In the debut episode of the Solar Coaster Podcast, Wade Allen and Andrew Thomson from the Supply Partners Technical Team are joined by Mark Cavanagh from MC Electrical to chat about the State of Residential Energy Storage in Australia. We talk about how Mark started his solar business and the decisions that have helped him grow an ethical and successful brand. Plus, Warwick Johnston from SunWiz drops in to give us an Australian Market Update with some interesting stats.
ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster! A podcast for navigating through the ups and downs of the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Hosted by the Supply Partners Technical team and joined by industry professionals each episode to help you turn chaos into stability. We'll be talking about solar, batteries, EVs, Electrification and much more, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
LINKS:
In the debut episode of the Solar Coaster Podcast, Wade Allen and Andrew Thomson from the Supply Partners Technical Team are joined by Mark Cavanagh from MC Electrical to chat about the State of Residential Energy Storage in Australia. We talk about how Mark started his solar business and the decisions that have helped him grow an ethical and successful brand. Plus, Warwick Johnston from SunWiz drops in to give us an Australian Market Update with some interesting stats.
ABOUT THE PODCAST:
Welcome to the Solar Coaster! A podcast for navigating through the ups and downs of the Australian Solar and Energy Industry. Hosted by the Supply Partners Technical team and joined by industry professionals each episode to help you turn chaos into stability. We'll be talking about solar, batteries, EVs, Electrification and much more, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
LINKS:
Welcome to The Solar Coaster, a podcast about the ups and downs of the Australian solar industry. Brought to you by the technical team at Supply Partners with host Wade Allen and technical guru Andrew Thomson. Okay, here we are. It's the Solar Coaster podcast hosted by Supply Partners. My name is Wade Allen. And I'm Andrew Thomson, and we will. Be your host each and every episode. Where all so the spearhead of the technical team here at Supply Partners. And what is the solar coaster, podcast? Well, it's helping you navigate through the ups and downs of this Australian solar industry. And there's plenty of them. Indeed there is, but our aim is to help turn that chaos into stability. And all the meanwhile, keep a smile on our face and hopefully be entertaining slightly. Right, let's enjoy that ride. Each and every episode, we will have on a new guest, an industry leader or a thought provoker of some description this episode. Our first guest is Mark Cavanagh from MC Electrical At. You know Mark pretty well, don't you? I do. Mark has a pretty strong online presence. I think I first became aware of him maybe eight years ago or so, probably when he first started putting his blogs online. I believe his online presence even extends overseas. Yes, apparently he's huge in Austria. So we're going to be talking to Markey about energy storage, both in a residential and a commercial space. We will also cut to work. Johnson from SunWiz He's going to give us an update on the market right now, give us some data points. And at the end of the day, I think what we're trying to achieve here is to bring value to the solar installers and retailers in Australia and help improve your business and even make that transition from being just a solar business to an energy business. I also want to make note that this is not just being recorded with audio, but also video. And we will be uploading it to YouTube, I promise. We don't just have radio faces. And if you'd like to see Mark, then you'll be able to have a look at that as well. So what do you say, Andrew? Should we pop on in? Let's go for the ride. Indeed. Off we go. Well, here we are. We've finally done it. We've sat down. It's the solar coaster. Brought to you by Supply Partners. Andrew, do you have a song that you want to sing about the Solar Coaster? Solar Coaster. There it is. Today being episode one, we are going to be talking about the state of energy storage in Australian, both in residential and commercial. But also we're just going to have a general chat about changes in the market, things that we're seeing, new products that are coming on the market. And we'll just have a general chat about all that and maybe where we see things moving in the future and hopefully making it easier on everybody, right from the distributor through to the retailers and eventually the customers. And our guest today is no one doesn't know this guy. Come on. Right, hamming it up a little bit there. So, Mark Cavadaugh from MC Electrical. Thank you for coming in, buddy. Thanks. It's a pleasure. Yeah, no, well, thank you. It's great. And for those who don't know, Mark, mark is a bit of a legend in the industry. He's up here in Queensland and I think it's probably best if we just kind of let everyone know exactly where you came from and what you're up to. Mark, so were you born up here? I was born in Brisbane, sort of grew up in Cairns, but then came back down here. So I've been here most of my life. Yeah. Nice. And how did you get into being an electrician, first off, and then solar? How did that all happen for you? Yeah, okay. So straight out of school, I actually quit school early because I hated it and went and did Prevo to do an electrical apprenticeship and ended up getting a job with Sequeb, who's now energetics. Oh, yeah. So that was a pretty good job. So that's kind of how I started and left there and kind of traveled and did a lot of sort of electrical work around the world and ended up back in Brisbane after that. Yeah, right on. And so solar has been your main thing, or is it just part of what MC Electrical does? Yeah, now it's our main thing. And that's really why we started, too, was to do solar. I called it MC Electrical. I get this question a bit. Everyone calls us MC Solar. I probably should just rebrand, but I called it MC Electrical because I started off working with sales companies and I just hated I just wanted to point out they were electricians. That's a good not sales, guys. Well, and also, you don't want to pigeonhole yourself as well sorry for anybody that has done that already, but the industry does evolve and we are evolving right now. This whole episode is about energy storage. So people are going to associate batteries with solar for the most part, but it doesn't necessarily need to be part of it. So it's a good call on your part for just MC Electrical, I think. So how did it all start out for you? Was it just you, one man in a van? Yeah, so I started off subbying for sales companies, like I was saying. And so week one, I brought one bloke on and it was me and him up on the roof. Week two, and I think week ten, we had 50. No, it wasn't that bad. It was just really rapid, like, there was just so much work out there. What year? So that was 2009. I started MC Electrical. Yeah, right. Things have changed a bit since then. Yeah, it was pretty crazy back then. No, one knew what they were doing. We're just making it up as we went along. And to be honest, we just grew far too quickly and I was just throwing blokes on roofs that I probably shouldn't have been doing just to try to keep up with the workload. But, yeah, we kind of kind of got out of that. Subcontract model installing for others in 2012 at maybe 2013 and started only selling, learning how to start up a sales company and only installing what we sell. And where are you at now? How many installers do you have? How many staff total? Yeah, it's around about 40 total. So I think it's a bit over bit over 20 installers and yeah, sort of doing four installs. We probably should be up to five installs a day. Those are some good numbers. Yeah, it's good. Not too big, but it's big enough that I can have managers so I don't have to be there. I can come here and hang out and do fun stuff. Yeah, right. So was the turn in your business you mentioned around 2012, 2013, when the 44 cent feed in tariffs stopped. Did your business kind of come to a halt overnight or what happened there? Yeah, big time. Yeah. We lost contracts with the sales companies that we're installing for, and it was hard. I was just letting really good guys go and then I just knew that these sales companies could do it and they had no idea what they were doing. And I knew I could build a really good solar company and a really honest one. We didn't have to rip people off because solar is such a good thing. You don't have to be dishonest about it. Yeah, but that was hard. It was a hard probably twelve months, but we had made money because in the early days, I'm just like, no, we're going to do this. We're going to turn into a good solar sales company, I guess. Yeah. One thing that I respect that you've done and I want to touch on it a bit, is you've decided to become a bit of an educator as well as just a solar retail company. So you have your blog, which is fantastic. You do product reviews, you do other things like updates. I read one that was about what to do if your panels get smashed by hail. Shout out to Springfield. It's like the epicenter for hail in Queensland. You also have your YouTube channel where you do similar things to your blog in educating people. And then just recently you've started a whole series. I guess this is also targeted at your customers called Know Your Solar, and you're just kind of helping people understand all the ins and outs of that. So what made you decide to go down the path of being an educator? Look, I think it was probably that I don't want to be a sales company and we want to be smarter than that. And obviously it's marketing, so it's content marketing, a soft way of marketing without all the slime in it. It probably turned into a lot bigger than that because I spend probably an unreasonable amount of time researching stuff which lifts my skills. I get better, the business gets better for it at the same time, but it works really good. It's really warm. When customers come and see us and they've come up the YouTube channel or the blog, they kind of know us and trust us to start with. So it works well in that sense. Yeah. Well, as a technical distributor, we know exactly what you're talking about. Andrew does that all day long, too. He's just the same as you. He's always researching, getting to know every product and then helping the rest of us understand it as well. I guess I found we all learn differently. And I found that if you give me an instruction manual, I can read it. I probably won't absorb it, but if I can, I guess, unbox the product, talk to electricians who've used it. What do they love about it? Just actually having the hands on gives you a whole different approach and then it helps with selling it. Yeah. What I find more is just not believing anything you're told by the manufacturer, testing the heck out of yourself, and you kind of find some interesting things over the years. Indeed, indeed. And you said that it helps with your reputation. I just want to give you a little pat on the back. We saw yesterday that solar quote's number one, installer is MC Electrical. Yeah, thanks. Congratulations. That's awesome. Thanks. Yeah, we've been up there for a little while now. That's a pretty good thing. It's basically based on customer reviews, so there's that front end sales part of the business. But I think we really focus a lot, really heavily on install quality. That's kind of our game. With four sparkies in the office, we're really technical based and making sure that our guys are like, my aim is just to get the best possible solar on as many roofs as possible. But the best solar comes first, and the many is the difficult part. Yeah, no doubt. I know what it's like to put yourself online. You open yourself up to trolls. So have you had any blowback from putting yourself out there? Yeah, there is. I mean, to be fair, it's probably a lot more positive. Or maybe I'm just an optimist and I ignore the negative stuff, but yeah, I do a lot, which can be a little bit frustrating, where I might bag out a product, but I'm not bagging out a product, I'm doing a technical review on it and pointing out the problems with the product. And then I can understand there's a sales guy somewhere in Australia that really hates the fact that I just criticize their product and they'll have cheap shots and I'm thinking, I wish someone could, actually. I don't think I've really ever hardly ever had this where someone comes back to me and goes, no, you're wrong. That point was wrong. They just go, oh, he's just trying to sell. I sell phronius. He's just back on the product that he sells. But I guess we sell the products we sell because I've done the study. Yeah, I noticed that, actually, that you just said that you sell Fronius. I think it was the beginning of last year. Was it beginning of 2022 that we went 100%? Yeah. What was behind that decision? Look, without naming names, we're installing other inverters on the market. And I've done a lot of comparison side by side, where I'll get 6 kw on the roof, up in my warehouse roof, compared to 6 putting two different inverters Fronius versus something. And just in so many different ways, Fronius just works better. Okay. And I just figure it's $500 more as well as warranty, and we don't have as many warranty problems with Fronius as any other inverter that we've dealt with. I think we've done three and a half thousand Fronius inverters or something, and we get hardly anything compared to even the inverters that we've done a couple of hundred of. So I just thought, I know it's the best, so why do we offer second best? Well worked out. You got the Advocate Award last year, did you not? Yes, congrats on that as well. So you've done ten of, your know, your solar YouTube videos. Is there more in that series? Yeah, there will be. So that really came about because it was like we've got a couple of people in after sale support, and we were getting the same questions over and over again. And I thought, well, to make it easier on them, but also to make it a better customer experience, we just answer those questions in video. I think that's really helped. So I guess any other questions that come up that we find that we're answering over and over again that will just naturally grow. Yeah, right. Do you have anything planned after that, or are you sticking with that for now? Yeah, thanks for asking. Because I want to say this because that way I have to commit to it. Exactly. Yeah. I want to do an install series where I jump out with my guys on the roof and record them installing a tile bracket. How do you do a cable run through a ceiling? All the things that we've learned about being analy retentive, about installing solar and putting that out there. Which would be good? Well, first it would be training for our new guys that come in. We're always getting new apprentices in, and we can show them this is the standard, this is how we do it. So to document that. But I think it'll be good for installers generally. One thing I will say is one of the brand of mounting systems that we sell. They brought out a universal mounting clamp for that product and a lot of installers actually struggled with fixing that product. Now, this manufacturer had PDFs install manuals around how to actually use it, and still people struggled. One day, we took our phone out to the car park, grabbed an installer who'd come to pick up their order, filmed a quick three minute video, and I tell you what, did that change? Everything. Suddenly, installers didn't have the same issue. So it just has a different cut through than documentation. Yeah. And we've written a really extensive sales documentation, technical sales documentation for the sales guys when they're designing systems. We try to do that with the installers. I think you're right, it just doesn't get that's not how I consume information either. Exactly. Yeah, I'm the exact same way. Reading. I don't know if people will actually read in the future, so we kind of talked about it earlier, but 1012 years ago, the industry was so different. Like, we had 250 watt panels we had inverters that, barely had monitoring in them. We didn't even have export limits or energy meters or anything like that. We didn't even have rules about DZ cables at roof. It was the Wild West cable. It was just AC cable we used. Yeah. And just recently, we've seen quite a few changes. Do you see more coming, like more compliance happening? Because I know it's starting to thin out the herd a bit with solar installers saying that it's just too hard now. Yeah. I mean, the last five oh three, I reckon it was a really good update. Some annoying parts to it, which last Australian standards about how to install solar, that is that shifted a lot of things. I think every time a new standard comes out, it'll keep improving. I think we've got a really good level of regulation out there already. Problem is, not everyone follows it. Yeah, of course. Well, we've got people out there checking people, but, yeah, probably not enough of them. Right. Not in Queensland. Really? No, we can do whatever we want and no one will know until the house burns down or something. It's quite frustrating. Well, we want to talk a little bit about energy storage, but part of what we're doing here on the solar coaster and what we want, some value we want to bring to everybody is we want to cut to Warwick Johnson from SunWiz. For those of you who don't know who Warwick and SunWiz is, they're a company that basically bring a lot of data and strategic strategies for solar companies using that data. So we're going to cut to Warwick now and he's going to give us a bit of an update on where we're at right now with market trends with regards to energy storage and PV and everything like that, and then we'll come back after that. Excellent. Hello, viewers. Here's a quick update on the PV and storage market from Sunways. The year's got off to a great start for PV, certainly much better than it was last year, and we're seeing that volumes are 18% ahead of where they got to the same point in 2022. We're still not doing as well as we did in that record year of 2021. We're behind that. The main exception, however, is commercial PV, which has got off to a cracking start and recording some record volumes for this time of year. With regards to energy storage systems, the attachment rate to PV systems certainly increased over the course of 2022, and somers is currently in the process of determining exactly where it falls. But we're seeing some good significant indicators that it's going to be well above 12%, likely above 15% attachment rate. That's the number of batteries installed by the number of PV systems installed. That being the case, that would infer that there were over 50,000 energy storage systems installed last year, which would smash our previous records. Sunrun will have a finalized figure for that when we release our annual battery Market report at the end of March. It is too soon to see say that how that's playing out in 2023, though we hear that consumer confidence may be impacting uptake of battery systems. One thing when we look across the retailer landscape of energy storage systems, one thing that's clear to us is that the businesses that focus on getting good at energy storage system sales are the businesses that are selling most of the volume. And in fact, one data source that we've seen showed that about a third of the total volume of batteries is coming from retailers that sell more batteries than they do PV systems. So there's something for you on that note. We're finding that a lot of PV is being replaced when a battery is installed, rather than just upgrading the PV system with some extra panels while you install your new battery system. Some data that's come to light shows that of all the PV systems that were installed last year, 20% were at a site which already had a PV system, and of that, actually two thirds were replacement systems, whereas one thirds were extensions. So it's more common to completely replace and repower a PV system. And we suspect that a strong driver of that is of course, energy storage systems. We're also starting to see battery systems themselves being extended. So people who might have bought and installed a small battery last year, the year before, are coming back and saying, well, now it's time to add some extra capacity. So there's another market for extensions in commercial storage. We're also seeing that emerge as a growing market segment that's really still in its infancy. We do expect that as more EV charges are installed at commercial premises, those buildings will be installing local energy storage systems in order to manage the peak pricing that they can get, as well as peak demand that they can be charged for. So expect to see some significant size commercial systems rolling out as Australia increases its EV uptake. That's all for me for the moment. Thanks so much. Okay, well, that's great info. Wark actually let us know of another statistic afterwards of 20 gigawatt of rooftop solar now installed in Australian. What a milestone. I wonder what they projected back in 2009 or whatever. Would we hit 20 gig by now? Like, that's a crazy actually, we should. Look up that data point, Rain Man, when you're going but, you know, like, the technology curve where it's like you've got the first 2% of those innovators, and they're the people that will just they got more money than brains. They just want the newest, brightest, glossiest, what have yous. And then it moves to the early adopters or those innovators where it's still the early market, but it becomes a little bit more mainstream. And then, bang, it moves into that mainstream market where the majority of people are I think it's pretty safe to say that Solar is well and truly in the middle of that. There are predictions that the solar industry will actually slow down slightly over the next decade. Do you believe that? Yeah, I've heard Nigel Morris talk about that. What do they call it? Not the death spiral like that. I don't know. The solar clip or whatever. I think it may just shift it's sort of maybe less solar, more energy storage, who knows? But to tie that into energy storage, we're probably still well and truly, almost, maybe just moving out of those innovators into the early adopters. But I remember back in 2013, Andrew, you mentioned it earlier, when Mark and when the feed in tariff dropped from 44 to eight, at least in Queensland, and our businesses just went overnight, and it became, all right, now who's going to uptake solar? Is it commercial? But in the residential market, it became a cellular excess versus store your excess. The very first battery system I put in back in 2013, was that really Knead power router. Do you remember that? Okay. No, I don't. The green machine, that is early adopter. Totally. Well, this was Cans, actually, right? And the power up in wherever this I can't even remember where they were, but it was shoddy. Okay. Can you remember back to the first battery system you put in? First battery? We have been really conservative with batteries. Okay. So I played around with GCL battery when they came out, like, in my workshop, and I played around with LG and a few other batteries in the office. But I think the first battery we put in, I just waited till Tesla came out with their powerwall. We might have done one or two LGs before that. We did a couple of Fronius batteries back in maybe 2015 or 2016, probably 2016, yeah. Right. But I was really conservative I'm not the early adopter, in a sense, that I've got a warranty for ten years on that thing. In all fairness, I should have tested the need app a little further because. It was Pyro shit, if I recall, weren't they gaps? And there were gaps big enough to let Geckos in, to short circuit it. And I think the IP rating was this undoing, I believe it was a nightmare. Yeah, no, that was funny. But I think we were listening to something recently and they say the five reasons why most homeowners are adding batteries these days are, I want to reduce my bill as much as possible so that back in those days, with the 44 cent, you could actually nil out someone's bill. Now, that's virtually impossible without storing it in some capacity. Or they want resilience from the grid if it goes down, they want to be able to back it up and also from ever increasing power prices. And there's people that are just like, they want to take it to demand, screw those DNS, right? And then you're already there putting solar on my roof. We might as well get it all done at once. Let's put it in now. And then there's the Keeping up with the Joneses. You guys are still very active out there right now, and you say you've been conservative about it, but what do you see on a day to day? Like, who's asking you for batteries? Yeah, so I think probably only in the last year we've got serious about batteries. We put pricing on our website and stuff and we had a proper pricing structure, because I reckon before that, it was like 99 people would ask, or 100 people would ask for a battery. 99% of people were scared off about the price. I think that switched that it might be 95. Like, there might be five out of 100 or ten out of 100 that are a little bit more interested, because a battery isn't a great economical purchase. You're not going to save a bucket load of money on your power bill with it. People do it for other reasons. And I think if you're upfront with people about that, there's a small percentage of people that go, I don't care, I just want a battery. I like technology, want to screw it to the man, like you said. Or probably the higher percentage is they just don't. They've got 20 grand to spend on not having a blackout ever again. Yeah, it's a good flex when everybody's out of power and you put the lights on. And so what do you think is going to be the facilitator to getting us, like, right now it's at 15% to 17% attachment rate. What do you think is going to get us into that majority market? Is it going to be a rebate, like a federal rebate? Or is it going to be the price of it coming down or new technology what do you think? Yeah, 15% to 17% of people install solar, put a battery on it, is that what you're saying? Yeah. That's crazy. I never knew that. I don't know. So rebates? I don't love the idea of rebates. No, because every man and his cowboy will get out there indeed, and install rubbish. But I guess rebates would be fine if every job was inspected. That would probably lift the game a little bit. Probably what I see, I don't know. That prices I don't have a crystal ball, but I can't see prices going down enough to make it a really good financial purchase. Not in a hurry anyway. But I think what will be the game changer is when VPP virtual power plants sort of kick in and. People. Can participate in VPPs properly, they're set up properly, and I think that's where you're going to start. They're going to start making financial sense. I guess that's just another reason why people are putting on batteries. And that could be a big portion of that 15% to 17% I know, like the Solar Schools program in New South Wales that's going on right now. They're all using Gen Twenty four S and BYD batteries, and they are participating in that as well. Andrew, you've got some good opinions about VPP. What are your thoughts? My thoughts on VPP is it's available in the market now? It has been for a few years now. There are people actively participating in virtual power plants, but the feedback from customers typically is that they're just not worth it. They seem good at face value, but then you realize maybe they're stinging you with higher daily supply charges or just catching you elsewhere, I think in the very near future. What we'll find is that at the moment, if you're going to look for an electricity retailer, you're looking at their supply charges, the usage rates, any other kind of fees they'll hit you with. And people are also looking at the feed in tariff. But the feed in tariff that they'll pay is also a bit misleading because some of them may pay a higher rate, but then that's capped at the first ten kilowatt hours a day and then nothing after that. I feel as though that a virtual power plant rate will just be an addition to the current lineup that will be used when you go and choose your electricity retailer. So you'll buy your battery, you'll have your solar system, and then it will just form a part of which retailer you run with. So I think there's a long way to go, but I feel as though it's not far off. Yeah. Okay. And there's a lot of trials am I doing a lot of trials with VP's and stuff like that at the moment? Right. We're working with Nectar, who's a new electricity wholesaler, like AGL Origin or whatever, or retailer, sorry. And we're doing a VPP with our customers. It's a. Really good deal for them. But the VPP part of it is like $10 a month,$120 a year that you're getting for allowing them to I mean, it's paying for the cycles, but that's not even what it's about. So they're not even cycling your battery yet. The VPPs haven't just so in their infancy. They haven't started, like Nectar and other companies, I don't think, have started to be able to monetize
it properly, have the infrastructure to make that happen at 06:00 on a Friday night when demand goes crazy, for them to be able to say, bugger off, gas, don't turn your turbines on. We're going to discharge our batteries because we got millions of them. I think one of the difficult challenges as well is that how do you express the savings potential from a virtual power plant to your customer? I know some VPP providers have tried and that hasn't ended well. I guess no one can guarantee the amount of instances that the battery will be called upon, so it's very hard to, I guess, put a monetary value against that. It should just be treated as an added bonus and not your sole reason for going down that path. Yeah, okay. Right. I think at the moment, yeah, at the moment, yes, definitely. That's right. Just a little bit of icing on the cake. But I think that's where batteries are going to like when they get that all sorted out, I think that's where battery are going to become mainstream. When we were talking earlier, we were actually having a conversation surrounding the you got to make sure that you know what the battery and inverter are capable of, too, because sometimes you can have an inverter that can only discharge and charge at 22 amp and you have a battery that can do 50 or vice versa, and one of them is going to limit the other. And if you want to participate in a VPP and be able to just discharge that battery, but the inverter is going, I just like to go with this, sorry. And exactly what you said earlier. Bargain, if you put that on a rebate scheme or BPP is going to be a bit of a scheme, and you get every man and their dog and their cowboy out there doing it and no one really knows. Exactly. People are going to end up with the wrong thing for the wrong purpose. Right? Yeah. And there's so many, like most of our customers, like I saying, buy it for blackout purposes. And you would assume people used to always assume if you got solar panels on, you won't have a black when there's a blackout, your solar panels will keep giving you power. That was stupid like that. But if you buy a battery, I think it should be fair to assume that you're going to have hair and a blackout. But it's not the case. It doesn't necessarily work like that. So I think people have to be really careful when they're looking into batteries and saying, what does this don't just assume what this thing can do. I think even a lot of salespeople don't really know what that capacity or capability of that battery can do. So it's kind of a little bit of a minefield at the moment. The other issue I think that we face as well is people who are selling battery ready systems. And what does battery ready truly mean? Like, sure, you can go and add an AC coupled battery down the track, but A, you need to make sure the DNSP will allow it because they'll class that as inverter capacity, and most of them have limits. But the other aspect to consider as well, if you're selling a battery ready system is have you actually scoped out the customer's place to make sure they have an area for the battery? We had an instance recently where we were provided a battery to trial and someone very quickly put their hand up, I'll have it. And after thoroughly checking their place, we just simply couldn't find a spot suited to a battery that was both compliant and aesthetically pleasing for the homeowner. So they had to forfeit the free battery. Yeah, those regulations around about where you can install it and then you throw on top the manufacturer's requirements. For example, BYD, you can't have to have an Eve over it. That's not the Australian standards. That's what BYD says. So all of those things, that's another mindset. Yeah, no doubt. Is there any size system that you're finding to be like the sweet spot for batteries? Yeah, for batteries that you're currently installing? I don't know. Every customer is different, but I probably think what Tesla have done, 13 kw, that's roughly a sweet spot. And we do that with Tesla and BYD. Yeah, but quite a lot of our customers will get quite a lot. We don't do that many, but we've had a surprising number that have got a BYD, maybe 13 kilowatt stack, and then they up it to 20 a few months later. So we're probably doing a lot more of the 20s as well. Oh, wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Something that was interesting, I looked at into our system before this just to pull out some numbers, and it could just be due to the fact that batteries are becoming more popular and people use supply partners because we are more technical. But in 2020 to 2021, our battery sales went up, I think 29.4%, and then last year it went up 185%. So it's just like it's become this massive thing, and we've gone from, what, three or four different batteries to now nine, I think we have on our price list. It's just become such a big part of our business, and I just see it even though we may still be in that really early market, I just see probably in the next five years it's just going to shift massively. Yeah. And whether that is due to some financial scheme or the price of them coming down or the prices of energy going up or those other VPPs will probably be a big one. Exactly what you said it'll be. Interesting, and I think I'm okay to share this, but if I recall last year, the top two selling products as a distributor were solar panels and the third best selling product that we had as a business was a battery, and it wasn't even the cheapest battery in our range. So it just goes to show that there are lots of people installing them and they're happy to pay a premium for it, too. Yeah, right. Those percentages that I actually shouted out earlier were residential. I broke them out because we do a lot of off grid stuff as well. So that's a completely different battery. So that was just residential. But speaking of like residential but now into commercial, commercial batteries are something that we're starting to get a lot of interest in. Yeah, a lot of calls. There's just been an increase in the number of tenders out there as well. Requests for quotations on our end, whether it be for just obviously that would be a new install or an off grid best or something like that. A lot of times that you get these big off grid things and they've got two or three generators running, one's actually covering the loads, one's a backup and one's a backup of the backup and they want to be able to turn one off for a few hours. There's a lot of things like that that are currently out there. Have you guys seen anything in that space with commercial? Medium scale? Yeah. No, we haven't. Medium under 100, you mean? Yeah, sort of like that. 50 to 200 kilowatt hour. Yeah, we don't do a lot in that space, but we generally stick to residential and smaller commercial and do a few that are bigger. But yeah, I think you're right. That could be a completely different case scenario. Right, so peak clipping, so they're not paying their peak demand charges at lunchtime infrastructure, the factory gets bigger and they don't want to have to upgrade the transformer. There's probably a lot of use cases. There really is. You guys do commercial solar though? Yeah, we do commercial, smaller commercial. We don't chase 100 kilowatt jobs. Keep your inverter at 30. Yes, that's what we love the headache out of it. A 30 kilowatt inverter and 39 panels or whatever goodwee. Just came out with a 30 kilowatt hybrid inverter, which is going to be pretty interesting. I think everyone's going to eventually go there. So if Fronius goes there and you're still 100% Frodious, I'm sure that'll probably be something that would be of interest to you. Yeah, I think with the larger hybrids, where a lot of the need for that is coming from, isn't so much about offsetting the usage because that can easily be achieved just with stacking multiple inverters. But at the moment, the common largest hybrid size is a ten kilowatt three phase. Now, as you mentioned before, you said that a lot of it is about resilience and backup and a ten kilowatt three phase, although it seems at face value, ten kilowatt, that's a lot of power. It's essentially 3.3 per phase, which in a blackout situation can be very limiting. All of a sudden, customer turns their kettle on, they've got a few other things on at the same time, potentially tripping. So suddenly now that we're going to start to see these 15 kilowatt, 30 kilowatt hybrids, that's either five kilowatt phase or ten kilowatt per phase backup. So I actually can't wait to see some of the other manufacturers follow, and these larger hybrids should become the norm. Yeah, okay. Unless you got a big house, you're probably not going to put a 30 on there, though. But yeah, that is an issue with the customers think they get a 10 kw system with a big battery and it's bulletproof. It's not one of those other things that you really need to know what. You'Re buying, and it's all about that education, which you're all over. So I imagine you don't get too many phone calls from people kind of disappointed with something the way it's performing because a lot of that would be handled at the front end of the sale. Yeah, exactly. We did actually get one customer disappointed early on, but Phronius has and BYDF tables about how their system works, I don't think they're good enough. So I've kind of combined everything into one sheet that sort of tells the full picture from a customer's point of view, I think. So, okay, you know, what is another one that I'm starting to see a lot of interest in? And this probably isn't going to pertain too much to you, because when you do the big 100 kilowatt systems for businesses, not necessarily are they using all that power, right? Like there's going to be some potential clipping or feed in or whatever it may be with export limitation and what have you. So there's a lot of AC coupling to existing systems, and there's a lot of companies out there that have put in 100. We've recently partnered up with Orchestra. Have you ever heard of Orchestra? They were at the Smart Energy up here in Brisbane last year, and the presentation just blew our mind. It's basically a software that creates feasibility reports almost instantaneously in hundreds of scenarios. So something that would normally take you a week to do in a spreadsheet is done in like, 45 seconds. And you can enter in the customer's load profile if you want, if you have that much information, which is obviously the best thing. Or you can even just go, yeah, they're a steel manufacturer in Brisbane. On this tariff, give me what an average looks like in that. And then you could start applying models to it and be like, okay, well, give me a solar system from 30 to 200 kilowatt. Give me batteries from 30 kilowatt hours to 200 kilowatt hours. And it runs all these things and it bang. It just brings out, like, net present value or return on investment. Is that right? Maximum reduction of your bill. And it gives you this whole thing. It's just incredible. What's that called again? Orchestra with a K, not a C. Right. Okay. We'll be doing a webinar on this exact thing in the next month. Yeah. Watch this space. It came at a perfect time, because in the past, the hurdle has actually been finding the right product. Some of the products you'd have to have custom built overseas, high expense to that long lead time. Maybe the local service wasn't there, but we're in a position now where a lot of the manufacturers goodwee BYD power. Plus they're all coming out with their own CNI battery solutions, best systems. So the product's there. But now the next hurdle is how do you actually convince your customer that spending all this money is going to. Be worthwhile spending a week on a spreadsheet? That's right, exactly. And getting something pretty in front of them that actually is accurate. That's where this thing comes in. And it's just next to none. Like there's nobody doing this. And it's just such a great tool, because if you have an existing customer and you can pull that data off the inverter and off the energy meter and everything and figure out exactly what's going on, you can input all that data. Actually, if they just added a 30 kilowatt hour battery on here, it could do this, this, this, and save them this, this. Because chances are we're four or five years down the track from when you installed it. First off, that thing's been paid for. Yeah. Okay. And now it's, what else can we do? So it's opening a whole new field for retailers to not only go to new customers with solutions over and above just PV, but it allows you to go back to that big list of old customers that you have, or someone else who's probably out of business by now. Yeah. That's when you're just scrolling. You got one guy in your office scrolling Google, just looking for PV on top of businesses. Yeah. So it's a pretty cool area. Yeah. Okay. And that you'd only use that on larger commercial systems. Oh, you can do it. You can do it on small systems, too. Cool. Yeah. The big one that I found recently is there are some just very large commercial customers based in Brisbane or around Australia that historically, solar just hasn't stacked up for them because they're on such low electricity rates. No one's been able to come to them with a proposal that has brought an ROI that made it worthwhile for them to drop all that cash on the system. Now suddenly you're getting some of these customers that have or had $300,000 a month electricity bills. Suddenly it's turning into a million dollar a month electricity bills. Now for a system that they will need the size of it, that could be twelve plus months of design work that goes into that procuring the products. Now if they had have done it already, then essentially that could potentially be $700,000 a month that they're saving. But they're doing that now. So these sorts of systems that come online, such as orchestra, having the products available, if we can shave off a month, two months of the design work, then that's going to essentially that could be the savings. Oh yeah. Pays for the software pretty quick. Yeah. There's also another aspect to battery from your business that makes sense. I know back in 2011 when we were doing five kilowatt systems and they were like $16,000 and that wasn't bending anybody over, that was just the cost of everything. There was some decent margin in there because the actual capital costs were quite high and if you're working off fixed margins, well then obviously you're going to make more money out of it. And now everything's moved so far down the line and it's become so competitive in the market, adding back in those higher capital costs of batteries and stuff like that is going to allow yourself to put a little more money in your pocket, hopefully at the end of the day. So it's no doubt that there's going to be a massive drive from solar installers and retailers to put these things in because it's obviously going to increase the revenue, therefore their profits. But at the end of the day, it's going to be the consumers that choose it. And I suppose if we're all being honest like you are, and doing the right thing by them and letting them know all the information, then letting them make the choice. Yeah, we really need battery technology and we really need early adopters. We just can't fool people into being early adopters. I think they need to make that call themselves. I'm pretty good. Are you guys good? I'm good. Yeah. Right, awesome. Well, thanks for coming in, Mark. That was awesome. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate it. And you're a legend in the industry and we really want to thank you for coming in and being with us today. Yeah, thanks very much. It was a good time. Thanks Mark.