Special Bd. of Aldermen — 08/06/2019 Page 9
So it’s basically our job to figure out what the best end result is, taking all those factors into consideration which
is why we landed on these first kind of few buildings here to kind of strategically maximize both the financial and
environmental benefits to the City.
And just a few examples of pitch roof installations what we are more familiar with seeing in our community is the
flush mounted arrays on these pitched roofs. In the lower right you see a similar standing seam metal roof. It
will rise about 3 inches above the seam so plenty of room for airflow and a very straight forward installation.
Dartmouth College in the upper right also uses primarily standing seam roofs, we have done about 20. So solar
systems have 3 primary components; the solar panels which generate the electricity and DC power, the racking
which is our method of attachment to the building or the ground area and then the inverters. So the inverters
are kind of the work horses of this system. So the inverters take that DC power generated by the solar system
and convert that into usable AC electricity that then gets fed into that building’s electrical system.
So high-level overview of how it works is when those solar panels are generating electricity, the inverters input
that power at the same voltage that building typically would use. So in these cases we are talking about three
phase, 480 volt power. The building will use that solar energy first and any excess power that the building
needs that the panels are not generating will be pulled in from the utility just like it is normally. But as Dan
mentioned, there is also going to be times when the solar panels are generating more power than that building
is using at any given moment and in that case the excess goes out into the grid taking advantage of that net
metering regulation that the Public Utilities Commission has made law and providing credits to that utility
account.
The other really neat thing about the inverter technology and the systems that we have designed here is it gives
us also a very high level of visibility into each individual solar panel. So we are using something called Solar
Powered Module Level Electronics, but basically it provides two key benefits; safety primarily for first responders
in the event of an emergency and then data monitoring access. So what that means is that | am able to see
each individual solar panel in what we call a data monitoring portal. And | am able to make sure that that
individual panel is performing up to our expectations and meeting the warranty obligations as well as our
production estimates. That also provides a ton of opportunity to take that data, which there is a huge amount,
and utilize it in other initiatives in the town. We have had great success with other municipalities by integrating
some of that data that we are able to pull from the solar energy systems into local educational curriculum as well
as helping provide really hard output data to achieve any carbon off-set goals that the City has. So we are
going to be able to provide that.
The other benefit | mentioned is safety. Safety is a major thing that we think about all the time, right? So the
other advantage of these power level electronics is in the event of an emergency, we have one switch, you can
see some disconnects out there. These big gray boxes are all disconnects, one switch gets turned off in every
single solar panel within 30 seconds goes to 0 volt or less than 15 volts so effectively 0. So if there ever was an
incident on that roof where first responders needed to get up there to put out a fire or do anything else, we want
to make sure that they are protected and not working around live PC electricity and these designs take that into
account.
Just a rundown of the major components, we spoke about these, if you’d like to know more just a little more
detail on the two primary components, the solar panels and the inverters | do want to add a word on the
technology we use. It’s hard for me to add one word but long story short, we at ReVision Energy we take our
engineering and system designs extremely seriously. So we are New England based company, we live and
work in these communities. Every solar panel, every inverter is not manufactured equally. We focus exclusively
on what we call and what the industry calls Tier 1 Components. So Tier 1 means that we and our partners have
gone through some pretty strict quality vetting processes, not just on the manufacturing but also on the finance
ability and bankability of that particular company.
