Co-Founder & Chief Commercial Officer, NEXTRACKER INC
Nextracker’s Solar Tracker Innovations with Marco Garcia: RE+ 2024 Exclusive
Join us as Marco Garcia, Chief Commercial Officer of Nextracker, discusses the latest advancements in solar tracking technology, ...
About Marco Garcia
Marco Garcia, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Nextracker, has discussed the company’s market position and product developments in several 2024 interviews. At RE+ 2024, he stated that Nextracker has maintained the number-one global solar tracker market share for nine consecutive years. He attributed this to a focus on key markets worldwide and to innovations including foundation solutions for various soil types, a low-carbon tracker, and software that he said improves energy yield by 20 to 25% over fixed-tilt systems. Garcia also noted that the company has established over 20 factories in the United States to supply projects within a one-day truck drive. In a September 2024 interview at the Energyear Italy Congress, Garcia said Nextracker has shipped 85 GW of trackers globally and holds a 30% market share. He highlighted the company’s work in Italy, including a 70 MW agrivoltaic project in Pontinia that combines solar generation with farming. Garcia described the Italian permitting process as the greatest challenge in that market, while expressing support for increased renewable energy and energy independence in the country. In earlier remarks from 2022, he emphasized Nextracker’s commitment to local content in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, and in a 2015 panel he advocated for long-term partnerships and cost reduction to enable solar growth in Latin America.
Transcript (24 segments)
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Michael Schim0:07
Greetings from RE+ 2024 in Anaheim. My name is Michael Schim and I'm the managing director of Taiyang News, and I'm very glad to be at the booth of Nextracker and have with me Marco Garcia, Chief Commercial Officer of Nextracker. Marco, nice to see you again.
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Marco Garcia0:25
Michael, yes, so great to see you. So great to see you. What a show. It's been a great show. It's excellent to be here again. I've been doing trackers for 22 years, so I've been at the RE+ show every year back when it was the SPI, Solar Power International show. It's terrific to be here with our team as well, and yeah, we continue to see growth in the tracker market.
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Michael Schim0:50
That's what we want to start talking about here. So I think you're the market leader. We just reported that in our recent tracker report from Taiyang News, and you've been doing that for eight years, nine years now. Is that boring?
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Marco Garcia1:08
Not boring at all. It's never boring to be the leader. Nine years as number one global tracker market share. One of the reasons we're able to maintain our leadership in the tracker global market share is that we're focused on all the key tracker markets around the world. The number one tracker market is the United States. This market is very large, good government, very good applications, strong EPC base, strong asset owners that are focused on the best technology and the best long-term performance. So we're very strong in the US, number one market share. We're also focused in the Latin American market. Brazil has been a very large market for us, the rest of Latin America, Spain and the rest of Europe. The Middle East is growing, primarily in Saudi Arabia. India has been a high growth market for us, and Australia. These key six markets around the world we're focused on participating and providing a high level of customer service and technical solutions in all of these markets. That helps us win.
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Michael Schim2:10
Wonderful. So the global market has been growing incredibly over the years, so trackers, right? So what's the reason customers are embracing trackers?
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Marco Garcia2:24
Certainly. In the financial model, your tracking system is going to give you 20 to 25% more energy annually. When bifacial modules were introduced several years ago into the market, that increased the benefits of trackers over fixed tilt. So it's really financial model driven. On the utility scale, especially in some of these markets where you're going to get the additional gain, the economics look better in the financial model. So utility scale points to trackers. The DG, distributed generation or C&I market, is also a very strong tracker market for us.
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Michael Schim2:58
How do you see the further market for trackers, especially when you look at markets where you have certain saturation? Can trackers also play an important role when we look at intelligence or kind of smoothing of the flexibility that solar brings by nature?
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Marco Garcia3:18
Certainly. The tracker production curve, once we track on sun when the sun comes up high enough in the sky in the morning, we're tracking on sun. You get that production curve of steady peak production throughout the day until the sun goes down in the evening. That matches well in the different markets. The energy production from trackers matches well to the load in the markets where we're participating, so that's always helpful. What we do with our TrueCapture software is improve the performance. As the curve is going up in the morning during backtracking, we eliminate shading with our TrueCapture software, the same in the evening. Then during the day during diffuse light events such as clouds, rain, etc., where you can't see the sun exactly, we can back off and provide diffuse light tracking and improve performance during those hours of the day or days of the year. So the TrueCapture software and our software innovations again help us be a leader in the tracker market.
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Michael Schim4:22
Let's talk about innovations and developments, because there have been so many. Can you give us a slight overview of the most important?
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Marco Garcia4:35
Certainly. The good old days, Michael, where you had a big flat project site with a rectangle you could put all your trackers, those days don't exist anymore. It's hard to find those sites. So we're seeing more sites with undulating terrain, and we launched a few years ago the XTR, the terrain-following tracker. We're basically allowing developers to go onto land that in many cases cannot be disturbed. There are certain environmental restrictions on the land, so we can follow the terrain north-south with our trackers and minimize or eliminate grading and earth movement. EPCs love to hear this. Whenever you can minimize civil works and earth movement, it reduces your development time, your construction cycle, and we're able to get the trackers out there faster. We follow the terrain with our XTR software, and then we eliminate the shading once again. Terrain causes shading between the rows; we eliminate that shading with our TrueCapture software.
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Michael Schim5:33
Anything else? It's also about cost reduction, continued cost reduction. On the one hand, it's great that module prices have gone down quite a bit, at least for the EPCs and the demand side. What does that mean for trackers? Also, raw materials prices went up. How are you handling that?
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Marco Garcia6:00
We continue to see strong tracker demand in all the tracker markets that we discussed earlier. Lower module prices is good for the PV industry. It makes it more available for residential, small commercial, rooftop, carports, etc. So low PV prices help the market. We continue to see high tracker demand even with reduced PV prices. PV module costs go down, tracker demand is still there because you get that 20 to 25%, in some cases 30%, annual gain with the tracker versus fixed tilt. It still makes sense to do the tracker.
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Michael Schim6:37
And you bring the intelligence, right?
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Marco Garcia6:39
Correct. By layering in our software, we try to make smarter trackers. Wireless controls, our self-powered controller. It's basically a small brain in the center of that tracker that we can control. Weather, thanks to climate change, we're seeing much more extreme weather events, and we've designed a tracker that is resilient long-term, so high availability, tracking on sun as much as possible despite wind events, and then of course defending the tracker. Here in the United States, a big deal is hail, primarily in Texas and in that area of the market. There's a large hail alley, and we defend against hail with a product that we've innovated called the Hail Pro 75. We can crank all the way over to 75 degrees, almost vertical, and the angle of incidence with the hail protects those modules. We've had third-party validation, we worked with insurance companies to ensure that we are protecting those assets.
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Michael Schim7:43
Wonderful. We should also talk about the consequences of the world unfortunately drifting apart. That means geopolitical consequences, energy security much more in focus, and solar is the fastest growing technology, obviously taking part in this. How are you contributing? How are you working on localization of jobs and technology?
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Marco Garcia8:14
We've set up over 20 factories in the United States in order to bring our products closer to the project sites. We try to be within one day truck drive from any solar project in the United States. That local domestic content here in the United States has helped us continue to maintain our leadership position. It's brought us closer to our asset owner customers who have large portfolios. We enter into VCAs, or volume commitment agreements, with those asset owners, and we can make commitments on domestic content for those projects. It helps us secure those relationships long term. And then again, the software that we layer in ensures optimal performance of those plants over the life of the plant. We always want to make sure we're getting the maximum energy production and we're protecting the assets. We want the asset to be available to track during all the hours of the day that it should be tracking, and we also want to protect it in the event of weather events like hail.
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Michael Schim9:16
Let's talk about another important trend: sustainability. There's a whole ESG picture, transparency, and many other topics of sustainability. How are you looking into that?
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Marco Garcia9:32
We have launched a low carbon tracker here in the United States, and we have strong interest so far in that product. It is at a slight premium. The low carbon tracker, the raw material, the steel, is going to cost a little more, but we have customers who are requiring that in their portfolios and the economics make sense for them, so we're adapting to that as well. I did want to mention, you talked about local content. Not only in the United States, we also produce locally in Brazil, in India, in Europe. We have local suppliers in Australia. We announced local suppliers there as well, and also in Saudi Arabia. So we try to provide local domestic content again in all the key markets around the world to help us participate in those markets and provide local jobs and really be a player in each one of those markets.
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Michael Schim10:26
I think that's very much appreciated locally. Let's quickly, before we come to an end, talk about what you see as the three major challenges or areas you want to focus on in the next few years to advance trackers.
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Marco Garcia10:45
We want to continue to innovate with our software, maximizing the energy production. We have software engineers on staff that are focused on availability, energy production, avoiding shade, performing in weather events, staying on sun, tracking as many hours of the day as possible while also protecting the tracker. So we'll continue to innovate with software to ensure availability and high energy production. We've also acquired a company called Ojo that offers the Earth Trust. We just launched our foundations business here at RE+. With the Earth Trust, we're able to provide foundation solutions for hard rock. In the past, the EPCs in the United States have focused on the foundation solutions. Now we are providing a more end-to-end solution with the help of Ojo. We also have what we call our NX Anchor system. The Ojo system is for hard, rocky soils, and the NX Anchor system is more for softer soils, frost heave, expansive clays, soils where you want to anchor the foundations, but we're able to use less steel tonnage. So a stronger foundation with less tonnage of steel. Very interesting innovations that we've launched to the market. We believe they're going to help provide a more important service to our EPC and long-term asset owner customers by getting involved earlier, getting geotech information, corrosion information, soil information, so we can provide solutions early on in the project cycle and identify how we can optimize the tracker for those customers.
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Michael Schim12:31
Wonderful. Solar generates around 5% of global power these days. We look at that picture, there's sort of a moonshot. What's there?
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Marco Garcia12:40
We're landing solar anywhere basically with our new foundation business. There's no soil type that we cannot address with our new foundation solutions.
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Michael Schim12:50
Wonderful. Excellent. Michael, it's always a pleasure to see you, my friend. Thank you so much. Take care.
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Marco Garcia12:54
Thank you.