The transcription of the video is below.

Chris Masys’ Entry into the Solar Industry & REC’s Early Days

Kerim: Hi, everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. Today, I’m here with Chris Masys of REC Group. Chris has been one of those solar veterans who has seen some of the earliest key players in the industry, and that being REC with these various different entities since the mid-2000s.

I’m especially excited to talk about REC today because not only are they making some impressive moves to come back into some sectors of the industry that they have kind of left in the last several years, but we’re also going to talk about the very early beginnings of the industry and talk about how everything evolved and where things are going.

So, Chris, with that, can we talk a little bit about how you found yourself in the solar industry, your background even before that, if you wish, and yeah, let’s talk a little bit about your background in the industry for the last close to 20 years, and before, if you wish. And then we’ll dive into what’s going on in the world of REC.

Chris: Actually, Kerim, thanks for having me and I agree. Looking back on my tenure in the industry it was actually a college friend of mine who brought me into the industry, and that would have been February 7, 2006, to be precise, that was working for the integrator named REC, which was originally started in the mid-1990s by Alumni of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, which is where I went to school as well.

I was a manufacturing engineer and really, at that point in time, having lived most of my life in California, we were faced with two key crises, which at that point was a water crisis and an energy crisis. That was back in the days of the rolling brownouts and blackouts across the California IOUs.

And it seems like at that point in time, the water crisis didn’t really have a set of solutions that was commercializable. But certainly, the deployment of solar PV would help with the energy crisis.

So that was really the genesis of my entry into the industry, where I cut my teeth was surveying rooftops and sitting at the kitchen table at that. In those days, we were actually bringing folding ladders in our sales vehicles, climbing up on rooftops, measuring it, and doing the old full metric measurements. It was a great way to really understand the front lines of the industry.

Since then, we sort of moved into sales management and biz dev rules within that organization. There was a tie-up between the parent company of REC Solar, Inc. the integrator and the global manufacturer of solar materials called REC Group, which ironically, had started in the mid-1990s as well, but in Norway rather than California.

There was a period of time from 2008 for several years, where the organizations were aligned with the stakeholding. That stakeholding was –

Kerim: Are these founders? Were the founders the same, or affiliates of each other, or were they overlapped? And the name, was it just a coincidence that they had the same name?

Chris: It’s a great question, Kerim. The name was a coincidence. At that point in time, I would say, the best recognition of the acronym REC was actually renewable energy credit. At that point in time, they were a very targeted kind of program.

Kerim: That’s right, RECs and SRECs. Yeah.

Chris: That’s right, that’s right. So the solar carve-out would be an SREC. Just a renewable energy credit, in general, would be a REC. That’s usually of lower value than an SREC because wind power at that point in time was much cheaper. Things have changed quite a bit since then.

So there was no affiliation between the founders. REC group stands for Renewable Energy Corporation. There was essentially no collaboration, not even really a knowledge of each other at the time.

Kerim: And this is a Norwegian corporation we’re talking about, which today’s REC Group is also, or your organization is also affiliated with, correct?

Chris: That’s right. 

REC’s Global Journey: History, Expansion, Major Milestones, Recent Acquisition, and Strategic Shifts

So originally REC Group was a privately-held company in Norway. It went public in the early 2000s under the ticker symbol REC.OL, which is simply the Oslo Stock Exchange. We’ve gone through a couple of iterations since then. We had a corporate owner based out of Hong Kong for several years. 

Most recently, a corporate owner called Reliance Industries Limited of India, which is one of the largest corporations in India is really going to supercharge our growth, so of course, we’ve had to remain nimble. We’ve had to adjust with the industry as conditions changed. It feels different almost every single year, which is what keeps us excited.

Kerim: Okay. But going back to your history with the REC, the integrator, which is a totally separate company that started in California or the US and that was not associated with REC Group, did they become associated with each other? And how did you end up from REC the integrator and now for the last 12 years, looking at your LinkedIn, at REC Group, the one that we’re talking about today?

Chris: That’s right. So the linkage between the organizations has everything to do with my own personal career trajectory, which is to illustrate, REC, the integrator at this point is somewhat a name of the past. There is a Synonai EPC division that lives on today in a different form.

But at one point in time, as recently as 2009, REC, the integrator was the number one residential installer in the country. When we say in the country, that was probably seven or eight key markets. They’re very different than today.

Kerim: I remember that very well because right around then is when we started CivicSolar, my old distribution company, that I co-founded. And I remember you guys being one of the top integrators in California, one of the bigger names in residential solar and small commercial, too, probably, right?

Chris: That’s right. So the small commercial units was deploying PV on top of Costcos and Ikeas, having significant success in that early phase, which is, say, mid to late 2000s in that segment, even up to small utility, not the very large projects, and residential was sort of the bread and butter that kept the machine running on a month to month basis, being portfolio-ed by nature, allowing us to keep the branch locations open and the crews utilized, but that company was high enough profile at the time that it drew the attention of REC Group, which was a well-known European name, looking to enter the U.S. market as an investment in the future, as an emerging market, and really not understanding what made the U.S. market tick.

Kerim: Right.

Chris: If you imagine, from the vantage point of a European at the time, who was used to a very simplistic feed-in tariff. This is really in Germany, what grew the substantial growth in the early 2000s, was the feed-in tariff, and simply the revenue side was guaranteed. And if you could build a system, interconnect, everything else worked out, and it’s very easy to compute the financial return.

In the US, it was very different. We had very few of those feed-in tariffs. We’re mainly a competitive-based system where, whether wholesale or on the retail side, you’re competing but it’s very different from this region to that region.

So not only do you have different climate and solution resources, you have very different retail costs of power, you have different interconnection guidelines, all these sorts of things, and it was the Wild West, it still is, and the European companies at that point in time, basically threw up their hands and said, “We don’t know how to approach this market. We’re going to approach through acquisition.” 

So MNA was the approach, and this is public information that REC Group took a 20% stake holding in mainstream energy, which was the parent company of REC, the integrator in 2008. This was April 2008, and that agreement was written with an option to go to 100% full acquisition within the space of less than three years that at that point in time, in 2008, everyone thought that was the way to go.

What REC Group learned along the way is you have to be very careful with the vertical integration as a manufacturer, if you also expect for other participants in the market to purchase your product because then those folks feel like well, maybe they’re disadvantaged in allocation or in pricing, or they just don’t want to share confidential information. Makes perfect sense.

So that’s, in conjunction with narrowing margins in the industry, made REC Group pull back from that minority stake holding so that stakeholding –

Kerim: For a little while, they considered they could be like Sun Power potentially, although Sun Power did never have their installation group kind of like Sunrun did, I guess, maybe. And then they decided not to go that way.

Chris: Sun Power ran in-house installations in the larger projects, so on the C&I segment and then the utility which, of course, were the first ones to exit out of.

Kerim: Sure. Yeah.

Chris: But in residential, what I call virtual vertical integration was their strategy there, which is basically a tightly controlled dealer network, but really with everything branded as Sun Power to the public. So yes, this was one of the contemplations is, is that the right answer? Was that the right answer for REC?

Chris: And the answer that played out over a few years of real industry experience was, no, that was not the right choice. That REC would rather focus – and this is also in a time period in the early 2010s where there was increasingly stiff Chinese competition.

Kerim: Yeah.

Chris: So the scale of the Chinese factories was growing. Their cost structure was quite low. 

REC Group’s Manufacturing Innovations

This is where REC decided to globalize into Southeast Asia with the factory in Singapore, which was in essence, a gold-plated (figuratively), not literally, fully-automated, gigawatt-scale facility, where solar grade polysilicon would go on one side and finish modules out the other. That really didn’t exist in 2009 anywhere else. And of course, today’s numbers dwarf that.

Kerim: Now, is this that facility? I’m pulling up your presentation here. Is this the facility you’re talking about in Singapore?

Chris: That’s right. That is the facility in Tuas, Singapore. This is the far west part of Singapore, for folks that have been there. This is one of the few places in the world, where they’re actually making new land. So they’re dredging sand off the shores of Malaysia to the north.

And our factory used to be, when I visited there in 2010, across the street from the water, now there’s an entire additional row of factories, and likely more to come, a very fascinating environment. 

Kerim: Well, kind of like the Mission Bay of San Diego, I guess. I think that’s manmade, too. Shall I keep going on these slides a little bit to see what else we can talk about now, the REC Group? Or is this a good time to transition from REC the integrator? Or is there more you want to share about that history of yours with the integrator? And then I guess, I think you had another company that you worked for between REC the integrator and the current REC, the manufacturer.

Chris: Thanks for that, Kerim. And I think the way to connect those dots is the REC the integrator, what happened to that name? What happened in the organization? The residential business unit was acquired by Sunrun, became what’s known as Sunrun Installation Services. Still exists today. That is, Sunrun’s direct installations rather than through their partners.

There was also a sister company which was David Katz’s old distributor, AAE Solar. So that was part of the mainstream energy companies. That got also acquired by Sunrun. And just recently was –

Kerim: Divested.

Chris: Those were divested. Yes, so they’re shutting down that business, but for a period of time, and this is sort of my personal transition from REC the integrator to REC Group is that REC Group immediately after that stakehold in 2008 was relatively thinly resourced.

Kerim: Right.

Chris: And by the time that REC Group really wanted to ramp up their efforts beyond that vertical integration, that was about 2010, when they approached me to, in essence, be on loan to REC Group.

So technically, I was still on the mainstream energy payroll and paid through the most similar organization, which was AAE, and this was for a period of about 18 months. It ended up being a bit convoluted with the different organizations involved, and REC Group pulled everything completely internally at the beginning of 2012.

So I was a personal participant in all those activities. I was the very first outside sales rep for REC Group with my territory being everything. So yes, flying down to Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean, up to Canada, up to the East Coast, all of those things.

Kerim: Okay.

Chris: And of course –

Kerim: So you are, in a way, the REC Group historian right now, after 12 years of being there, we can say.

Chris: Yes. There’s just a few of us that are in that. George Mcclellan, who you’ve spoken with before is also in that boat, Kristin McRitchie.

Kerim: Got it. So today, we said we would talk a little bit about these recent moves of REC, I guess starting, maybe this is the slide to share again. Well, I guess, I know in the last several years you guys have been solely focused on the resi sector in the U.S. market, but maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the big milestones that happened in the 2010s and then how REC’s position is today, globally and in the US. And then, maybe talk a little bit about like what is to come.

Chris: Absolutely. And there’s an important milestone to call out, just to avoid brand confusion within this, which is I like to refer to REC today as really on version 3.0 and we’re not going to go line by line over every bullet point there. This chronology is fascinating. It’s also available on our website, recgroup.com.

But version 1.0 was basically a small but quickly growing renewable energy materials manufacturer from Europe, with, for example, the largest customer of REC wafers for quite a period of time was the original German Q Cells, and then vertically integrated from wafers down into cells, to REC selling both of those in the marketplace and a lot of our original wafers and sales went into Japanese products that were branded Sharp and Mitsubishi Electric, but REC realized that as a shortcoming that very good in the upstream doesn’t necessarily create any market recognition in the downstream because the end-of-product, the module, is branded something else.

So that really created the catalyst for version 2.0 of the company, which is “Okay, we want to be a major manufacturer, not just of solar-grade polysilicon ingots, cells, wafers, but also of the module product.”

Kerim: Yeah.

Chris: And in that version 2.0 is where REC globalized to Singapore. That factory was built in 2009 and commissioned in early 2010. This is still back in the day when a non-PERC multicrystalline product dominated the marketplace and certainly where REC had a depth of experience.

REC Group’s Current Market Focus and Products

Okay, so our topic today is what’s happening in the U.S. market, what’s changing in REC’s current position and products?

So maybe with that, I should go back to the presentation. Now I guess we can talk a little bit about the products. And for the viewers’ benefit, we’ve recently done another solar conversation where we talked about REC and REC’s HJT technology. So we’re not going to dive too deep into the details of the technology. But maybe we can talk a little bit about the recent market focus change in REC’s U.S. position and also the products that are relevant to that.

Chris: That’s right, I think, rewinding one slide to where there’s a 3-module side by side. This is a nice visual tool to explain because in essence, we are rediversifying our efforts to approach what we call the three major market segments. So the way that REC is segmented, this I think, is similar to others, which is, there’s a residential market segment with its own key requirements, and dominant buying motives. There is a non-resi DG segment. So you know, the term commercial and industrial, C&I to me is too narrow. There are lots of other applications within there, but certainly on the customer side, the meter. And then there’s utility, which is wholesale power.

And historically, REC since it’s US entry has targeted all three of those and then certainly diversified across all of them with different products, although in the very beginning, large DG and residential, it was quite common to use a 60-cell product. Of course, they’re smaller. Those were M2 cell size. You would simply have a 1,000-volt bill of materials as opposed to a 600. You could use the same thing in those. 

It’s just been in recent years, really, since the advent of REC’S heterojunction products that the organization has doubled down on residential A) Because as we first explored just with 600 megawatts of annualized capacity, then added another 400 to 500, that scale really is dwarfed by say, the demands of the utility segment, or even some of these larger DG projects, are upwards of multiple megawatts.

And it just made sense for us to roll out that heterojunction product and get some fast learning and product redesign opportunities. We’re already on the third to fourth revision of the design of our HJT products, and moved it to a larger wafer size, basically increasing the competitiveness of this fundamentally high-performing reliable technology.

That piece has always been there. But what is the right form factor? What is the right packaging that the industry is looking for? So that’s really been solely residential for the last three years, but REC’s expertise with the prior products. So we followed a similar trajectory to other manufacturers which was all p-type multicrystalline. Then the addition of PERC technology to that. Then p-type mono, p-type mono PERC, n-type TOPCon, we followed all of those and have really been in a search for years. 

We know that we’re not as large as some of the big Chinese, so we simply look to exert our R&D and quality manufacturing advantages on the product design side as well as on the commercial side, with sales and sales support.

And it is time now that we are able to significantly increase our capacity, that we can readdress the non-residential segment, the utility segment. Some of this will be with a product that will come from the India facility, when that’s online, which should be towards the end of this year into next year.

But in our existing Singapore facility, we are allocating some of our production space to a large DG-focused product. This is a 60-cell form factor but on a G12 wafer. So this is something that gets you around 630 watts. It is a monofacial rather than a bifacial design, because this factory was set up originally and still, only to handle glass on the front side, and the equipment’s handling is for a flexible polymer backsheet.

And REC has learned through experience, it’s our feeling that the optimal way to produce a bifacial product is a dual glass and then you also change a bit of your design, which is in the search for reducing cell to module losses, so maximum module efficiency, if in a monofacial product, you would have things like potentially support bars and junction boxes sitting off at the back of the cells, because in a monofacial application, that doesn’t matter. 

If you’re going to a bifacial application, you don’t want to shave the back of the cell. So then you’re expanding the module footprint. You’re putting the J boxes in an area where there’s not a cell on the other side of it. So you’re basically losing module efficiency, at least from the front side, but then recouping it from the bifacial performance gain. So those will be features of the upcoming bifacial products. 

But there’s still a lot of market opportunity for a high performing 630 Watt module monofacial, with an excellent temperature coefficient, very low degradation rate, and these are things that our customers and our distribution partners are very excited to be able to source from REC, given that it’s been about three to four years since something similar has existed.

Introducing the Alpha Pro M: Unveiling Production, Efficiency, and Global Capacity

Kerim: So we’re now talking mostly about this Alpha Pro M product, right? Is that what you just described?

Chris: That’s correct. So this month will mark the beginning of production. It’s basically an expanded footprint of the one that you see on the left of the screen. So Pure-RX was intended as sort of a dual purpose. It’s sort of on the larger side for a residential module. A majority of these are being produced right now at 460 watts but again, a very high module efficiency. It is a black and black format, because the difficulty in maintaining the proper SKUs, if you have a white backsheet and a black backsheet version, that’s going here, it’s very difficult.

So this is a black-on-black product that’s again, at that 460 Watt range and a 1,000 volt, the bill of material can be used in either residential or in large DG, as we move towards the larger DG projects, some ground mounts, we’re going to be looking at that Pro M, which is going into production this month and should have the first U.S. deliveries in September.

Kerim: And so just to get a sense of, I mean, we talked about a lot of different numbers in terms of REC’s current production and future production, the 5 Gigawatt, the future 20-gigawatt facility in Singapore and another one in India, can you give us a sense of like what the production is today, or maybe was last year? And what can we expect at the end of this year? Is it doubling, or has it grown by 30%, 50%? And then what percent of the demand is in the US right now? Or your production is going into the U.S. market and elsewhere, can we talk a little bit about these numbers? And which product line, too, perhaps?

Chris: We can, we can. So at this point in time, the Singapore facility has a total production capacity annually of somewhere in the 1.5 to 2 gigawatt range depending on what’s being produced. We have deliberately moved to end-of-life the older products so REC no longer today produces a p-type mono PERC. We’ve also end-of-life our TOPCon products just a couple of months ago. We are 100% invested in heterojunction. And so again, sub 2 gigawatts coming out of Singapore with the new factory build in India, which will come online in 5 gigawatt tranches, starting at the end of this year. That’s what will contribute to REC’s production capabilities going forward.

So say, in a year’s time, the aggregate capacity is something like 7 gigawatts. Add another 5, 13, we will be north of 20 gigawatts in the 3 to 4-year timeframe. The Singapore facility has been a really good place for us to produce a consistently high-quality product, and of course, does not have the cost structure that you see in China, but in India, we’ll be able to get very close to that.

Kerim: Got it. So most of that growth is going to come from India. And Singapore is going to continue, I guess, as is, is the current plan.

Chris: At the current, say 1 to 2 gigawatt range, we can find global markets where the Singapore-produced product makes a ton of sense, and it will continue to live on as an R&D hub. It’s really been our very talented team there that’s enabled the significant success and manufacturing and learning with heterojunction, and we don’t want to give that up.

Kerim: And so, yeah. The Singapore market makes sense to continue producing premium products, I guess.

Focus on the U.S. Market

Chris: That’s right. And you would ask also about how important is the US to us? And in recent years the allocation of REC’s total production to the U.S. market has been in excess of 50%, at some points, upwards of 60% or 70%. So the US is very important to REC, and we sort of arrived at this whole listing of factors where the industry is interested in forward-looking technology as long as it can still be reliable.

Module efficiency is important as well as these other characteristics of temperature coefficient and the degradation that really contributes to boosting the net present value of projects, and the US tends to be among the world’s most sophisticated markets.

I think because of our complicated tax benefits, there’s been structured finance where you have counterparties, and multiple counterparties involved in large deals. We’ve got tax equity, we got long-term debt. You’ve got independent engineers sitting on both sides, and it’s really driven a focus on the attributes where REC shines, not to mention, being domiciled in a friendly nation and this increasing focus on sustainability and CSR initiatives which is not just stemming from the Forced Labor Act and with a concern around UFLPA enforcement, but “Oh, when we’re working with a certain company and basically supporting with our dollars their value chain, and what they are doing in their facilities and with their people, are these things that we can really stand behind or not as the right thing to do?”

Fortunately, for REC, these things have always been important to us. For 25 years we haven’t had to change anything. We just disclosed more information, but I think we’re at a happy point where the industry, certainly do we need a cost- competitive, high-performing product? Yes. But is it worth sacrificing everything just to get a low price? Probably not.

Kerim: Got it. That’s a great summary of REC’s, not only history, and also positioning and value points in the market. Thanks a lot for all this insight, Chris.

I have your slides here, which we can go back to. Obviously, one of the things you say is that the best warranty is the one you never have to call, and I guess that speaks to the quality message of REC.

But are there any things that we want to highlight in terms of the brand and the topics we talked about as I just skimmed through these remaining slides?

Quality and Warranty Claims

Kerim: I’m going back to this next slide where you’re talking about the max, the annual degradation going down to point 0.25%, which is quite low.

When I was developing solar farms about a dozen years ago, this number was closer to half a percent, if not more, for the first few years. And being at 92% and year 25 is huge, huge improvement. But what’s also really interesting is it would be really cool to have these warranty claims, and defect percentage rates because ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. And we talked about this with George McClellan in the other conversation that we did about REC’s HJT and a couple of other solar conversations. We talked about this, where really the value of the solar system is this production over time, and the fact that now degradation is at half of what it used to be, the annual degradation is a big change, too.

But you know, that 100 times more defect rate, that that can be 1% of the asset value in certain horrendous cases in the industry on even a repeating annual basis in certain situations. So to be able to understand the cost of that and analyze that and maybe having some more public reports, people talking about that, doing comparisons between different brands sounds like would definitely benefit REC’s position in the market, having been one of the premier high-quality European-originated panels.

Chris: That’s right. That also begs the question tactically of how easy is a warranty claims process to work with? If this is actually a reality in our industry, are you on the phone with someone in your own time zone, in your own country? Is this something international? How cumbersome is that to work with?

And for REC, it’s been very easy resourcing to make that simple for our customers to deal with because we simply just do not have that many claims to work with. If there was an order of magnitude more, you can imagine the size of the organization and then shipping materials around that’d be required to do that.

Kerim: Got it. Okay, anything else we want to touch on? Maybe the projects, talk a little bit about the reference projects. Or anything else?

Project References and Case Studies

Chris: Absolutely, I think, just paging through a few of these. Again, just because our industry changes so quickly that it’s easy for us to get amnesia about the past because something that happened two years ago was an eternity in the solar world.

But REC does have a very strong track record of project supply into these spaces, and if we look at the first slide beyond this, this is, of course, not detailing all of them, but just ones that have the interesting story.

There was a portfolio with a developer called Recurrent Energy, that was in total about 350 megawatts. One of those was the largest individual utility project that REC has supplied globally, which was 257 megawatts. That was in California Central Valley. This is your typical non-recourse, financed utility off-taker. This public information ended up being majority-owned by Southern Company after COD, but the fascinating aspect there is that Recurrent Energy was an independent developer at that time.

They’re, of course, now owned by Canadian Solar, who’s one of our competitors, and that transaction happened between when we contracted for supply and when we supplied the material. So by the time we supplied those projects, they were actually owned by one of our competitors, which is fine. We’re all friends, that’s great. We’re all doing different things. But that hadn’t happened to me personally before.

But that decision was made in 2015 because REC was a relative safe harbor in the supply landscape, but that was in the wake of the second AD/CVD case, which completely upended the supply outlook for solar modules imported similar to what we’re seeing today, and REC was in a position with Singapore production, where we could offer certainty. That was fantastic.

The Georgia Power military-based portfolio, those were all of a similar DNA, which is, those were a U.S. Government entity PPA off-takers, with the actual solar asset being owned by Georgia Power, which is a Southern Company utility and that project supply spanned in time from 2016 all the way to 2020.

The final one in 2020 was Robins Air Force Base, which is known as the “largest industrial complex” in the whole State of Georgia. It’s like a small city in and of itself. That was 175 megawatts, and those procurements were driven by American Act, but was able to be exempted by the contracting officer by TAA (the Trade Agreements Act) so Singapore, of course, having a closed treaty relationship with the US, that was underpinned by the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, and it was an easy thumbs-up for them to give. 

You look at nations like Vietnam, China, etc. Those are countries that are not considered friendlies under the Trade Agreements Act list.

I also like the Oak Leaf portfolio. This was right around the rise of community solar projects, so mid-2010s until late-2010s, and this was in total 24-megawatt, but split across 2-megawatt sites that were flung all the way across the state with a major mobilization effort, for the EPC efforts for McCarthy, so to get the right materials in the right place at the right time, to keep those guys humming, was a major victory for our logistics team. That’s something that they’re very, very good at.

I think we can page, Kerim, through a couple of the following ones. The intent here is not to show every single project we’ve ever supplied, but simply to refresh the market’s knowledge and the industry’s knowledge that REC is back in the non-residential space. But this isn’t the first time. We’re very fluent with these deal structures, with the requirements that can be significantly different than resi.

The Costco and Ikea portfolios were similar, in the sense that those were both cash purchases of solar systems by those entities, and what was at the foremost, in the forefront of that decision-making process was a reputable product, from a reputable company, that had a degree of social responsibility because those things are very important to both Costco and Ikea internationally. They do not want a black eye from supporting the wrong things.

So these were on, not just the big box retail stores, but also distribution centers, and that’s a phenomenal vertical for a period of time. And then, of course, the Veterans Administration portfolio was similar to the Georgia Power projects in the sense that that was a Buy American Act procurement, but it was exempted by TAA, and in total, I mean, these were ground mounts and in single-axis trackers. These were carports. These were roof mounts. Every type of inflation you can imagine flung across the entire country, and that was a really nice portfolio to have under our belt.

Kerim: Nice.

Chris: These individual ones, again, just to call out some highlights. I like Tranquility as an individual. This is one of the recurrent projects we had talked about, but 258 megawatts, that’s a lot of solar panels covering a lot of area and with a complicated enough deal structure with the commercial and tactical logistic elements that I was personally maintaining a Gantt chart, month by month of everything that was needed through a 9-month period. And it ended up performing flawlessly. So that was fantastic.

The Rio Tinto Stadium is in Utah. That is a professional soccer stadium. That’s an open, not an enclosed stadium. So if you want a large PV system on an open stadium, there’s not really much roof area. This is very, very small proportion roof-mounted and the majority is carport-structured, which is great, of course, for speeding vehicles when it’s hot, covering from rain, and then Utah, you also have snow, protecting vehicles from snow.

This is from the early days. Internationally, we’ve got Germany. We’ve got other parts of the world, and I think that last one is a nice way to tie up because these are recent years in Europe.

But specifically, the outlying ones are on the left and the right. The one on the left is a car wash building in the Netherlands, and there wasn’t much available roof space, if you look at that. So between the other roof obstacles and the parapet walls, they really needed maximum power density, but also maximum energy yield, that they needed to produce the most kilowatt hours from that rooftop, and they got that with an REC heterojunction product. So the power was actually the predecessor of the RX. This was a 40-cell g. 12. These modules are not very large. Those are around 420 Watts, but they were able to get almost 300 kw on that roof, which met their design considerations.

Then also in the Netherlands on the far right, this was an HJT product that was going on an agricultural application. There was a lot of ag applications in the very early days in Germany, and then in the US, we’ve seen sort of an early rush towards that in California, specifically. But now, as other states come online with viable incentive interconnection programs, agriculture is just a tremendous vertical and that spans, of course, a lot of different operations. It could be a growing operation where they’re predominantly pumping wells. It could be a nut drawing, it can be a processing operation, but agriculture is really a phenomenal application for PV.

Upcoming Products and Future Plans

Kerim: Got it. So quick question. Going back to your top three products that we display here. But we didn’t really talk about the upcoming product in 25. But going back to the Pro M product line, what do you think will be the sweet spot of project sizes for the new segments or for the new, I guess, segments of the market that you’ll be addressing with the Pro M product line?

Is it going to be like a 250 to 500 kw, or is it going to be a megawatt plus or whole thing, from all the way from 10 kw resi to a multi megawatt utility?

Chris: Great question. And again, speaking to just the variety of applications that we have once we get outside of residential, and they are nowhere near the same, if you have a carport structure versus a single access tracker versus a rooftop where you’re trying to go around a bunch of different obstructions, very different design considerations.

So what we’ve seen in terms of our customer network and the prospective interest in that product, it seems to have the best fits in projects that are under 750 kw, not assuming a bifacial performance gain and not using single access trackers simply because of the relationship of the power density of the product relative to its width, which dictates the torque tube that you need. 

So basically, we’re talking about 6 ground mounts. We’re talking about roof mounts. We’re talking about carports, anywhere from 100-kw all the way up to 750, although I have to say that a lot of these sub 200-kw installations they also really like the RX. That’s the 44-cell form factor, especially for some of these rooftops where I mean, it’s like you’re trying to stack these things and having a bigger building block doesn’t always help in having installation guys having to step over things on the roof or they’re holding this. That’s why we say that the RX product at the 460-watt or so power level is really a good dual-purpose module. Go above there, then we have the Pro M.

Kerim: Well, thank you very much for all this information and insight you shared with us, Chris. As we come to the end, I guess, I wonder, do we want to say anything else about maybe a little bit about what’s coming up in 2025?  Are you able to share anything about upcoming products, and what to expect in the near future? Or shall we call this a conversation?

Chris: No, no. Let’s plant a couple of teasers of things that we know will absolutely be true, which is, that the product coming out of the new India facility will be the result of over 25 years of REC’s vertically ingrained manufacturing experience. So it will be high reliability, high performing. It will have a very competitive cost structure globally, which I think the industry has been waiting for this, which you know, who can mount opposition to Big China?

And the product that will be out of the gates first, that will be most exciting for the large project segment, and for usage also on single-axis trackers would be the dual-glass bifacial in a 66-cell form factor on the larger G 12 wafers. That’d be something that would give you –

Kerim: This is what we’re seeing here on the right?

Chris: That’s over 700 watts just on the front side rating. This will have a module level bifaciality, approaching 90%, meaning flash front, flash to the back, is the ratio of those two.

So heterojunction is the highest inherent bifaciality of any crystal and silicon PV cell. So we’re fully going to leverage those benefits. That’s something that we’re very excited about. Haven’t been cleared yet, to quote that. And of course, customers, I think, would want for the unit to be assembly lines to be running before that happens. So that’s going to be happening towards the end of this year. We’ve got pre-production units with basically the same bill of materials, the same design that have already gone into PVEL’s PVQ testing. So we’ll have the extended reliability testing because that can take 7 to 9 months to complete, to get the final engineering report, to have well-characterized performance and reliability data. That’s again, something that could be expected in the U.S. market by about the middle of next year.

And at this point in time, it seems very safe to have a manufacturing location of cells and modules in India. I specifically say cells because the scoping of these AD/CVD cases is crystalline silicon cells, whether or not made into modules.

So if you’ve got an Indian-made module, with a Southeast Asian or Chinese-built cell, you’re going to trigger those tariffs, but with an Indian-built cell and module, at this point, none of the investigations are interested in that. This would be a product that is not subject to AD/CVD and also from a sustainability and a quality standpoint single site auditable. And of course, it will not be fully, vertically integrated from day one. But the ability to go to a single site and understand the same quality management systems that are employed across the entire value chain, and in one location not transported around the globe, this is something that is really cutting edge in this industry, and even 2024 has not been seen yet.

Kerim: Great. And that is all coming online in the 2025 timeframe like you said, right?

Chris: Current expectations for the cell and module facilities that the first tranche of 5 gigawatts will be up and running by the end of ‘24. So basically assume for a reasonable ramp up, debottlenecking, and transit that gets you probably to the mid of 2025.

Kerim: And the 1.5 gigawatt is single per facility that’s up and running right now, and has been for a while. Is that mostly supplying the U.S. resi market right now? Or are there also some European in there, and other parts of the world?

And what do you think will be the 5 gigawatt India capacity like? Where will most of that go? Is it mostly the US, or Europe and/or other places in the world?

Chris: Great question. So the Singapore facility at this point is majority residential product, and then some of the Pro. M. and I’d say 60% to 70% allocated to the U.S. market.

We still ship product to Europe. That’s been our historical, strongest market. That’s where REC started. We have activities in Japan through other parts of APAC and Australia. But the volumes, as far as a single market that we bring into the US dwarfs the others.

Kerim: And now probably a similar percentage breakdown with the Indian facility as well, I would –

Chris: It will depend, certainly. We are going to be deploying a lot of renewable capacity into their home markets in India.

Kerim: Okay.

Chris: But they will be exporting a decent amount as well, and because the US is already so important, that we already have the framework of distribution partners of the sales team, of all the commercial aspects required to effectively address the market in the US. I would expect for the US to get the lion’s share of India exports.

Kerim: Yeah. Got it. Well, this has been a great conversation, Chris. Thank you so much, and I hope to do another one soon, with the other REC team members talking about all the great things you bring to the market. Thank you.

Chris: Thank you very much for having me, Kerim, really appreciate it.