This is your SolarWakeup for January 17th, 2018

Listen Closely. I went back and listened to my interview with Amy Harder from Axios yesterday. Inside the conversation there were some things that were coming true in reality. The Goldman group inside the White House doesn’t seem to be having the impact we were expecting, much like the conservative think tanks, Sean Hannity, etc. Also the argument about jobs and job losses don’t seem to be moving those inside the conversation. More than anything, the bad actor label on China seems to be coming to the forefront. Go back and listen to hear what I’m talking about.

Don’t Click The Bait. We are done breaking low cost of renewables records. The conversation needs to drive towards, what do you need in order to have this energy need come from solar, wind with or without energy storage. The data from Colorado says absolutely nothing. Without knowing the ratio of storage to generation, you cannot ascertain anything at all. You also don’t know what they are doing with storage, what grid services they will provide and how many hours of capacity they are proposing. Don’t look at these results for any business metrics. Your cost of money divided into the capital costs minus operating costs will still give you the best view of the bid price. Rant over.

EVs Rule The (Future) Road. I love the additional investments into electric cars by other auto OEMs, Ford announced an $11billion push towards EVs. I’ve been an EV owner since 2012, first a Volt then a Tesla. The Volt buying experience was eye opening and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same today. The sales person knew nothing, nobody at the dealership did. How to charge, how many miles of range, what happens at the end of the range? All the OEMs will need to invest in education of the sales force. If I were Autonation, I would have an EV only showroom. Completely separate the force from the traditional vehicles and make it a competition and not a closing exercise. Tesla doesn’t have this problem by only selling EVs. At the end the solar industry wins because EV owners want solar and EVs will drastically drive down the price of batteries.

You Get A Job, You Get A Job. Energy jobs keep growing especially at the labor and middle class level. If you want to make more than the average American in your job segment, then being in solar is a great place to be. On the other hand, you may have to work through the solar coaster, stand at rallies and enjoy the sunshine. I can only imagine how many jobs solar would create in Florida if our policies opened up just a tiny bit. The same is true for Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio where most of the remaining 60,000 coalminers live.

China Is Dumping Projects Too. $0.3Trillion was invested in clean energy worldwide last year, half of it in solar. Half of the solar investments came from China which begs a curious question relating to the 201 proceeding. Should US capital file a complaint about Chinese capital buying too many projects? Is that unfair as well? Maybe that is the correlation to the real estate market that the White House would understand.

Are You Coming? There is a surprise addition to the SolarWakeup Live! event in New York. We will have an unnamed speaker (for now) that has been in almost all the meetings around the 201 case. By the time we meet in New York, the tariff should be decided and you will get to hear how it happened and we may indulge in some conversation looking back at the process. This is inside a cool theater in midtown, join us. 2 for 1 offers available if you email me.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann