This is your SolarWakeup for April 7th, 2017

The forgotten GW. As I spoke to software vendors and service providers at the asset management show last week, I kept trying to figure out where all of the GW were. At most, vendors had a portfolio of 15GW or so depending on how it was counted. With global capacity well above this, I kept asking the same thing, where are the remaining GW as they have to be managed somehow. The answer is that utilities, which own a large amount of the global GW, are doing almost everything in house. From writing their own software to hiring their own field technicians, few utilities are outsourcing the asset management or O&M functions.

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Metaphor of the week. The coal mine museum goes solar. Makes sense, that’s the future for coal miners across the Country. Elon Musk should have donated it to them and now IREC should offer free training at the museum, located at a technical college in Kentucky.

Make sure you listen to the latest episodes of EnergyWakeup. Google is now at 100% renewables, how do they do it and what is next? Sam Arons talks to SolarWakeup. We also speak with OSEIA Director about Oregon’s solarmarket.

The budget to nowhere. Congress doesn’t like the cuts to the EERE division of the DOE. Some solar people sat down with the Secretary of Oops Energy, Rich Perry. First public comments was all political fodder but I want to know how the meeting really went.

• PV-Magazine: NRG begins moving solar, wind O&M in-house
• Fox News: Kentucky Coal Mining Museum switches to solar power
• PV-Tech: Members of Congress oppose Trump’s EERE funding cuts
• Vox: The Trump era of climate policy will bring a few huge surprises. Let’s try to predict them.
• SolarWakeup: Sam Arons from Google talks about going 100% RE and corporate PPAs with Google
• Greentech Media: Trump Voters and Democrats Agree on More Clean Energy, New Polling Finds
• Rocky Mountain Institute: Rate-Design Best Practices for Public Electric-Vehicle Chargers
• Washington Post: Investment in renewable energy dips globally as prices fall

Opinion

• Utility Dive: How New York is incentivizing utilities to interconnect DERs under REV

Have a great day!

Yann