This is your SolarWakeup for September 22nd, 2020

The Power Of Markets. There’s a new report from Deloitte that talks about the cost, feasibility and timing of the utility decarbonization goals. I don’t want to judge the conflicts of the report but it’s important to note that Deloitte makes a significant market working with utilities. Deloitte measure the feasibility as doable with significant cost and need for innovation for success. The counterpoint isn’t that it’s not feasible, it’s that the market needs to change and be competitive.

The New PodIn anticipation of the report, SolarWakeup’s latest podcast looks at the energy market in the Southeast US and what it would look like if it was competitive. I talk with Mike O’Boyle from Energy Innovation who wrote the study. Without spoiling the report, consumers would save billions of dollars and get cleaner electricity while the States would create jobs.

RBG Environmental Opinions. Environmental laws have not had the airtime nor headlines at the Supreme Court until recently. Politico does a nice job of describing RBG’s role in the opinions, especially around the EPA’s jurisdiction over bodies of water and pollution. When the EPA runs into jurisdictional battles with States that aren’t interested in following federal rules, you can thank Ginsburg for the opinion that gave EPA jurisdiction writing, “When Con­gress elected to make EPA’s input a prerequisite to state action under the act, it did so expressly.”

It’s Battery Day. Tesla is holding its annual shareholder meeting and battery day. Watch for big headlines about battery production and the price roadmap ahead.

Corporate (Virtual) PPAs. We’ve seen several gigawatts of solar transacted between solar farm and corporate off taker. Some call them virtual, corporate or remote arrangements. What we need is for those transactions to be open-sourced, so if you are a counsel, financier, developer, owner or customer in one of those transactions it would be great for the market for that to be explained to the market and made less esoteric.

Launch of the SCF Suite 2.0. My friends over at Sustainable Capital Finance continue to innovate in the fast-growing C&I sector. They just launched their newly revamped software, the SCF Suite 2.0. The platform offers solar developers and EPC’s an efficient, centralized dashboard to receive indicative PPA pricing, download proposals, and populate & execute term sheets, EPC agreements & PPAs. The SCF Suite has been retooled with a fresh new look and the addition of many highly requested features. If you’re interested in learning more about how this software can speed up your transaction process, as well as increase your sales conversion rates through automated agreement population and e-signature features, feel free to check out their info page.

Opinion

Best, Yann