So, pulling this all together, that’s an example of how this works with SolarSuccess and with different software, they may well have that flow look differently. But it can be as complex where you watch all the details or as simple as you would like. The end result of all of this is that we have higher productivity, the data accuracy is improved and standard formats, we’ve got the integration and this means that we have more throughput.

We can do more jobs with the same number of people as we could before. This gives us more bandwidth so the faster we complete the projects and the less time we need to spend on doing the project management for these projects, the more time we can spend in the field delivering the projects as we move forward.

So, you can take on more projects.

This is better for financing. You can get better quality financing and more people are interested in financing because the process is more standardized. If everybody knows that the permitting is happening according to the national standard and that national standard is clear, the risk goes down for the financiers, because all they need to do is say, yes, I trust that NREL has worked this out, and that we are installing to the right level of safety that we need to be installing with. And the financiers are happy. What they want is consistency. So, by automating this in a consistent way across the entire country, we’re actually freeing up capital to be better, more available, and available at better terms for the entire country.

This gives everyone a higher return on investment (ROI). It costs less so the homeowner gets a higher return on their investment in solar, the solar installers can have higher margins and spend less money on overhead, time and frustration, and reduce their risk. The financing also reduces their risk. And the AHJs spend less time going over this.

The inspection statistics show that it’s exactly the same. Doing a SolarAPP+ application, you have the exact same inspection failure rates as you do with the paper-based application. So, everybody experienced a higher ROI in the area that they’re most interested in.

It is only goodness that we roll this out to everybody, and we’ve got a large and growing contingency of people interested in bringing this reality to all of us.

And the challenge is that the different industry players need different levels of details. What different constituencies in the solar industry are willing to substitute for products versus insisting that they get exactly one particular product, has made this a very complex question because if you get too much detail, it’s too hard to maintain and manage and it doesn’t work for smaller or even, you know, reasonably size solar companies. Even large solar companies that gets too much detail.

And so, we had to figure out how to solve this.

So, what we ended up doing is we’re providing different views of the product registry. What’s in the product registry as a whole, is the full manufacturer SKU. It’s the full detail for every single product.

So, if you’ve got a Q-Cell 400, built by Hanwha, you can have five of them that are black-on-black, and five of them that might be silver. And you can see the full detail of everything that’s in there.

But what we’re going to use is, we have a group-by-API mechanism, and what we’re going to use in that grouping API for the installers, is a simplified level of detail.

They would see something like Hanwha-400-Black, and then be able to substitute all the fives, and they’ll just take the first one as what it is that they’re looking for when they place their orders to a distributor of the manufacturer. And then they’ll just explicitly say, any of these five qualify. And I’m, I’m not really concerned about what it is, as long as you can meet pricing constraints.

And that way we’ve got the right level, like a sweet spot of the level of detail the installer needs to manage when they’re receiving and attributing products to a specific job. They need to do it at this higher, simplified level of detail so that the warehouse and the inventory can all stay aligned, and we’re still giving clear instruction to the distributor/manufacturer about what is a valid and acceptable substitution, so that we can make sure that we can get supplied at the right time with what they have on hand.

So, changing what is the full detail on the product registry to a simplified detail for the solar installer, because the installers do not want that full detail, was a key element of changing how this works.

Then the government, like the CEC (the California Energy Commission), needs even a lower level of detail. They are working at things like the Hanwha 400. They just want to see that this product line in general has the required certifications. And so, it’s getting referenced and CEC listed based on even a simpler view of what is available for that product.

And so, by accommodating all of these in a way that we can work with them automatically, and get the full detail where you need it was the solution that we needed to get the product registry actually adopted and generally referenced by a broader audience.

So, this has resolved our need for common language. It is relatively simple and took a little while to think about it, and a lot of consensus building to get everyone to understand how they play together.

So, I’m going to dive in just a minute to show you what we needed to do. If you’ve got any experience merging Excel data sets, you will recognize the value of having a fully defined term right from the beginning. And fundamentally, this is the key innovation of the Orange Button API that is then brought forth and utilized across each of the terms and elements specifically.

But what we are doing is we are fully defining EnergyAC, for instance, and that makes it able to have the field of value and the units are included, right with that energy unit. Start time and end time are for production and decimals and precision. By pulling in this information together, particularly the units, we’re able to have the same energy measurements work for the Internet of Things (IoT) where you’re just doing watts based on the lights that go through the walkway that are motion triggered, and you can see how long they were on for, and you can plan and organize and optimize intelligently based on having a completely defined unit there.

You can do this in kilowatt hours if you’re doing a residential home or megawatt hours for utility scale implementation. And the same energy AC unit, because it’s a fully defined term will work to describe what has happened historically and what’s going to happen now and what’s going to happen in the future so that we can compare and contrast and learn from each other, which is where our biggest innovations are going to come.

So, these common terms results in us having a completely defined term, which is why Orange Button works. This is the core as everything as you would expect, just like where you were wiring up the walls, it actually comes down to a few simplicities. But having this complete term is the key simplicity for the Orange Button, common terminology.

Blu Banyan is leading this initiative, but who is playing?