, you have less time. So my home has felt, it’s felt very We at home on places like Instagram, TikTok, those, the vertical, short-form media stuff. But I get a video, I get a YouTube video out, ever so often, when I can, so.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Well, I look forward to the drive to the job site podcast, when that releases.

Derek The Solarboi: For my safety guy, I would not like that.

Aaron Nichols: For everyone who’s listening, welcome back to this week’s Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here, exact solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today, we have one of the more recognizable faces in the solar industry on the show, Derrick the Solar Boy. Now, Derrick, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and just talking about who you are and what your day-to-day job is like.

Derek The Solarboi: Also, my name is Derrick the Solar Boy. That is my moniker on the internet. B-O-I. If you’re looking up. A B-O-I, yes, with a nine out of why, for sure. I, so I’m a solar technician and electrician and I’m a master electrician in five, six states, something like that. You know, the states that are useful around in the area. But I am the lead technician for the company I work for and I go out and fix people’s problems on solar installations. I’ve worked in residential, I’ve worked in commercial. The one that I have, the place that I’m working right now is much more focused towards commercial and small utility, so that is primarily what I’m working these days.

Aaron Nichols: Okay. I’m interested, I just want to pull a thread for fun. You said, lead electrician for the company you work for. I’m not going to press you on that because on your LinkedIn it says it’s like undisclosed, but is that because you decided to be a content creator, you thought that you would keep it separate in your public persona?

Derek The Solarboi: It is. There was an issue at the previous place I worked for where there was somebody who got cranky in Idaho or something about one of my videos where I was not being perhaps as safe as I should have been. And it became a whole problem. And so since then, I have kept my online identity fairly separate from my actual joby job. So that is why I get a little bit more cagey when it comes to details.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. That’s an angle I hadn’t considered since, you know, thought leadership for me is just standing in this blank room. I can be pretty safe right here, you know. I’m not there’s no harness I should be wearing while I’m talking to you on the computer.

Derek The Solarboi: Well, and that’s the thing, like that’s the other reason why you don’t see a whole lot of people like me doing content is because the industry for for many good and bad reasons, very, very risk averse. And when you have somebody who’s on a site doing content about actual work, actual electrical work, there are so many things to think about when you’re looking at safety. Not just like are you actually being safe, but do you have the appearance, the full appearance of being safe? Because if you aren’t really careful, like if you do an edit that makes it look like you haven’t done a thing that you’re supposed to do, you’re I have a ton of comments from people saying, I don’t know if you didn’t do this thing or nothing. You know, because people get lost that there’s potentially more context than what is being presented. Right. So, that is tricky. And it’s really, really difficult to get somebody to agree to let somebody do something like this. You know, I know friends who have done content creation and have moved other companies that then realized, Oh, wow, these people have decided that they didn’t like this anymore, and it’s totally screwed them over that way. Yeah, it’s tricky, and it’s why you’re not going to hear as many people from my area of the industry talking about stuff, because talking about things while you’re in the field, according to things while you’re in the field, it’s just safety guys don’t like it.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and I think you have a little more to lose in that avenue. you know, then maybe me or someone who’s in marketing or someone who’s more of like a manager, you know, a CEO. But I think that when you make the decision to open yourself to the public, you are inviting criticism. There’s just, just certain members of the public who are, you know, I like to report one star reviews of local businesses from time to time because I used to work in hospitality and I understand that there’s just certain people you’re never gonna make happy.

Derek The Solarboi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. For sure.

Aaron Nichols: Now, Derek, you have, for anyone who’s listening, Derek has a bright purple beard. And I am interested to ask you about it because I’m curious if it was a gimmick for the channel or did you have it before you started? Does it mean anything to you? What is the significance of the purple beard?

Derek The Solarboi: So there is no like deep meaning to the purple beard. It’s just fun. And I like doing, I love doing fun things. So, you know, the purple beard is fun. It is, you know, very consciously something that, oh, I can continue to do this to stand out on social media as, you know, eye-catching type of a thing. So, there’s a tiny bit of cynicism to it, but not all that much. I love my purple beard. And I get comments on it regularly from customers as well. Like, you know, I’ve gotten questions from people will be like, what doesn’t, isn’t, wouldn’t that be end up being inappropriate for customers? Like it seems like you’re just trying to get attention or whatever customers love talking about it. I get a lot of positive comments about it. It’s fun.

Aaron Nichols: That’s amazing, man. Yeah, and so anything you can do to be remembered is important. And it’s also just a good beard. Like I think you think you get away with it because it’s a good, thick beard. not everyone can grow on like that.

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, I am blessed with my facial hair, for sure.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, me too. Anyway, bouncing off that topic, you run a forum called the 3-7-4-1 reference, and you told me that you aim to reduce the amount of rapid shutdown devices on the roof. Show is meant to be accessible for people who have zero experience with solar energy, and so I’d love to set the stage here. So first of all, what is rapid shutdown for people who have no idea.

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, so rapid shutdown is a requirement that came into the electrical code in 2017. It got implemented closer to 2019, so from then on we’ve had this requirement where, if you have a module, a solar panel up on your roof, that solar panel needs to have its voltage cut off after the panel almost immediately after it leaves it. So, solar panels are always on. They’re all, like, as long as the sun’s out, the solar panel is energized. So, the only way to do this to do the module level, the panel level wrap and shut down is to have a device under every single panel, really. I mean, we’ve cut it down to, you know, having a device for every two for some systems, but for residential, especially, it’s pretty much still one to one and what that turns into you end up doubling or tripling the number of connectors that you have on the roof. You have these electronic devices up there that just have objectively a higher chance of failing over the course of their life.

And not only that, if it’s one panel, say you have an optimizer or a microinverter up there and one of them goes down. The cost to replace one of those, even if you get the new device for free from the manufacturer, you still probably are gonna have to pay some for labor and that labor for one module repair is really expensive to, once you amortize that out across the next couple of years, right? It’s just a lot of complexity for not a lot of benefit. It was a reaction to firefighters around the early teens or so being afraid of fighting fires on groups with solar panels on them. So this is sort of a knee-jerk in the other direction from the insurance industry, from firefighters to try to make it as apparently safe as possible for people. and we have seen a lot of failures with these kinds of systems, you know, optimizers, you’re gonna probably have some optimizer failures over the course of your system, right? And you’re gonna have to pay somebody to fix them unless you have a really good warranty with your installer. And yeah, it’s just, it’s a lot of complexity that we don’t have to have. It doesn’t have to be that level of safety. We can bring it back a couple of notches, and that’s what UL3741, or it’s better termed PV hazard control, PV hazard control systems. That’s what that aims to help with. So PV hazard control systems, let’s a lot of these listed systems allow you to have up to 600 volts within the array still. So you don’t have to do module level rapid shutdown.

Aaron Nichols: So just to summarize for anyone who’s listening, please correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but in the early 2000s, firefighters were worried about being electrocuted when they had to show up to a house with solar panels on the roof and hack through it to hack holes on the roof so that they could get water into the home and fight the fires. So they passed that concern on. At that point, we introduced codes that said that you had to be able to shut the whole system down from, you know, immediately. And that meant that we introduced a lot more complexity into solar energy systems. And then when you introduce complexity into a system, there’s more chances that it’s going to fail because there’s more points of failure. Do I have that about right?

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, and I think it was 2010 or 2012 that there was a big fire in New Jersey on, I forget I forget the name of the place, but it was a prominent news story at the time that the firefighter chief was like, well, we’re not going to fight the fire on this thing because we don’t know if you’re going to get shocked by the solar panels. It’s not likely for a firefighter to actually get shocked when interacting with these systems and we don’t have any data about firefighters actually being harmed by interacting with solar installations when they’re on fire. There’s just no data out there. We don’t know as far as we know, nobody’s actually been harmed by this. So it’s going to need jerk in a direction that has increased more complexity. It costs more upfront, right? It costs more to install the system. It costs more to maintain the system. We need to get it back to a more reliable situation.

Aaron Nichols: Okay, so we’ve added a bunch of unnecessary cost into solar energy systems, what can we do to remove that cost?

Derek The Solarboi: So when they introduced module level rapid shutdown to the code in 2017, they also had a clause in there about, you know, if it’s otherwise listed to be safe, right, and then they later in a later code revision, they termed it PV hazard control systems. That’s what 3741 is, so typically how it works right now is a racking system will get this listing with, you know, with the inverters, with the devices that they use to shut down the, you know, do the array level shutdown, because you still need to shut down the array. But it’s really difficult if you don’t know, if you don’t want to pour through just a ton of manuals to find what’s compatible with what? Because for a while, the racking system would pick some inverters. And then that would be how you would know if those inverters you could use in this scenario. But the inverters often didn’t have that information on their website. So anyway, that’s why I made pvheasantcontrol.com. It lets designers help know what is compatible with what and how it gets installed just through this website. So you can look up any manufacturer inverter racking system, and it explains how the stuff works, so I have myself just installed a solar installation on my house with PV has control and a more novel listing, like there’s a listing company up in Canada that the CSA that they allow for racking to do a more general listing, so allow you to use any inverter that’s listed to this other listing, etc., you know, complicated stuff still. But I was able to use a solar converter and a midnight string shutdown and a, you know, and a terrogene racking system. And they all work together in this listing as much more flexible. So, very pleased with that. And I’m hoping that those systems are where we’re headed in the future to make it easier for designers to use this stuff.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, I’m going to have to pick your brand because I think next spring or summer, I’m going to be doing it on my own home, and so I’m excited to go through that process as well. Would you say the name of the website one more time, and I’ll make sure I put it in the show notes?

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, it’s pvhazardcontrol.com.

Aaron Nichols: Perfect. And outside of rapid shutdown and the need to simplify the tech stack out in the field, What are some of the top mistakes that you see when you’re out in the field, expecting and checking things out? I’m interested in, if there’s anything you see over and over again that just drives you crazy, especially for us as an EPC, something that we can pass along to our install team and avoid.

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, I mean, most of the time, if you have good, you know, if you’re teaching your ops people properly, really the most of the time what you’re going to see in terms of failures is inverters. Inverters, optimizers, microinverters, the electronics. Combs can be really big communications. So most of the time we hook up these inverters to the internet. So depending on what source you have for that internet, if you’re doing it over Wi-Fi, that will drop out anytime that the customer decides to replace their router. So that’s always annoying. I never use Wi-Fi, I always use a hardline ethernet, maybe cellular, but yeah so most of the time we’re looking at inverter failures and you know can I can I call on a people know this about me I do not love the reliability that we’ve seen with solar edge inverters especially over the last five years or so and that That is one of the reasons that I’m, and before that, certainly optimizers were dying all the time as well, hence my desire to tell people about these things and create these resources for people to be able to get away from this kind of stuff, to not be locked into a single manufacturer, right? Like, I don’t know, I’m a problem with solar edge existing. I have a problem with it feeling like we are forced to use solar edge, because, you know, Well, one of the three manufacturers, the petition for the module level rapid shutdown, revision in the code in 2017 was solar edge, and then it was also end phase, and then it was Tygo. All companies that very greatly profited off of that code change. So, hopefully, we’re able to swing around to where we’re not locked into these optimizer and micro-inverter solutions, and it’s easier to design around more string inverters type of a system.

Aaron Nichols: OK. Yeah, this is one thing that we love about being a behind-the-meter EPC is that we can be product agnostic and then just install over time, just install more and more of what works.

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, and every inverter manufacturer has their moments of failures and like bad products like, you know, especially when a new form factor of inverters is introduced often, you’ll see like a rash of those failing and then they get over it and they move on and so it varies, it varies.

Aaron Nichols: So you’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have. I’m almost at three years in the solar industry.

Derek The Solarboi: Nice. Oh, now you’re becoming a senior, though. I mean, three years doesn’t take long. It amazed me. So I started back in 2014 and it amazed me. Like once I was five years in, how I basically was one of the old guard at that point, right? Like it doesn’t, it doesn’t take long, which is really cool. Like if you’re joining into the solar industry and, you know, having electrical background is great. Obviously, if you’re doing install. But even if you’re not, we still need so many people in this industry as it continues to grow, despite whatever the government does to try to kill it. It’s going to continue to grow. And we’re going to continue to need people who are technical. And if you dive into and care about the technical stuff and and really focus on making that your primary goal, you’re gonna advance so fast in this industry and find out that you, all of a sudden, are one of the people that knows the things that everybody calls about, you know.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, that’s good to know. I think I definitely need to spend some more time on the technical side, but. Yeah, it can be intimidating as someone who comes in brand new. Just like, because everybody who’s been here for longer than five, ten years, they’re all like best friends and godparents to each other’s children. And so they meet each other at conferences and they do a Viking handshake and they’re like, brother, we’ve been forward to the fires of war.

Derek The Solarboi: That’s pretty accurate, yep.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. But I’m curious, what are some of the major changes you’ve seen since you started?

Derek The Solarboi: That’s a good question. So I only started really paying attention to the larger, like, I don’t know, political side is like the right way to frame it. But like the economic, the larger solar industry, I’ve only really been paying attention to that more in the last like three, four years or so. So I mean, all I know is what has changed since we started in And since I started in 2014, but even then, I never installed any central inverters, but that used to be the go-to thing for commercial projects is install a central inverter, which is just a huge, you know, couple hundred kilowatt inverter that’s, you know, 480 volts, it sits on a big pad on the ground and you run all your stuff down, all your modules down and parallel them all together there in one big chunky cable. And we’ve gone from that to string inverters all the time. And then, of course, sort of the code enforced optimizer solution or rapid shutdown solution, which that’s kind of the biggest thing.

Aaron Nichols: Now, to bring it home, Derek, I ask everyone who comes onto the show the same closing question. And it has to do with the fact that But I spoke in my grandma’s 80th birthday party last summer. And when I was sitting there writing a post about it afterwards, I realized that 80 years means she was born into a world where renewable energy did not exist. And windmills just pumped water back then, maybe generate electricity. I should Google that at some time, I’m not sure. But PV wasn’t invented till 1954, and then wasn’t even a viable technology until the 70s. And Jimmy Carter put solar on the White House in 79, but that was solar thermal, and everything that’s happened since her birth has been the birth of renewable energy as well, all the way till now when it’s the cheapest source of power. So if you are just going to moonshot to take us out here, what do you think clean energy it looks like 80 years from now. And don’t worry, we’ll both be dead unless medical science advances. So no one will hold us to the answer.

Derek The Solarboi: That is true, wow, that’s it, wow, what a thought. That’s pretty, wow. Okay, my answer on that would be, I mean, I would expect that certainly 80 years from now it’s gonna be fairly default when installing a new house, when putting in a new house. like I think my expectation is that there will be rich people who will intentionally not install solar and not having solar will be seen as the rich person thing to do because it will be so cheap and so common and it will be just so expected. We’ll just have backyard nuclear reactors, which is the seed dropping. You know, nuclear people keep saying it’s gonna make sense financially, and they keep costing too much. I don’t have a problem with nuclear. To be clear every time I talk about renewables and talk about nuclear as well. I’m like, I don’t mind nuclear, nuclear seems great. We just need to figure out how to make a cost rate.

But yeah, I think it will become a default for most people. I think it will become an industry like HVAC where maybe not every house has a solar on it and just like not every house has HVAC but it’s going to be common enough that you’re going to have several local HVAC service companies or solar service companies in your area and it’s just a fact of life. It’s just a thing. It’s just another appliance you have in your house and it’s going to I mean, a lot more portability for people as well, I think, you know, the batteries and solar panels that we have, you know, that are sort of geared towards people who are camping or just kind of want a portable power source, like that’s just the start of this industry, or if that part of this industry, and there’s a lot more to go.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I mean, that’s my favorite thing in the world. I have a 200 watt solar panel from Craigslist and old battery bank and a star link and I can now just work from the woods as a Colorado boy.

Derek The Solarboi: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Derek, thank you so much for coming on today. Where do you like to be found online?

Derek The Solarboi: So you can find me at solarboy.com, all my links there. But I do have a bunch of other projects that I have going on all the time. And if you want to follow me and my projects, you can find that stuff at buildshiny.com. One of my secret side projects recently has been restoring and posting old national electrical codes in their entirety as PDFs online so that people can see them and figure, see how where we’ve come from so that we can kind of better understand how we got here and where we’re going in the future. So, that’s been a bit of an all-encompassing fascination for me, but any projects I start in the future, you can find it, buildshiny.com.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Yeah. I think that maybe that’s the podcast, as you do, maybe sort of like a drunk history thing. You just read old electrical codes that you’ve restored.

Derek The Solarboi: This is my hope. Honestly, there’s a bunch of documents that I would love to just read aloud as a performance piece for a video. So I think it’s gonna happen, but I gotta do a couple of, I gotta close out a couple of the projects in mind first.

Aaron Nichols: Well, thank you so much for coming on today Derek and for everyone listening, that’s been this week in solar.

Derek The Solarboi: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com