About this virtual "lunch and learn"
Who is presenting?
Taylor Geer is the COO at VDE Americas, implementing and overseeing the company’s strategic plans and operations. Engaged in the renewable energy transition for over 25 years, he has global experience with solar, energy storage, and wind projects across all stages of development and operation. Taylor not only helped pioneer the independent analysis that owners and lenders have relied on for the past two decades, but also has experience on the owner’s side of the table with capital at stake.
Cherif Kedir is a solar industry veteran with over two decades of experience in product engineering and development, yield and performance enhancement, test site development, and durability, bankability, and certification testing. He also has an extensive background in semiconductors, specifically with product engineering, testing, and failure analysis. Cherif provides unified executive leadership for VDE Group's two North American business units, VDE Americas and RETC, part of the VDE Group.
Alyssa Huang brings a decade of experience to the photovoltaic industry, combining technical expertise with product marketing strategy. She began her solar career in 2016 as a PV system design engineer and became certified as a NABCEP PV Design Specialist. At LONGi Solar, Alyssa supports product compliance, go-to-market initiatives, and roadmap alignment to meet customer needs across the U.S., with a focus on high-reliability and hail-resistant module applications.
Jonathan Ostrom Allen, Ph. D., has over 30 years of experience in data analytics and scientific research related to the electric utility industry. As VDE Americas' director of hail advisory, he helps customers identify, characterize, and mitigate technical and financial risks associated with severe weather events. He also contributes to the development and advancement of VDE Hail Risk Intelligence for solar assets, including its ArcGIS-based Hail Risk Atlas.
Why is this important?
Hail has emerged as one of the most consequential natural catastrophe risks facing utility-scale solar projects. Although hail events account for a relatively small percentage of solar insurance claims, they are responsible for a disproportionate share of losses by dollar amount. As utility-scale solar deployment expands in hail-exposed regions, industry stakeholders need cost-effective ways to identify and mitigate hail risk exposure.
While solar project stakeholders can mitigate catastrophic hail risk, doing so benefits from more than a single line of defense. Hail-hardened PV modules can reduce the probability of glass breakage, while reliable hail monitoring and tracker stow strategies can reduce the impact energy modules experience during severe storms. Beyond-qualification testing can characterize product-specific resilience, providing data that engineers, insurers, and financial stakeholders can use to better quantify project risk by location.
What will you learn about?
In this virtual lunch-and-learn, experts from VDE Americas, Renewable Energy Test Center (RETC), and LONGi Solar will examine hail resilience from the product, laboratory, project, and financial perspectives. Taylor Geer, COO at VDE Americas, will moderate the event. Alyssa Huang, product marketing manager at LONGi, will discuss the design and testing of its Ice-Shield PV module and the role of glass strength in hail-impact resilience. Cherif Kedir, president and CEO of RETC, part of the VDE Group, will explain how product certification testing differs from its new Hail Resiliency Curve (HRC) Test, a test-to-failure protocol that generates continuous probability distributions rather than binary pass/fail results. Jonathan Allen, Ph.D., director of hail advisory at VDE Americas, will demonstrate how risk assessment professionals can use test-to-failure data, combined with advanced meteorological models, to compare project- and portfolio-level financial risk exposure on a site- and technology-specific basis.
Attendees will learn about:
- Why effective hail risk mitigation benefits from both resilient PV modules and reliable tracker stow strategies
- How module construction, including glass properties, influences hail-impact resilience
- Differences between conventional pass/fail hail testing and test-to-failure characterization
- How the HRC Test measures the probability of glass breakage across a range of impact energies
- How product-specific HRC data can be incorporated into site-specific hail risk and financial loss models
- How PML and AAL analyses can help quantify the financial implications of module selection
- How hail resilience may affect project insurance, O&M exposure, and lifecycle economics
- How developers and asset owners can evaluate the value of investing in greater hail resilience
