Scaling Smarter: CPS’s Utility & ESS Solutions with Zhehan Yi

The transcription of the video is below.

Intro: Zhehan Yi & CPS, CPS’s US Market Strategy

Kerim: Hi, everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. I am here today with Zhehan Yi of CPS. As you might know, CPS is the leader in C&I three-phase inverters in the American market, and Zhehan is responsible for Utility & ESS product solutions at CPS, as the director of that division.

And today, we’re going to talk about CPS’s unique competitive position in the C&I market, their three-phase inverters and beyond, but before we do that, Zhehan, I’d like to talk a little bit about you, how you found yourself in this role at CPS. Maybe a little bit about your schooling, your background, as far as you want to go.

I know, like you, you are an implant in California like myself. We both were born in Asia or myself in Eurasia, and we ended up in California, working in the solar tech sector . 

Tell us a little bit about your background, and then we’ll dive into CPS and its unique offerings.  

Zhehan: Thanks, Kerim and hi, everyone. My name is Zhehan. Well, that’s a really good question, Kerim. Whereas growing up overseas and working here, in the renewable sector, just a little bit of background for myself. I actually went to school in Beijing, in China. I grew up in China. I finished college in Beijing before I came to the US to pursue my PhD degree. 

Kerim: Were you double E, electrical engineering?

Zhehan: Yes, I have been in the double E, electrical engineering ever since I joined the college. At that time, we really didn’t call it double E. We called it power systems. 

In China, we differ, I guess, electronics from power systems, both of them are electrical engineering, but electronics is more consumer electronics –

Kerim: power systems, yeah. 

Zhehan: Power systems, like more high-power transmissions and renewables, and polytronics, of course.  

Kerim: Very cool. And then you came to the US for your master’s degree and your PhD, or did you do the master’s in China? What was your area of focus when you did that? 

Zhehan: I came here for PhD and in the middle, after I finished my master’s class, I can apply for a master’s degree, but it’s the same program and five years in total. 

So my area of focus after I graduated from college and joined, the PhD has been solar and energy storage, production and control, mostly using polytronics techniques or at that time what we call neural networks or very early stage of AI to solve some of the production issues in solar and in energy storage as well as some optimization in control of those renewable resources in the grid. 

Kerim: How did you end up? You’ve obviously had other roles, and you’ve been in this specific field for probably a decade plus, I’m assuming, a decade or maybe two. Tell a little bit about that journey.

Zhehan: After I graduated, I actually joined a company in the Silicon Valley called GEIRI NA, which is a research lab working on renewable technologies and innovations for power systems and utility, mostly focused on renewables like solar and wind power, energy storage microgrids. After that I joined Delta Electronics a couple of years before I joined CPS. 

From my college, I have been working on renewables in solar and it’s for a while.

Kerim: Great. Let’s talk a little bit about CPS and it as a major powerhouse in the power industry. You guys are essentially an Asian company, but with a sizable presence here in the US, and maybe you can give us a little bit of a background on CPS as a company, and then we can dive into the various different products that you want to highlight.

It might be good to pull up some of the slides we were going over before, as well. 

Zhehan: Cool. CPS or Chint Power System actually is a subsidiary of a bigger company called Chint Group. Chint Group is our parent company. It’s a public company in China. It’s focus area is broader. What we are doing here is more electrifications and communications. 

They have also a large business in power transformers and also PV modules like we have at Astronergy, our sister company. And also Noark is our sister company working on switchgears.

Chint Power Systems is the subsidiary of Chint Group, focused on power electronics, power supplies. We work on inverters for PV, and we work on energy storage systems. 

Kerim: Astronergy, I remember that brand from early 2010s. Was it still part of Chint back then, I wonder? Or was that an acquisition for Chint Group? We used to sell some of Astronergy panels in my old company as a distributor. 

Zhehan: I believe it has always been under Chint.

Kerim: Oh, wow. Impressive. Okay, great. Anyway, back to you. 

Zhehan: CPS America is the U.S. arm of Chint Power Systems. It is very localized. In the US, we have a large team over here focused on servicing our customers and our products in the US. We work mostly in three-phase string for C&Is and now utility projects. And we started to step into energy storage. Actually, we started energy storage back in, even before the pandemic.

We have installed C&I storage, maybe more than 20 of them in the US, and we kind of relaunched that sector after the pandemic in just the recent years. 

Chint Power Systems is not new to energy storage because overseas, we have probably shipped or installed more than 2 gigawatt hours of energy storage in other countries. 

It’s just for the US. We started to relaunch the energy storage. 

Kerim: The core product in the U.S. market that you guys entered with, if I remember correctly, was the inverters, of which you’ve probably sold many gigawatts. 

We were discussing the number. Is that around 10 gigawatts, did you say, of inverters deployed in the US, total today? 

Zhehan: Yes. I believe the total gigawatt that we deploy in the US right now is more than 10. 

Kerim: That is mostly C&I and utility-scale inverters.

Zhehan: All three-Phase String inverters. We’re very focused. Back in the time we had central inverters and we sell central inverters in other countries, but in the US we only focus on three-Phase String.

Utility PV Platform String Inverter Trends

Kerim: Now might be a good time to dive into the product overview of the solutions you go to market with in the U.S. market. I know you had some slides that you’d like to share. If you can pull them up, we can go through them. 

Zhehan: This is just an overview of CPS’s utility PV platform. A lot of our customers are very familiar with our C&I products especially the 50, 60 kilowatt that you see nowadays, all over the US on the carports. I see a lot of them even over the highway.

Kerim: I remember reading somewhere that you have had 20,000 such projects supported in the US, and most of that is with those 50 to 60 kilowatt products, I’m assuming. Is that a fair assumption? 

Zhehan: We have more than 20,000 projects that we know of. That may be more in the customer or distributor. They sell the inverter and install it somewhere that we may not know. It’s about right, more than 20,000 projects. Mostly in the early days are the C&I’s inverters, like the 50, 60, 36, 25, those 380 products.

Kerim: And obviously, now you are going up market into bigger project sizes, bigger C&I projects and utility-scale projects. So this is the utility PV platform we’re looking at.

Zhehan: Also, the history of the utility project in the US, mostly in the past and even nowadays it’s dominated by central inverters, but we’re seeing a lot more projects asking for string inverters, given the benefit that it can offer.

Also, the uptime, especially for the string inverters because replacing string inverters is easy. Just swap.

Kerim: And the whole system doesn’t go down when it’s down, right? 

Zhehan: You’re limited to that, maybe 350 kilowatt instead of the entire block, like 4 megawatt. Right?

Kerim: Exactly. Kind of like the microinverter effect in resi happening at utility-scale.

Zhehan: Similar to that assumption, but the other benefit is the serviceability, right? You don’t have to replace the entire block. Instead, you can just swap the inverter down, which we’re talking about maybe two-hour, three-hour labor.

In most of the cases, in large utility projects, customer or EPC or the O&M company would stock some of the spare units on site. They can use the spare unit to replace the failed one and send the failed one back afterwards. They can get it signed up first instead of having to wait, run RMA and inspection, everything, which can take weeks or months. It depends on the lead time of the parts, right? We’re talking about essential. A lot of benefits.

We’re seeing a lot of utility asking for string inverters, as well, and that’s why, I mean, we are powering that field, and we have good products to support projects like those.

Kerim: How new is that trend of moving from central inverters to more string inverters at utility-scale solar projects? Is that a thing of the last two, three years or more like four or five years or one year? What would you say?

Zhehan: Well, that depends on another very tricky question. 

Kerim: Which is? 

Zhehan: How do you define utility projects? 

Kerim: Yeah. Is it one megawatt or 5 megawatt or 10? 

Zhehan: We’ve seen a lot of community solar, right? Those ground- mounted, but still considered DG or C&I. Those projects are probably around 5 megawatts, which, those projects have been using string inverters for a long time, but if we’re talking about 100 megawatts, 200-megawatt projects, I think it’s maybe in the past decade or even closer, maybe five years.

Kerim: Got it. Makes sense.

Zhehan: Very interestingly, in Asian countries or in the Euro Countries, a lot of those utility projects are dominated by string already. US is kind of a unique place where most of the utility projects are still using central inverters. 

Kerim: Interesting. Got it. Okay. 

800V Utility PV Platform Overview

Zhehan: Maybe let me dive into just a little bit, back now, before that. This is an overview of our utility PV platform. At the top, you see we have these three inverters, 275, 350 kW. Both of those are 800-volt AC, and we do have a new inverter, what we call a 250-kW, 600 volts. This is 600 volts.

We do offer both in the US, and we have a whole series of accessories, what we call a total solution with the inverters. Nowadays, we’re seeing customers prefer a one-stop shopping for the solution.

So we provide both inverters as well as the low-voltage switchgear, including the breaker box, switch box. All of these are 800 volts. We also even offer medium voltage transformers in the US. It’s a whole solution that we can provide, from DC to AC, even up to the medium voltage.

Kerim: Is it now becoming more common to see this solution set in 100 megawatt plus size utility-scale projects? 

Zhehan: Yes, I would say so. 

Kerim: Got it. 

Zhehan: Projects are using central, it’s mostly like a central skid, right, like a 20-feet container or like a 20-feet skid that you drop to the side.

With a string inverter, it’s very similar. You also have a central skid, but it’s just a transformer. The inverter itself is mostly distributed across the field, serving, let’s say, like a conversion and also a combiner, converting DC to AC and run an AC home run instead of DC home run. 

We also have what we call AC PLC kits, which can provide communication for some larger projects instead of running RS-45 daisy-chain, which can be a very long run in utility projects. Customers can utilize our AC PLC kits. 

These use the AC cables to communicate with the inverter and operates the inverter to the SCADA. So the communication wire saving there is also a good consideration for other installers. We even provide a cluster mount.

If you look at this one here, it’s three inverters plus a breaker box, like a 875 layout for utility projects. We’re seeing this being installed along the driveway for the projects at the end of the checker tables for easier serviceability. All of these are facing one direction. A truck can pull in and then can service inverters and the breakers, in case.

Kerim: In my recent conversation with Anton, we talked about CPS’s approach to designing solutions for customers’ ease, and this is a good example of that, this cluster mount. 

Zhehan: Followed by that is just an example of our utility, power block or a building block. This is a 4.2 megawatt example, which is showing 15 275 inverters, 5 breaker boxes, 5 solution boxes, and a 4.2 medium phase voltage transformer skid. We provide the entire solution and provide certification for different parts of it. The system is tested and fully verified by CPS.

Kerim: This is a good block for community solar projects. It’s probably ideal for that size is what I’m assuming, but is it being used in other applications or use cases? 

Zhehan: Yeah, we have 100 megawatts involved using this system. 

Kerim: 25 times over? Yeah.

Zhehan: And in fact, for community solar, I’ve seen a lot of 5 megawatts block. For 5-megawatt, they usually don’t use a single 5-megawatt skid. They use two of the 2.5 instead.

We also have a different size of medium voltage transformer and that we offer 2.8. So two of the 2.8 will give you 5.6. You can use it as a 5-megawatt and with additional kVA overhead or MVA overhead in case of 0.95 power factor or Volt-VAr control is required by the utility then you can utilize that overhead. And the rest of the inverters and breaker boxes, switch boxes, the number you can just decrease that down, right? It’s very flexible. It’s all modular design. Either it’s a 4.2 or it’s a 2.8. It can be the same design, just different numbers of the equipment.

With the 350 it’s very similar. We unify the design for our solution. Later, if we have adding builders, we can do similar things.

One thing to bring up here is the 800-volt why we do the 800-volt breaker boxes and switch boxes is, around 2020, when we started to work on 800-volt PV inverters, we saw a lot of customers asking where they can find the 800-volt breakers or switch or fuses to work with our inverters, and we’re seeing the limitation in that. And usually what we have found is there was a long lead time for those items, and which slowed down the inverters, projects as well because when a customer buys an inverter, they need to know where to buy the rest of them to get a project up.

We decided, we can provide those. We can work on a total solution for you. And why not? Because we are the system provider. We know our inverter the best. Or even better for the switchgear companies.

We’re good at this so we provide a total solution from inverters, breaker box, switch box, to medium voltage transformer. 

Kerim: Makes sense. One question. Can customers buy these directly from you guys? Or do you go to market via distributors like Greentech, Renewables, and others? 

Zhehan: For utility, we only do direct purchasing. It’s all through CPS.

Kerim: Okay, for these larger products, it’s all direct. 

High-Power Inverter Technical Specifications

Zhehan: 350, is one of the highest power string inverters globally, and it’s a very high-powered density inverter. The dimension of the inverter is very similar to the 275, but the power has increased significantly, from 275 to 350. 

It features 15 MPPTs. Each 350 has 15 MPPTs in there, which is a lot. A central inverter, for example, like a 4.4 skid usually has maybe 4 MPPTs. 

If you have, let’s say, 15 MPPTs in even a smaller 350, if we’re talking about 4.2 megawatts, how many of them? Like 12 times 15 MPPTs available. That’s going to give you a lot of flexibility in generation.

Especially if your projects have the PV arrays or checkers facing different directions because of the terrain or, for example, if it’s a hilly area, you can utilize the MPPTs to give you more production. So that gives more flexibility and generation in projects.   

Kerim: Right. More optimization, almost like what happens in a microinverter again, but at a whole system scale. 

Zhehan: The design is fully compatible with a 210-millimeter bifacial PV module, which can go up to 700 watts per module, right? It has a really wide compatibility with different modules.

We have up to 40 amps per MPPT mixed operating power and 48 kilowatts per MPPT mixed operating power. It’s really huge. 

Kerim: Which bifacial PV modules are compatible? 

Zhehan: Most of the bifacial PV modules will be compatible. Here I’m listing the 210 millimeters because that’s one of the highest power modules now available on the market, but most of the bifacial PV modules, for example, those 500 watts or 600 watts up to 700 watts, most of them are compatible with our inverter.

We do have PID mitigation function built into the inverter. If a project is asking for that, some of the modules asking for a PID mitigation function to be able to get their warranty, our inverter does provide that function. We have what we call the reactive power at night or Q at Night function, which allows the inverter to give reactive power even with the sunlight.

At nighttime, if the utility is asking for reactive power, the inverter can provide that and make extra money out of that. 

Kerim: Remind me again, what does PID stand for? 

Zhehan: Potential Induced Degradation. 

Kerim: And the benefit of that feature is? 

Zhehan: To reduce that degradation or to eliminate the degradation. The module power can have more power over a long time because the degradation induced by that is limited by the inverter. The inverter will be able to make sure that the site will have more power compared to if you’re using inverter without that function.

Kerim: It helps provide a healthier power wavelength or I don’t know if it’s the frequency, to result in less degradation of the panels over time. 

Zhehan: It’s basically the degradation happens. Right? Because the nature of the PV module would induce or would have that, especially thin film would have that degradation. There are multiple ways to mitigate that or recover that.

Our inverter has integrated one of the most popular ways to do that. It’s essentially by lifting the PV negative and PV positive of the module side, the DC side. In that way, the PV module, I wouldn’t say last longer, but will have less loss due to that degradation.

Kerim: Thank you for that. 

Inverter Performance and Product Strategy

Zhehan: Just some quick comparisons of our inverters to the market offering. If you look at our 275 and 350, all around the design, we have a lot of different features and functions compared to our competitors, right? Even if you’re looking at this derating temperature, we offer a higher derating temperature than most of our competitors in the market. 

If we just take this as example, our 350 can still run as a 350 inverter at a temperature of 40, even 45. In the US, most of the large utility projects are built in the desert or in the southwest, where the temperature can go pretty high in the summer.

Kerim: When you say 40, 45, that’s Celsius. That’s over 104 Fahrenheit, right? 

Zhehan: 100 or 110. 

Kerim: 110, yeah. You guys essentially lose almost nothing at that level of heat. 

Zhehan: Unless it’s more than 45 degrees C. But compared to the market offering, right, if you’re talking about like 10%, even 10% more generation, at 40- or 45-degree C, you’re generating more than 10% of the power.

That’s not only related to power cost, right? That means that you can size your system with our inverter, with less inverter. For example, if you’re using a 350 with us and 350 with others, if we can power, more than 10%, compared to the other one, that means you can use less, 10% less equipment. That’s 10% less labor probably, right? And later the O&M costs related to it. 

Kerim: With the others, you would have to oversize the panels and then with racks and wires, everything goes with that, and labor.

Zhehan: It’s a whole system. It’s not only the inverter saving.

Kerim: That adds up, 10% more investment. 

Zhehan: And that’s a lot for a utility project because the size is very sizable for it. 

Kerim: That changes your ROI from 10% to 12% or 11%. That’s a big difference.

Zhehan: For  the 250, 600-volt, this is our new inverter. We’ve had it available since this year, and it’s a little bit different design. It’s a single stage. This is a single MPPT inverter at 600 volts. It’s probably the largest power at 600 volts, I mean, in terms of string inverter now available in the US. I’m showing here two very interesting pictures. We can put this 250, 600-volt inverter on an integrated skid like this, together with a switchboard and a medium voltage transformer. This is kind of like a virtual central design which can combine the benefits of string and in a central layout.

For some projects, the customer would prefer this layout because some of the projects they are using, let’s say, chambas or BLA harnesses and even the conventional DC combiners to allow the EPC to pull the larger cables from the VBO directly to the skid instead of having to run multiple or a large number of string cables. It saves a lot in the cabling and it’s also easier for installation because it’s from the inverter to the transformer it’s all pre-wired and pre-installed. 

Kerim: You just drop that skid in and that’s it? What’s the size? Is that a – 

Zhehan: DC and AC and that’s it. 

Kerim: 40-foot? 

Zhehan: This is about 37, this example that we’re using here. It’s a 3 megawatt block. 

Zhehan: We have a life-size of this example in our Dallas headquarters. We showed this in our innovation week this year. Got a good feedback on that and good interest in this.

Kerim: Really simple ideas implemented well, makes a huge difference from a customer satisfaction and ease of use. It sounds like you guys are doing a good job at that. 

Zhehan: The most important is customer feedback, right? We’re here. We’ve been doing projects for years, and we hear the customer’s voice. Why did you guys do this? And also, we have our own team, keeping us up in the market, for the technology that we are selling or that we’re working on to make sure we are competitive enough over time. 

We have a product strategy team, looking at really 5 years, 10 years out to see what’s going on and what we can do.

This is just a start. We have more exciting projects and products coming. 

CPS Battery Storage Solutions Overview

Our ESS platform, here comes energy storage. Really, you can’t separate PV from energy storage because nowadays a lot of projects have both of them co-located even from residential, right? Now you have residential PV and energy storage, C&I and utility. A lot of different use cases and applications for both of them. 

Kerim: Do you guys go down to the resi level as well in the U.S. market? 

Zhehan: We don’t, but we do have single-phase products, which typically are being used in smaller C&I buildings.

We have the 5-megawatt-hour power block together with a 2.0 or 2.4 string, inverter skid. So this is a pair of products, and we have C&I too. This is an old generation 125279 or 250558. The new generation is what we call a Gonzo energy storage. It’s an all-in-one design. We have 62.5 or 125 kilowatt for 261 kilowatt hour, so we have two-hour and four-hour options for it.

Kerim: And then the single phase size is what generally? 

Zhehan: We have from 7.6 to 12 kilowatts for hybrid. 

Kerim: Got it. 

Zhehan: We offer the battery, as well. The battery is stackable. A rack can give you like 20-kilowatt hour.

Kerim: You guys have basically like approximately a quarter megawatt hour, half a megawatt hour, and then 4 and 5 megawatt hour blocks.

Zhehan: Covering different projects, right? From small business buildings and small C&I to larger C&I and even larger utility. We have all these products to cover different sizes of projects. 

This utility ESS, we have, actually CPS was one of the earliest to make a 5 megawatt hour battery in a 20-feet container using a 314 Ah battery cells. For utility battery cells in the past, it was mostly dominated by 280 Ah and 314 is kind of the new norm in these products. We were the first to integrate that into our products.

This one, we provide both the battery and the PCS. The PCS is again, a skid with inverters on top of it and also a medium voltage transformer included. We have a switchgear underneath in the compartments over here.

It’s all around the design for utility projects. Some of the larger C&Is are designing their projects with this. For example, large buildings or stadiums can usually utilize containerized batteries, as well. It’s all designed by CPS. Again, we have 2-hour and 4-hour options, very modular designs similar to our string inverters.

The PCS skid over here, if you look at the design, I don’t have a larger picture, but on the top here, there are actually 12 string inverters instead of an entire central inverter. Then each one is connected to one rack into the battery container. Each container can run independently. If one of these fails, the others can still run. Replacement will be pretty simple. You can just take one module out, and then just slide a new one in and connect the cables and that’s it. Its service is pretty simple and provide more uptime. Especially batteries, the uptime means a lot for projects.

We have 9544 for all different options here. The C&I, this is the Gonzo. This is 261 kilowatt hour, but we do offer two different options. It’s using the same enclosure, but the PCS size is different. We have 62.5 as well as 125 kilowatt. This gives you from 2-hour to 4-hour options, which is very common in the C&I buildings or applications. 

It’s an all-in-one design, so it’s pretty small. If you compare it to our last option, it’s a PCS cabinet plus a battery cabinet, but this one is just in one cabinet. It reduces the footprint by more than 50% for installation.

If a system or a project needs more of them, we can even parallel them in operation. 

Kerim: That cabinet, what does it have in it? The inverter, the battery? 

Zhehan: Yep. 

Kerim: And the comm device all in one, in 55 X 39 inch. Wow. If you needed like a 500 kilowatt-hour storage –

Zhehan: You just need two of them, two of this 125, right? It gives you 500. 

Kerim: By the way, the 62 and the 125 are the same size cabinets? 

Zhehan: Same enclosure.

Kerim: Same enclosure. Okay, so you need two of those to have 500 kilowatt-hours of battery. Wow.

Zhehan: Correct, correct.

Kerim: That is impressive.

Zhehan: That’s a lot. The energy density is very high in here. 

Kerim: Can you put that into the garage of a multi-family building? Just curious. Is that allowed? 

Zhehan: It depends on the local fire departments. It may or may not be allowed.

Kerim: Can you put it outside, and it would be protected from rain and everything else? 

Zhehan: Yeah, this is outdoor rated. 

Kerim: Outdoor rated. 

Zhehan: Most of the C&I is installed outside of the building. If you have multiple of them, you can do them side by side.

Kerim: I mean, that’s essentially 10 Tesla powerwalls in a four by three foot cabinet in terms of the bottom area, surface area. That is impressive, right? 

Zhehan: Yeah, if you’re talking about the power or the battery’s energy. 

Kerim: Oh no. It’s actually more than that, it’s 20. It’s 20 Tesla powerwalls, and the area it takes is probably, I would say three times more than a Tesla powerwall, but you have 20.

Zhehan: But it’s a different application. 

Kerim: It’s higher. Yeah, totally. 

Zhehan: This is more C&I. 

Energy Storage for EV Charging

Kerim: Right, but one area as we discussed Zhehan, that I’m close to is the multi-family segment of C&I. I think storage is going to be really important because a lot of buildings have parking spots, EVs, dozens of apartment units and then they put a single array for the community, how to flow all the electrons and store them between batteries and EVs and units and optimize all of that. 

That’s a whole other challenge in a multi-tenant environment, and a couple of these types of batteries in or near the garage, which communicate with the EV electrons that are stored in the EV and used at the tenants on demand, will be something in the next 5, 10 years. I have no doubt. 

Being able to store something separately outside of the EVs will be important too. This does it in a very efficient manner.

Zhehan: Actually,  that’s a very good application, and we’re seeing a lot more demands over that application in the past. Just in recent years, maybe starting last year, last two years, it’s a PV plus EV storage. It’s a very good application because with the EV getting more popular and EV chargers are being installed, right? EV chargers can take a lot of power and very high power, right, in a short period of time.

That usually requires the building to upgrade its transformer, right? If you want to install more EV chargers, your building is typically, unless it’s a new building, right, typically the service utilities transformer is not sufficient for you to support that many EVs.

Kerim: Right. 

Zhehan: There’s a limitation on that. And even we’re seeing car dealerships, they are selling EVs. They have to install the EV chargers, but the utility, the meter, as well as the transformer is not sufficient. If they want to upgrade that transformer, get a permit, from the utility and get it done, get it upgraded, it’s going to take a long time. But one way is you can install battery, and install PV.

So you can have your energy localized for those EV chargers, right? For example, you can use a battery to store excess power from the PV. And then if you have a lot of EVs getting plugged into the charger, and I guess–  

Kerim: You can wire the chargers directly to the battery, like a DC to DC fast charger kind of situation? 

Zhehan: Well, you can, but we are doing it as AC couple, which is more convenient for installation and upgrades. 

Kerim: Right. 

Zhehan: Enriching feeding. You can use it as energy.

Kerim: And you can still wire the EV charger directly to the box without needing to upgrade the transformer. 

Zhehan: Right, right. You can defer the need for upgrading the transformer and still have the EV chargers installed and get rid of the main charge, right? 

Otherwise, if you have the EV getting up, right, against the peak power will be pretty high and definitely give you a huge bill in the demand charge, especially from C&I. The C&I storage can really play a good role in that, I would say, with the EV charger. 

Kerim: What are some of the most common C&I project application types that you’re seeing in the market these days in 2025, 2024, 2023? Is the trend trending in one direction? Like I’m assuming data centers and AI, is a big uptick in demand, but tell us a little bit about like what you’re seeing in the lay of the land out there in the market. 

Zhehan: I think it’s growing everywhere, not in one direction, but the areas that you were talking about, the AI and the data centers is one of them.

Battery Solutions for Critical Infrastructure

Especially in Texas, we’re seeing a lot of projects like that. In California because of net metering, the new program, the NEM3, is also stimulating a lot of projects and customers to install batteries for C&I buildings.

Kerim: Factories, distribution centers, things like that. 

Zhehan: Yeah, and we are also seeing a lot more, increasing demand for 4-hour duration batteries, while in the past, mostly two hours. It’s also related to the backup power requirements in case the grid goes out. 

Power outage, you can utilize the battery to provide power, like a microgrid application, especially for critical buildings, right? Critical loads like hospitals, data centers, those usually require uninterrupted power. We’re seeing a lot of different projects like that, as well.

Of course, in EV plus storage, we see car dealerships installing batteries. In fact, we’ve installed one last year in California with a car dealership. 

These are the new products, and we have liquid cooling and air cooling combined in this. Liquid cooling for the battery packs, and then air cooling for the PCS. It’s a mixed cooling technology. Again, it’s a modular design, it’s pretty simple.

UL 9540 certified, so it’s all ready to go. This has been listed in CEC, and we also work in HECO, so it’s all ready to go. 

This is my last slide, just want to bring this up a little bit, talking about why C&I, ESS, and I know we talked about that just a couple of minutes ago already, but this is a video.

It’s a typical low curve for a C&I building, where in the afternoon, once the AC kicks in, right, you have the power going up and then going down in the evening when people get off work. 

Kerim: Yeah, it’s like a typical office building or something like that. 

Zhehan: It is a typical office building or school. Typically, the utility charges for energy as well as the demand charge, if you have a high peak, then the demand charge can be pretty high, even 50%, 70% of the bill sometimes. 

With solar, you can oversize the solar, and then once the solar kicks in in the day, the energy kind of goes down. The total power kind of goes down, right, because of the solar.

If you size the system up enough, then you probably can sell some of the solar energy back to the utility. 

Kerim: Yeah, in the NEM1 and NEM2 era, you would probably oversize that so that that green area under the line would be even bigger, but now with NEM3, because there’s not as much value to that overproduction because utility is not buying it at retail rates anymore, you probably size it more like this today. That makes sense, yeah.

Zhehan: Well, with storage, you can still size it up, right? 

Kerim: Yeah, you can still arbitrage that. Exactly. But even if you size it like this, your point is that that demand charge is lower, but it’s maybe 10% lower than what it was before because – 

Zhehan: Well, the demand charge maybe is still there because the peak is not eliminated and the solar goes down. It’s not detachable, right? It depends on the sun. If you’ve got a cloudy day, then you still get a demand charge.

And again, like you said, you may be wasting the power sending to the grid because it’s so cheap. Even in the summer, right? In August in California, you’re talking about maybe very, very cheap power selling if you’re sending power back to the grid. 

With the storage, you can kind of reshape the whole curve, right? You can store the excess power from the PV to the storage and discharge the storage later when the peak is still high. You can kind of eliminate the peak demand in your utility bill. And that saves you a lot.

Kerim: Your peak demand is never higher than what it was in the early hours of your morning time. 

Zhehan: Right, you can manage to do that if you have your inverter. If you size your solar and the energy storage properly, you can manage to do that.

Modern Energy Solutions Complexity

Kerim: I’m assuming there’s a whole ecosystem of consultants and designers and engineers that are designing these solutions because it’s getting more and more complicated.

It’s not as simple as just using the good old helioscope and Aurora anymore. Now, there are a couple of layers more of sophistication that Energy Toolbase and other products like that probably help model in the sales process of these projects. 

Zhehan: Exactly. In different places, they have different time of use program. 

Kerim: Different rates, different rules, different demand charges, different mixes of costs. It’s very optimized. It’s like in the early part of the 20th century, there used to be a title called VP of Energy in corporations, Vice President of Energy. It seems like we need that again because this is not so straightforward.

Zhehan: Because right now, it’s more complicated because different buildings also have different low profile. So you want to optimize the installation based on that profile as well, right? This is a typical one where you have power in the day, but some of the buildings, like some manufacturing sites, you may have power consumption at night, as well.

It’s all different. And also some agricultural sites, are also different.

Kerim: Still, one of the unique things about CPS, if I remember correctly, is the fact that you don’t just sell these hardware solution sets, but you also have the engineering and design and pre-sales, post-sales support team that acts as a consultant along with all that. Would that be a correct statement? 

Zhehan: We are still an equipment provider only. Our service is based on our product only. We service our own product. If this is being sold as a part of a solution to a site or a project, we are only responsible for our product because obviously, we’re not experts in that, and they have their own supplier to service that part. 

But we do have our service team working in the US. Our service hub is in Dallas. We have a large service team taking care of different technical issues coming from customers.

Kerim: And you do have an engineering team that you extend into your services, as well. 

Zhehan: Yeah, we have service engineering. We have application engineering and a product team here in the US. 

Kerim: Well, as we near the end of our conversation, maybe some last words on how to get in touch with you guys, how you go to market. What are some resources available to prospects and customers? You can talk a little bit about that. 

Zhehan: Well, we’re always available in the US, and you can find all the contacts on our website. We have hotlines, engineering answering hotlines during working hours.

If there are any questions related to service, technologies, or any interest in our new products, you can always reach out to us. We also have a sales hotline in the website. 

Kerim: What is that Flex O&M system that I remember from a previous conversation? Can you say a few words about that as well? 

Zhehan: So Flex O&M is our service portal. What it really is, is for the inverters, it communicates with the internet through a gateway, and we would call it Flex Gateway. Flex Gateway enables the inverter to get on the internet and customers can utilize that Flex Gateway to access their system.

We can give access to customer portal so they can see how the inverters are performing. That’s from the customer side, but the other side is the service side. In case, for example, if there is a unit having a technical issue, we can get the authorization from the customer to access that unit and see if there’s anything that we can do remotely.

For example, sometimes it’s just a power cycle or a firmware upgrade can fix the issue. That way, we can do it remotely instead of having to roll a truck to the field to take a look at that. Sometimes, those projects are really far away in the middle of nowhere, so you can save a lot from that perspective. 

Kerim: Well, Zhehan, thank you so much for this great overview of CPS America’s solutions for the U.S. Market and a deep dive into the products, understanding your capabilities, service capabilities, talking about your service center in Texas, 10 gigawatts of live assets across the US. Thank you for sharing all this information with SolarAcademy. 

Zhehan: Thank you for having me. Thanks, Kerim.