Special Bd. of Aldermen — 08/06/2019 Page 7
James Hasselbeck Thanks for that overview Dan and thank you everybody for the time this evening. So as Dan
mentioned, my role is to oversee our design, estimating, construction and operations and maintenance arms of
the company. | am a construction guy so | am happy to get into the weeds particularly of any concerns the
Aldermen may have on any of these projects and hopefully address them. So the first building we wanted to
focus on is a really great opportunity here at the Transit Garage. So what we see here is obviously an
overhead image, each of those little blue rectangles represents one individual solar panel. Each solar panel is
roughly 3 % feet wide by about 5 % feet tall. So we are right around 19 % square feet. On this type of roof, a
flat, EPDM or rubber sealed roof, we do not penetrate that roof surface and that is really important. My team is
a bunch of engineers, plumbers and electricians. We are very, very interested in building solar energy systems
and not at all interested in owning roofing warranties.
So we work, but obviously as you can imagine a key part of our business, so we work extremely closely with all
the major roofing manufacturers prior to our installation. If you in the procurement or construction world, you
may be familiar with something called a submittal process. So we do something fairly similar; so prior to any
installations we get ahold of the existing warranty holder on the roof, whether it is the roofing manufacture or the
roofing contractor. We basically submit to them the details of the racking manufacturer that we are going to use.
All of the big roofing manufacturers have a very specific process in place where they basically review and then
confirm that the products that we are using will not void the warranty. That is a crucial piece of us; sometimes
there are inspections involved and there are certainly a lot of back and forth that we undertake. But the key
takeaway for this group | think is that the work we are doing here will not be putting holes in these roofs and we
will not be impacting any existing roofing warranties. There is a documentation stack about this thick that we
provide at the end of the project.
So how this works, we are not putting holes in the roof, so what we are doing is we are doing a lot of smart
engineering and we use what is called a ballasting system. So basically, we are using, wait | don’t know what
photos you have there, yeah so you can see in some other similar projects we have Contemporary Automotive
over in Milford, Tupelo Music Hall, and the Wirebelt just up in Londonderry. But basically we have determined
that by strategically placing a very specific quantity of concrete ballast blocks in a very specific weight structure
that that provides enough downward pressure to hold the solar panels secure. It adds anywhere between 4 to 7
pounds per square foot of dead load to that building; the differences is based on the wind load and the building
factors. Part of our due diligence as Dan alluded to, we also do a structural engineering review of each building.
So we go in with our professional engineer, take a look at the building structure and confirm with 100% certainty
that everything that we are doing is structurally sound. | guess that’s kind of it.
Mr. Weeks And | would just point out that the production data you see the array, the capacity, that’s the DC
Direct Current Capacity of 103.9 kilowatts, 297 panels and then really the important number there is the power
output 106,500 kilowatt hours per year. A quick word on how we come up with those projections?
Mr. Hasselbeck Sure so you can see the graph in the top right corner and it is difficult to see the things on the
bottom but on the left hand access, vertical access, that’s the production quality on a monthly basis and our east
to west access is months starting in January and ending in December. So as you can see, we see very low
production in December, January and February because we are basically assuming that those arrays are going
to be covered in snow and it not worthwhile for anybody to get out there and shovel these rooftops. So basically
we just model out that production and how we get to that modelling is using some industry standards software;
it’s not our own guessing. It’s a program called Helioscope which is vetted by both the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory and a lot of financial institutions that invest in these projects. We are able to provide really
accurate production data by utilizing existing weather data from this area. | think our ticket is in the Nashua
Airport for this specific site; so very detailed, historical weather data over 30 years in town. Then we look ok
here’s our system, here’s the pitch of the panels, the orientation of the building to provide a really accurate idea
of what we can expect for power generation.
