This is your SolarWakeup for June 9th, 2017

Growth of Community Solar. There is a lot of value from a development standpoint for community solar. First it separates offtaker from the solar farm location. The geographical separation enables the second value generated by community solar, credit risk mitigation. If an offtaker defaults, moves or otherwise decides to stop paying, the solar farm can put in a new offtaker. Additionally, you can make a play to shorten the offtaker contracts or even go month to month like a cable bill. You lose the distributed network value but solar doesn’t really benefit from that anyways in most cases. If you can get your investors around the regulatory pricing risk, then we should continue to see a growth in this market.

Q1 US Solar Market. Always interesting to see the headlines from one publication to another even though they all got the same data the day before. 2017 will be smaller than 2016 and Q1 was smaller than Q4, no real surprises here. Cost of solar continues to drop in price and we will see how that impacts the future of the market, even in the circumstance of a minimum price situation.

Last night I came back from Los Angeles and will be in San Francisco the week of the 19th to talk more energy storage in a solar market. Looking forward to hearing from many of you.

Is Perry Going Rogue? The comments from nomination hearings to the current comments, Rick Perry seems to be continuously leaving the door open for training for job replacements from coal to renewables. I don’t think it means much nor do I read too much into it except perhaps placating the critics enough to keep doing what he really wants, prolonging the market for incumbent entities.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann