Name: Designing Smarter: Using AI & Automation to Find New Design Efficiencies
Uploaded: 2025-08-28T19:17:11.903Z
Duration: 37 min 56 s
Description: Designing Smarter: Using AI & Automation to Find New Design Efficiencies

Transcript for "Designing Smarter: Using AI & Automation to Find New Design Efficiencies": Hey. Welcome, everybody, to the webinar. Glad to see you all here. We're gonna get started in just a minute. We're gonna give everybody some time to settle in. So just hang tight. We're gonna get started in just one minute. Okay. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today for designing smarter using AI and automation to find new design efficiencies. I'm your host, Matt Raitsman, here for Aurora Solar. We've got an agenda for you today. Talk about some solar industry trends. We're gonna see how automation fits in. We'll have a demo of our product solution, and we've left a lot of time for q and a as well. K. Great. First, let's talk about what's happening in the industry and why this is such an important topic. As I'm sure everyone is well aware by now, the 25 d ITC for customer owned systems is expiring at the 2025. Because of this, we're anticipating a spike in demand from homeowners trying to take advantage of the ITC before it's gone. Then there's no way to get around it that 2026 may be a tough year, especially for cash and loan purchases, although the tax credit for TPO remains in place. So after 2025, where do we go from here? After 2025, there will undoubtedly be some changes to how solar is sold. And as an industry, we'll need to adapt our businesses and processes accordingly because in the long run, solar is not going away. In fact, as you can see on this graph, after the 2026 residential solar industry is expected to make a rebound. As utility bills for homeowners continue to rise and we look for ways to improve efficiency and reduce soft costs, going solar will make more and more sense over time. But how exactly will the solar industry need to shift in the new era post 2025? For one, there is an increased focus on operational efficiency. On average, variable soft costs, which include things like customer acquisition, design, permitting, labor, and project management still account for roughly 40% of the total cost of going solar. The more we can bring down those costs, the better we'll be set up for the long term. Secondly, we'll see a higher share of TPO after the '25 d tax credit ends. The share of TPO is expected to increase from 45% in 2025 to almost 70% next year. So where you're able to, having the flexibility to offer diverse financing options for homeowners will be important to adapt as the market changes. Thirdly, battery storage attach rates will continue to rise with the average attach rate in The US, excluding California, rising from 38% in 2025 to an expected 57% by 02/1930. Soft costs are still way too high. As hardware prices continue to fall, soft costs in The US remain stubbornly high. According to Woods McKenzie, the average residential solar project today still costs about $3.36 per watt. Now here's where it gets interesting. The Department of Energy estimates that 39% of that cost comes from variable soft costs. These are the kind of costs that scale as your business grows, but also ones that are more controllable than things like taxes or rent. Let's take a quick example. If you're an installer doing 500 projects per year and each system averages around 7 kilowatts, that means you're spending around 4,000,000 per year just on variable soft costs alone. And that's where the opportunity lies because unlike any because unlike fixed costs like hardware, the soft costs we can control a little bit more. Here's what we mean when we say controlling variable soft costs. Let's go back to our example. 500 projects per year, each one at seven kilowatts. Now let's go ahead and imagine we make a few key operational improvements. Let's get our cancellation rate down, probably under 10%. We'll bring our change orders and repeated site surveys down to 20%, and we'll find a way to save about twenty five hundred hours annually across proposals, plan sets, and manual handoffs. All of this can be done with accurate and dependable sales and design software. These changes could drop your variable soft cost per watt from a dollar 31 to a dollar 12, and that translates into real money, over 600,000 in annual savings for your company. This is where automation and AI step in. They're not just buzzwords. They're real tools that can drive efficiency, cut costs, and help us adapt to the changing economics of solar in a post OBB world. Energy demand rates are rising fast. Everyone who pays a utility bill knows this. And of the homeowners we surveyed for the solar snapshot, over 85% of them said utility savings is the top reason for them to install solar. And looking at these stats, that makes a lot of sense. The North American Electric Corporation forecasts an 18% increase in demand over the next decade. That's equal to adding California, Texas, and New York. This makes demand growth now higher than any time in the past two decades. And with that increased demand and not enough supply, prices will rise. The Clean Energy Buyers Association is forecasting a 6.7% increase in electricity prices by 2026, effectively raising price of electricity by a $110 for every US household. This increase in demand and cost is already being felt. PJM, the Washington DC area, is forecasting a 5% increase next year. Missouri Liberty Utilities is requesting a 30% increase for residential customers. And the Common Sense Institute Colorado is forecasting homeowners will experience an increase of 56 in electricity prices equal to about 400 to $500 per household. So how can you set yourself up for success and stay competitive in the new era? We believe that one of the biggest drivers lies in operational efficiency, levering automation and technology to make sure your teams are spending time on the things that make the biggest impact to your business and reducing costs where you can, which can set yourself up to be able to adapt quickly and scale efficiently in times of growth. Reworking designs. Reworking designs after site survey data changes, waiting on missing inputs from sales or survey teams, manually adjusting setbacks, fire pathways, and obstructions, recalculating production after layout changes, time consuming AhJ compliance adjustments, hunting for and uploading measurement files and photos, drawing roof structures and slopes from scratch, starting plan sets from a blank canvas, manually placing obstructions for every design. These are the kind of things that our software can help you with. But don't take our word for it. Out in the field, automation is saving installers real time and real money. We have to move to the next slide. Okay. And with that, I believe it is just about time for our demo. So I'm excited to show off our demo for you, which I recorded just just this week. Make sure I don't have Today, I'll walk you through a demo of most of the automation tools available within Aurora Solar design mode and show you how it helps solar designers find even more efficiencies. With shifting policies and economic pressures, staying agile and efficient is more critical than ever. Aurora Solar is built for today's challenges, optimizing design workflows and enhancing precision with advanced three d capabilities so you can act quickly and deliver install ready solar projects with confidence. We'll start here on the project overview page where all active work is organized. From there, I'll head into settings. Settings. Aurora Solar configurable self-service tools enable administrators to adapt the platform to their organization's specific workflows by setting default automations, driving consistency, accuracy, and simplicity across sales design and operations teams. With unified settings, admins can establish standards like pricing defaults, design parameters, and performance simulations that automatically extend across the tenant. This structured yet flexible foundation sets design teams up for success without being slowed down by redundant technical details. Let's take a second to look at the design section. All of the settings can be adjusted to your company's preferences by clicking on edit in the top right corner. Imagery. Admins can select default imagery if they prefer. The default setting is to select the most clear, recent, and highest resolution image available. You can also select the default provider if you prefer. Fire pathways. Aurora prides itself on being able to automatically apply AHJ required fire pathways for you. For designers, you have the option to optimize for irradiance, placing pathways in more shaded areas. Solar panels. For solar panels, admins can set the default values designers start with for SAP minimum as well as tilt threshold, spacing, and tilt for both flat and pitched. Auto Designer. Auto Designer is our automation solution for designing entire systems in Aurora. You can see here that you can set default for target energy offset, t r s f sorry, t s r f minimum, default filler row settings, and minimum panels per row, saving designers multiple clicks every time they run the auto designer. Aurora in sales mode. And while this webinar is focused on design mode, it's worth noting that you can adjust the Aurora default mode for sales mode here. Designers can choose whether they prefer to receive an AI smart roof or AI roof base and update the settings accordingly. Now let's take a minute to look at our component database and how that works. We maintain a comprehensive database of all modules, inverters, DC optimizers, batteries, and balance of system components. In the corner here, I can restrict which components are used. Turning this off will allow users to search for any component within our database, and turning this on will limit users to only using the components that have been enabled by the account admin. So I can simply search for the modules that I want my team to use, enable them, and the users will only be able to use those components within their design. If there's a component that we don't have available in our database, you can click on request custom component, provide the details, and we'll be able to add that to the database within five business days. Let's also take a look at our utility rates database. We recently made some improvements to make it much easier to see which rates are enabled, select preferred rates, and quickly find the one reps should use. Great. With our default settings, component preferences, and utility rates in place, let's head back to the project dashboard. Here, we'll see how Aurora takes care of energy usage energy usage calculations automatically, an essential step for running reliable performance simulations. Energy usage automation. The pre and post solar utility rates are auto selected based on the project's location, but I can adjust them if needed. You can see here that Aurora groups utility rates by making it easy to find just what you're looking for. Next, I'll enter their consumption info. There are several options depending on available data, monthly average, monthly estimate, retrofit scenarios, annual estimate, or the most accurate interval data, which can be imported from the utility API. For this example, let's say they paid $200 in March. That input can estimate annual usage. The more data you have, the more accurate it gets, but you can always update it later and the project will adjust accordingly. You can also add energy optimizations to show how products like heat pump or AC would affect the usage. Okay. Now that we've seen how energy usage automation works, let's get started on a design. Aurora AI in design mode. As we touched on earlier, Aurora AI was historically used most often in sales mode. However, that's no longer the case. It's now being used almost equally in both sales mode and design mode. This shift is most likely happening because it's faster than ever, modeling roofs in under ten seconds. It's more accurate than ever trained on four times more data and improved obstruction detection, and it delivers more consistent outputs. AI SmartRoof and AI Rooffaces now produce similar results, allowing designers to use their preferred tool to quickly refine an AI model. Let's go ahead and run AI SmartRoof to show you how it works. Hover over roof and then select AI smart roof. In about ten seconds, it will automatically detect any roof obstructions like chimneys or vent pipes based on the high resolution imagery and then uses lidar to adjust the height and pitch of each roof face to create a full three d model of the home. Then if I need to make any changes, I can just click on the roof and edit as needed. Automated shading analysis. For those unfamiliar, lidar uses laser pulses from an overhead scanner, usually on a plane, to measure surface elevations based on return time. This allows us to capture highly accurate surface data. Aurora converts that data into a mesh for easy use, but you can also view the raw point cloud. This precision is what enables our accurate three d models combining imagery for structure and lidar for height and pitch. You can adjust manually or use auto fit to align buildings automatically. Next, I'll run irradiance, a shading analysis using the three d model, sun path data, and local weather to generate a heat map of ideal roof areas for solar. You might be wondering about tree shading. Aurora accounts for this in two ways. LiDAR shading on by default calculates shading from trees and nearby structures using elevation data, or you can manually draw trees, which is helpful if the homeowner is considering removing one. You can then rerun irradiance to see the impact. Once the three d model looks accurate, I can move on to finalize the design. Autoplace fire pathways. Once your site model is ready, you can begin designing the PV system by selecting system from the CAD toolbar. First, we should apply fire pathways using Aurora's auto place fire pathways tools, which references local AhJ codes and can take a radiance into consideration as we saw in the settings. Just hover over fire pathways, select auto place, review the AhJ code and code year, and confirm whether the property has sprinklers. With one click, Aurora handles what would normally take significant time applying AHJ compliant fire pathways in just seconds. System design. There are a few ways to place panels. You can manually place them by selecting a module, setting orientation, and clicking and dragging. Aurora will automatically avoid obstructions in roof edges. After manual placement, use auto stringer to string the system or do it manually by adding an inverter. Aurora gives us full flexibility to automate or customize as needed. The fastest method is using Auto Designer. Choose a target mode, either max fit or a specific energy offset. Select up to five modules and component types, like string inverters, micro inverters, DC optimizers, and Aurora will create the optimal design based on layout production and component efficiency. And as you can see, the default settings we created have carried over and auto populated, saving me from having to fill these out each time. Once you've run Auto Designer, you can still adjust individual modules or arrays as you see fit. Next, I'll run production, which simulates performance based on sun path, shading, and weather, showing expected output, energy offset, monthly production versus consumption, and system losses for optimization. From this drop down, I can also add storage or update pricing, but I'll cover that in sales mode. Then you can download additional assets such as shade reports, VXF files, or bill of materials. We have integrations with a number of racking manufacturers so you can create a comprehensive bill of materials. I do hope you enjoy the industry trends. I hope you enjoyed the demonstration as well. You know, as far as what's next here, just wanna sort of wrap up, you know, our takeaways. You know, what's gonna be important here as as it always has been is adapting quickly, staying informed, boosting efficiency, of course, and automating smartly is gonna save us quite a bit of money as you guys can see. I would love to answer to open it up for questions. You guys do have any questions about what we've seen there, anything about the product or the industry trends. So if you have questions, please jump into the q and a over to the side there. First question here is about one of the slides there. There was a question about why solar was declining in 2024, if you remember earlier. I don't know if I could bring that up quite easily now, but there was a slide earlier with the and it's kinda far back. We did see a little bit of a dip in see a little bit of a dip in 2024. You know, I could I could point perhaps to the the SunPower bankruptcy, which was in 2024. But, really, I think there's a lot of factors. Another question about Aurora AI and its accuracy compared to other tools. Aurora AI is is very accurate, of course. I'm I'm not exactly sure which other tools tools you mean. But our accuracy, of course, is NREL validated, and I would be happy to share those studies with you if you do have any accuracy questions. Oh, my colleague here has tapped me on the shoulder and says solar was declining in 2024 due to, NEM three point o in California. Very good. Very good. Very smart. Wonderful. Okay. So another question here I see is, what happens if you don't have lidar? So I think that's referring again to the Aurora AI. That question might have been from the same person. Our lidar, coverage is second to none, and we update our lidar several times a year as well. That being said, Aurora AI does require lidar to run, so you were you were paying attention to the video there. And we don't have that in every place. So, of course, when it's not available, we can't run the Aurora AI. So instead, we do have some fallback methods. The one I would recommend is just sending that to our team of expert designers at our expert design service. You can send that project away with a click of a button. They will do all the designing for you and send it right back to you. Very popular service. So we do have options if LiDAR is not available. Oh, good. And the questions are coming in here. How frequently is your LiDAR updated? Yes. It is updated several times a year. We get LiDAR from several sources, and we always up, update and use the latest sources we can get our hands on. There is a lidar coverage map on our help center, help.aurorasolar.com. So if you're interested in where to reach it, you could go and check it out. Or just reach out to us, and we'll show you. A question. Where can we get training on Aurora? Will you be at the RE Plus conference? Yes. Aurora will be at RE Plus. Do stop by our booth. Let them know you saw our webinar today. You know, a great place to get training you know, if you have any questions, of course, reach out to our support team. Support@aurorassolar.com. Let them know what the issue is, and they will get you the the help that you need. You know, as as far as, you know, the training goes, there's there's a lot of different different types of training that we we offer. So do reach out to the support teams to let us know, you know, more information. But something else I could I could mention as well is our academy website, Aurora Solar or aurora sorry. Academy.aurorasolar.com is the website. Academy.aurorasolar.com. And your Aurora subscription, your your Aurora, service includes the academy program as well. So that is a great place to get training if you need it. Dustin Marsh has a question about how much it costs to use the AI. We do have several different packages right now. I do suggest you jump on to our website if you're interested in, checking out our pricing. You can learn a lot just at aurorasolar.com. A lot of quick questions here. Do we have to upgrade our Aurora plan to get the AI tools? We do have some very we do have some basic plans that don't have the AI, so it does depend on your your level. You just reach out to us. You can reach out to us at support@aurorasolar.com. You can email you can email me, mreitzman@aurorasolar.com, and we'll get you the help that you need if you're interested in learning about the plants. Question. Do you have or plan any mobile tools for site visits? Well, we certainly do have an area where you can upload and keep your site visit photos. That is with our plan set service. You know, we do have full plan set service here, our instant plan set service and our regular plan set service. So with that, we do have a repository for your site photos. We need you to upload those site photos. As far as others I mean, as far as other tools for site visits, you know, I you know, one of the original value propositions for Aurora was that we could do a lot of selling without having to do that site visit. Right? That's that's really really one of the nice things is we can reduce a lot of truck rolls with Aurora. Right? We don't have to go out on-site, fly any equipment, fly any drones, anything like that. We can really get a lot of interest and get a really accurate proposal, really before we need to do the site visit in a lot of cases. But that being said, if you have any ideas, let us know because because we're we're interested in your ideas and and the things that would make your job easier. So do let us know. Do you have any ideas about, mobile tools or for site visits that would make things better? Another question. What about sales training? That is a very good question. So we do have some solar training. So, again, we have that academy. You know, the the question there was a question earlier about what training you get with Aurora, and I mentioned our, academy.aurorasolar.com website. You do need an Aurora subscription before you log in. So if you you're going there now, you might not have be able to log in. So we don't have any sales training specifically on there because there's a lot of kind of what we do have we do have is is solar training. We have our solar one zero one class, and we've got a lot of great feedback. You know, we do know that, as we're we're ramping up new new sales reps, it's nice to have a place where they can go and get some training, at least on solar, in general. So that is something else you get with the academy, and we've got good feedback on that. Oh, this is great. Can this tool be used for commercial or utility sale projects? This can be used for small commercial projects, small to medium sized commercial projects. If you're looking for something a little bit bigger, I can also recommend, Helioscope. It's another product that we offer for has a lot of great commercial features, but you can do commercial interval. It works great. You can calculate your depreciation values, and you can get your your, ballast or racking all nice and set up. There's a lot of great commercial tools. Utility scale, not as much. It depends on depends on what you're talking about. Let us let us know what kind of projects you have in mind, and, we can show you some examples of what we can and can't do for sure. Another question, can you run through the last slide slowly of the design. I have a movie of the design. I don't think I had I didn't have any slides in the design. It was just my film. But we'll send you the video afterwards so you can check it out. Okay. Great question. Anything you can share about your road map, plans for upcoming features, and functions? We always make sure that our customers get the quarterly and and and, I think half is it quarterly or half yearly road map? So, you know, you always can see what we're working on, when you're an Aurora subscriber. Some things I can mention off the top of my head are auto designer speed and efficiency improvements. Right? So we did demonstrate our auto designer tool where you can answer a couple questions, and the software will design the system automatically for you. Got some nice speed improvements. Sorry. Fast. It's gonna get faster. Smarter storage simulations is something else that's coming up where, we know that that battery attach rate is only increasing, and so our storage solution is gonna get a lot of improvements soon. And, also, being able to model for storage in design mode is something else that's right around the corner on our road map. Right now, the storage piece is tied a bit to the sales piece, but we've got some really slick, new design features coming out with storage that you're sure to like. Let's see. Is there a way to investigate cost and effectiveness of removing obstructions like vents, etcetera? Absolutely, there is. So, you know, you're running so when you're creating your designs and your projects, you're running all the different scenarios. What would it look like if I removed this tree? What would it look like if I moved this event? What would it look like if I used these panels versus these panels? You can quickly run all your different scenarios to figure out what's gonna be the most cost effective, option for your customer and for yourself. How do you here's a great question. How do you collect user feedback to improve Aurora? How can we best help you? Yes. Thank you. We take our user feedback very seriously. Do fill out your NPS surveys if you've been you you guys probably seen if you are an Aurora user right now, you're seeing these surveys happen, quarterly. We read them all, take them very seriously. If you have an idea, just reach out to our support team. We'd love to hear from you. And we actually we do have some we do have some more stuff. I can't talk about it too much right now, but we're we're actually gonna be giving you more ways to submit user feedback, in the future. It's something we've been thinking about as well. So lots of different ways. Reach out to me, reach out to the support team, fill out the surveys. We do wanna hear from you. There is a question about the costs of the AI assisted design. I'm and the website, I guess, isn't clear about what the cost is. I will definitely send that feedback to our marketing team. And, you know, if you do have any quest if you have any questions, you can email me directly, and I'll I'll try and find out some more info for you. If you're not feeling comfortable with what you're seeing there, get you some answer you need. I think, you know, I think it depends. I'm not I'm not in sales. That's why I'm not giving a very salesy answer. I think it depends on the scale. I think it depends on, you know, we have different packages to figure these. I I I guess would be would be a more accurate answer to why we don't list the list that right there. Alright. Let's move on to some more technical questions, which I'm way more comfortable with. How long does it generally take for a new user override to get up to speed? Well, I could share you I could share a lot of data with you on that, but it really depends on what you're trying to do, your role, you know, are you the administrator setting everything up? Are you just a salesperson? We do have a lot of self-service options. We have some, paid training options as well if that's something that you're interested in for your team. We put on great webinars all the time. And if you have any questions, you could just email me directly or, man, I'll tell you what you need to know. I was kinda dodging the question, how long does it take a new user of Aurora to get up to speed? If they're a sales user, they can get they can get rocking and rolling in under a week. No problem. If you're setting up your account for the first time, it depends on your complexity. How many states are you operating with? What kind of financing options do you wanna set up? It it depends. Next question. Heat pump energy savings calculations are done only with the AI package? No. The energy optimization features, are included with every package level. We didn't demo the energy optimization features too much. I did mention them in the video. You know, we're quite aware that a lot of times you're not just selling solar. You're selling, a lot of different stuff. It could be anything from new appliances to new windows to installation to roofs, a lot of different things. And all that's gonna have an effect on your energy profile. The energy optimization feature lets you account for that with the energy profile. Right? Not only am I gonna go solar, but I'm actually gonna add this new efficient AC, etcetera. What what is that? What are my savings gonna look like after that? We help you figure all of that out. And it's included in each package. What's the question? Which packages include that? It's all of them. Good. Good. Good. Okay. So I think we are all out of questions for right now. I don't see any any more coming in. I do thank you for taking time out of your busy day to come and speak with me and check this out. If you have any questions, just reach out to us. We're gonna send you an email after this too. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, or just shoot me an email if you wanna talk to me directly. And, yeah, just thank you so much. Hope you guys have a wonderful day.