 from sunny Honolulu. This is Howard Wigg, cold grain think-tank Hawaii. Guess what the first state was to declare 100% clean energy as a goal? By 2045 it was Hawaii. And we are ahead of schedule right now, largely thanks to PV or photovoltaic panels. Now, photovoltaic panels to work effectively efficiently, they've got to be clean. We keep our car windshields clean, don't want to be peering through dirt, and neither do PV panels. How in the world do we keep them clean? We bring in people like Mr. Fred Brooks, president of PacificPanelCleaners.org dot com. He's headquartered in Kaimaki, and at the moment he's cleaning panels on the island of Kauai. So welcome, Fred. Thanks very much, Howard. You're doing a great job for green clean Hawaii. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how long you've been in the business, why you're in the business, and then launch. All right, perfect. So we've been in business now for 14 years. I started my first cleaning company in 2009, and we're based out of Honolulu, and we have full-time crews on Maui and the Big Island. Basically, started up with an idea. I refer to it as it happened BC before children. I was designing and installing systems since I was involved in the photovoltaic industry in Hawaii since 2006. I was there for the giant boom in 2009, and with my background in the engineering department in the United States Navy, everything was maintenance. So I basically started saying, you know, we're installing these. Who's taking care of them? So the idea for PacificPanelCleaners was born to be able to go and take care of a couple of systems in the morning, then hope to be able to go out and surf and play in the afternoon. Well, it took about eight and nine years before the word really got out there, but it's been a great go at it. I've been honored to be a pioneer in such a fast-growing industry that's really valuable because one of the biggest things that I saw was we talked about energy and the loss of energy efficiency, and we're installing these solar investments. You need to take care of them. I was privy enough to be on the team that designed the first stage of Punahou, and that was put in 2007, and that was the biggest system in the Hawaiian Islands, $4.6 million. And I said, why not take care of it? Who's going to do it? So that's how it works. So like you said, I'm over on Kauai now. We do maintain systems on all the Hawaiian Islands. We do more than just clean systems. We are a PV asset management company certified on inverters, and we are a thermal imaging company that specializes in PV modules. That's the main gist of it, and I could explain more about it. You've seen our robot in action. We brought the first solar cleaning robot to Kauai, so it's been an incredible journey. I've been very, very fortunate to work with amazing people and teams and a lot of the installers I know, and I've worked with them, and the Hawaii Solar Energy Association has been a phenomenal group to be with, and Association of Energy Engineers. I'm the scholarship director. It's been an amazing journey, and I'm really proud that we're able to know that we've walked in on systems that weren't working, and now they're fully operational and working again. That's a little bit about us and what we do, and yep, out of Kaimuki. And I should do a full disclosure. I am with the Hawaii State Government. Think Tech Hawaii is a nonprofit. Neither of us is authorized to endorse any private company, so Fred and I are here on an educational mission. We are not endorsing his company, and I can speculate that there's probably some other really nice solar panel cleaning companies out there also. So that's just the full disclosure. Now, Fred, one of the graphs that I saw that came out of your house was the increase in performance. There was a graph showing a very low TWH output, and then, boom, all of a sudden it looked like the output doubled. What was that graph all about there? So with our company and a lot of maintenance companies, we have access to system monitoring. That graph that we used was really good graph. It worked with Enphase, so it showed the system immediately and on time. This was a site that we had. It was back in Manoa that was really, really moldy. A lot of black mold built up on it. We thought it would be really neat because we were able to watch the production go up, and his production, I think it tripled with the amount of mold that was on the site. Now, this is, of course, you know, we're going to talk and show the best extreme examples, but we've been tracking a lot of the ones that have the heavy build up and on it, and it starts, they reduce so much, it's incredible. So we have a couple of them that showed up, but the client couldn't believe it. It was really funny because that day we actually did half the system, and then we showed them on his map the half that was clean and the half that was not, and with Enphase, they do different coloring on it. The ones that we cleaned with nice bright blue and the ones we didn't clean were dark black, almost not producing. So we had immediate gratification on that. Without a job, it's really satisfying to be able to go to a system and able to pull out the data and watch the immediate improvement on it. So with that being the extreme condition, the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners has given estimate and so has Sandia Laboratories. The idea you get between 15 and 20% increase. NAPS upset about 20%. So on the average, you're going to be, you can get up to between seven and 10 is what I would say. But there's definitely 20% losses and we've had sites with 50, 70% loss from soiling. And with the idea of just going up and cleaning alone is really good. But with the inspecting of the systems, which when companies should go up and clean, they inspect the system as well, you can find other down equipment because over time, if you're not maintaining the other equipment, the equipment can do that. It's just that I would do an analogy of getting your car checked, say at least once a year. You don't just look for the dirty oil or whatever, get an oil change. The mechanic looks at the whole system and says, Mr. Wig, you've got a spark plug missing, if they even use spark plugs anymore. But you know, they check the whole system and what you're indicating is as long as the professionals are up there on the roof, might as well look at everything. Yeah, yeah, since one of the most important parts of our company is the idea started off with just getting up and cleaning. But with my background, I was a quality control inspector in the Navy and I used to help design systems. We started looking out systems were installed. And then with the inspecting of the system became more of a safety concern. Because if you go up there, you got to remember if you're spraying water on solar panels, solar panels make electricity, we want to make sure you do it. Like you said, how do manufacturers all have a recommended guide and they recommend annual cleaning of the inspection. And with the idea of the inspection, you're looking at the whole envelope, not just the dirt on the one side to put it that way. And how about the transformers, the electrical system? So, when you're looking at the electrical system, we pretty much always do, we start our checks by looking at the ground first and working our way up because if some equipment has a ground fault or a major fault, we call it a safety concern and then we're going to have to focus on fixing that problem right then and there. That'll be our biggest concern at that moment. So, there's a variety of different inverters. There's central inverters, string inverters, there's microinverters. So, with our company and with the trainings that I've given and I've written documents and papers on this and explained to people, it's really critical to do an inspection on it. And having your monitoring system is like the easiest thing in the world to look at because you don't even need to go outside. You look at the monitoring system and some of them are so good now, they'll tell you what the fault. So, you're able to do with everything else. You have people trained up that do it. With us, we have trained people, I know there's other organizations that have trained people that specialize in looking at their monitoring for people's systems. And whenever I give trainings, I've held trainings for homeowners or facilities with facilities managers, I state that there's five levels, basically a PV maintenance. And level one, the most critical is know your monitoring system and check it because that's equivalent to having a, you know, a base maker, a heart checker on you. You're checking the system, the system's health right then and there. It's the quickest indicator. Okay. And then you mentioned five. Yep, I mentioned five. So, then the second one, basically, because it goes up in levels of technical terms and diversity. So, then you have the basic monitoring, then you have your system inspection. So, that's a visual inspection. I call it an up and over check or over under check because you look at the electrical equipment from your utility meter, you follow the pipe up, you're just looking to see is it cracked, is it damaged? You know, are the clamps that we're holding it through the wall, are they broken off? And then you get up onto the roof and you look at how the pipe comes into the roof. So, you look at that. Now, you have to remember your PV system isn't just the paddles, it's the racking, it's the, it's the piping. So, you're looking at the piping, you're looking at the racking. So, that's your, your inspection. When we say over under checks, we're looking over the paddles to see if the paddles are cracked, damaged. Did little Billy's baseball go land in your panel, big hole, you're looking underneath, you know, did the little, little rat decide to start making a hole underneath your panels because that is a big thing and pigeons nesting and looking at the wire management. So, that's your second one. Pretty much you can get up and do it. If that looks all clear and safe and there's no faults anywhere, then we say go ahead and you can start cleaning your panel. These are all pretty basic. So, the first three, you know, you can get up and take care of them as long as you're following proper safety steps, it's good. The fourth and the fifth one is a little bit more detailed and intense. So, the fourth, the fourth section now requires testing of strings, testing of equipment coming in on the roof because depending on the systems you could test out different strings going to the inverters. And then the fifth one is thermal imaging your entire system. And with thermal imaging, I always recommend having a certified thermographer and someone who specializes in portable tags because they're more aware of what they're actually seeing identifying and that's their specialty item. And I've been honored to be a certified thermographer since 2012. And I've been able to speak at the conferences for FLIR and the Infrared Training Center on the exact subject matter of identifying issues of your portable tag system using thermal imagery. Yep, it's a big mouthful. And I was really honored that when FLIR came out with their first thermal imaging drone, I was contacted and we were able to get our FAA licensing and flying the first thermal imaging drones. And that wasn't too long ago and the technology is really advanced. So, like I said, there's five stages of a PB maintenance package, monitoring is most basic, then it's inspecting, then cleaning, then after that it becomes a little bit more technical. You do it. We help our clients understand it. When we have a client, just say they have properties on six islands, right? So, we come out there and we check in their sites, they have monitoring, we help try to teach or train them on their monitoring plan. So, they're aware as well because one of the big things we do when we try to educate people or when we try to tell people about PB maintenance, we always say it's best if you understand your monitoring as well. And I'm able to teach it, but the monitoring platforms have great great links. They do a lot of YouTube channels and a lot of training on them as well. So, whatever monitoring platform people have, like everything else in this world, we can Google search it and it'll tell you how to use it. So, when you're thermal imaging, what kind of temperatures are you looking for? Are you looking for variations in the temperature? Is there a sweet spot temperature? So, when you're thermal imaging a photovoltaic panel, there's a couple of factors that take into place. One is to have the knowledge level of knowing that a panel has what's called the standard test condition and it's one of the test conditions traded at is a thousand watts per meter square. This has a direct correlation to the current on the pad. So, that'll change the temperature. So, there's not a sweet temperature. So, this is a lot like I tell everybody Sesame Street. Which one of these is not like the other? You have a 60 cell panel. If 59 cells look like one color and one cell is completely different color, that's what we focus on. And then, from there, you're able to take an image and there's tools that can be used that will let you do a differential tempering. So, that's when it starts coming into place. Well, with truth demography on a PV panel, we want to continually take the readings on the irradiance to let us know what we were having at the time. So, we always try, you want to try to have it above 500 watts per meter squared coming in. You don't always get your best test conditions. So, you're looking at that. There's different items you're looking at and that's dealing with the anomaly of a hot spot. So, the hot spot's able to be identified and we call it a hot spot because literally, it's one square out of all the squares in there hot spot. And that gives you different references of what's going on. And this falls back to if you're doing any energy management work or everything else, we always try to train and when we publish our papers on this, we always state it's best you have your photovoltaic investment installed. Within six months, get a baseline thermal scan of the whole system. If there's no anomalies then, you have your baseline. If a year or two later you go, you start finding anomalies, when you try to do a warranty claim, it's going to make more sense to be able to say, well, here's our baseline. Here's the previous year's document documented with the date and time stamp on it. We did not have these anomalies and just say for a commercial site, that's 500 pounds. All of a sudden we found none, found none. Year three, we now find five. We have a one percent variation now. So, our deviations, one percent. And then when we talk with the panel manufacturer, we state we have it. And then there's other testing that goes along with this, but this is your initial visual check on it. With the thermal imaging as well, we've been very fortunate to have learned how to identify if microinverter is out in the location. So, this takes a little bit more identifying and it's a real fine line. We do our testing in centigrade because all the standard test conditions refer to Celsius in centigrade. So, with that being said, we've noticed that you could see it down microinverter optimizer between one to two degrees C. So, it's a very, very tight window, but the thermal cameras have such great projection and able to identify it. You're able to pick these small differences up and when you go through training through the training groups that offer thermal imaging training, they teach you how to lock in, how to identify that, make your camera do what it works. It falls under tools of their usage. Now, this is just a perfect example of the fact that technology, especially electronic technology, is this improving, improving, improving, improving. And then those of us in the renewable energy field, energy efficiency field, this is just nothing but good news because we're getting more for less. The efficacy of whatever system is improving. You just gave a perfect example of that. Yes. And one of the best things now is Leah Wong for our company, she is our head person who runs our drone program. So, we have the certified demographers and certified drone pilots because when you do fly the drone, if it's not for your personal use, you have to make sure your FAA license. And they're specialized in actual thermal imaging use on a drone. So, it's really neat. So, when you do in the drone, so just like, you'll go over and you've got an overall picture, it's fantastic. We'll have sites with 20,000, 40,000 pounds. So, carrying a handheld camera all day long trying to find those problems takes a long time. When they have it mapped out, we're able to identify the anomaly in the location and then you do further close-up inspection with the thermal camera. Is it a bird dropping? Is it a rock that went into the glass? Is that what caused it or is an actual anomaly in the panel themselves? So, it's once again being able to realize that it's a whole collaborative part of a system and all these parts work together really well. And like you said, the advancements that we've had in technology since I started company to clean panels and to maintain its audit has been incredible. There are monitoring platforms that now have such great data. It's incredible. You know, like I said, we've gone from handheld scrubbing every site to now we have sites that we're running our robots on. You know, it's making things safer. We're using lighter robots because there's heavy robots out there but, you know, OSHA regs are trying to use some of the lighter robots to fall into different qualifications. You know, with the thermal imaging drones, it's fantastic. I've been shown through Leah that she's able to build a track of just say, I'm flying at Howard's house. We go to your house and then every year we fly your house. She runs the same exact pattern. So, that way it falls under the same idea with the base slide and if we have to work with the warranty claim, we could say, this is the same exact location. We found it in the same image area. So, they're able to do things that I just look at. I just up just like, wow, it's so incredible at how far advanced it's come and what they're doing and being able to track the monitoring data, the equipment that's coming out to make a safer and, you know, you go clean 600 pounds with the scrub brush compared to using the robot. You're a lot happier after using the robot. I can tell you that right now. I saw an image, you know, you had a video of a robot. Can you describe what this robot does and how it's mounted? So, there are a variety of robots that have come out and it's been great watching them come out. So, basically it's like a small machine that has treads on it and there'll be two brushes. Some machines have one brush. We have one as two brushes and basically it'll have a water pump that goes to the top. It pumps water to the front and the back of it and as it goes, it cleans up. And if one of the bigger items that we've noticed is it uses less water, so we have less water usage, it performs and cleans it better because the brushes do it. There's different brushes for different soiling. So, that's about the most technical part on it. And then when I first got the robot, I went to see how difficult it would be. So, I, at the time, my daughter was six and I put the battery and I handed it to her and I said, here you go, Cassie, give this a ride. And took her about two minutes to figure out how to drive the robot. So, it's real intuitive. It will do it. There's definite items you have to be aware of, what angles you could run it on, getting closer to the edge. But it's pretty much a joystick. So, gamers are good at it and it's pretty amazing because the drone is the same thing, the robots are the same things. So, it's really cool to have robots. We've got them on a couple islands now. We've got another one coming in and it's just, you know, I like it for a few reasons. One is it definitely makes things safer. We're able to work and operate safer. It has less strain on the employee's work and it does a phenomenal job and we've used less water usage. So, there's a lot of bonuses on it. And it's fun to drive a robot. And your six-year-old daughter can do it. My goodness, goodness. And I assume that the brushes spin around the same as a vacuum cleaner, say brush. They rotate, so they have their own motors on each side. And so, the way they have it set up, if the robot, just say the robot is going clockwise, then we move it left to right or whatever. So, you've got a clockwise rotation. You run the brushes in a counterclockwise rotation. So, it pushes everything off and then there's a little squeegee on it that helps wipe everything off as it goes and rinses all the way back. Just like you squeegee your glass shower door after taking a shower. Wow. So, it's been phenomenal. We make sure we document it before and after images, what do you want to do? So, you track it once again. These are all done because if you're documenting these items, if you ever have a warranty claim, you can prove to people, hey, we've been trying to do the maintenance on them. We've been cleaning them. You know, your maintenance manual, for instance, manufacturer will say, what's your clean inspection? And they'll just say, use a water or a mild detergent. They never tell you what detergent to use, so they won't answer which one's legal. Wow. And drones, how high does the drone slide over the target? I've been with her when she's gotten up to like 350 feet, 400 feet. And she can zoom in. We had one of our sites that she was able to fly, which had, I think it's got 2,400 panels on it. She was able to fly to 350 feet and she was able to see the whole thing and we were able to identify six anomalies from that height without a problem. The clarity that they've developed from the first failure view that I got to use, what we have now is I would quit it to go on from a black and white TV with the knob to now being able to tell Alexa that I want to watch whatever shows on TV and they'll put it on every room I'm walking through. Wow. And we've just got less than two minutes left. I want to talk about the future of PVs. Right now we're really looking hard at something called agro-photovoltaics or something like that, where you put the panels over an agricultural area and the plants are more shade lovers. So they grow better under the panels. I don't know if you've heard about that. Yeah, I've worked with people talked about it. I've actually helped try to develop some ideas on it to actually make it work because of the need on them on a lot of solar farms because you can dual-purpose your sites and the farmers know way better what crops will work underneath it. And it's really an amazing thing to be able to do because I said dual-purposing it is phenomenal and they have different systems that pretty much will run to keep them shaded and running water on them and keeping them cleaned out. It's really phenomenal advancements in technology and a mixing of groups and it's a mixing of the forward-thinking ideas because it's green technology trying to think about our future and farming and food sources and water saving and reclamation is an amazing future. Yeah, to me though, those all go together. And Fred, that brings us to the close of our show. We were just kind of getting warmed up. So thank you so much, Fred. Howard and Think Tech Hawaii, thank you very much. Thank you for always putting on phenomenal shows and all that you do. My great pleasure. And to our audience, thank you for attending. See you next time. Think Tech Hawaii. Code green. Aloha.