Monopoly Overreach And Insanity. This got my blood pressure up early yesterday when Twitter started circulating the news that NextEra approached Duke with the intention to acquire the Carolina utility. Even though Duke is based in Charlotte, it has operations in North and South Carolina as well as Florida. NextEra which already has well over 50% of Florida’s consumers can’t get enough when it comes to a regulated non-competitive market. Imagine the power that such a utility would have across the Southeast, politicians would have to allow them to do anything because what other choice would they have? This is incredibly dangerous but entirely plausible.
Nonstationary Power. When Tesla first released the power wall they called that division stationary power. I publicly opined on this platform years ago that stationary power implies non-stationary power to be on the auto side of the company. Delaware had done a vehicle to grid pilot a few years ago and Enel has been showing off their programs in Italy online. With the CPUC enabling some testing of V2G we’ll look a bit into how that overlaps with the solar industry. Homes with EVs often have 70kWh plus in their driveway, it makes sense to have the ability to use that energy in certain situations.
Speaking Of EVs. Do any SolarWakeup readers know anything about ev conversions for internal combustion vehicles? Please reach out and share your tips.
Solar Market Update Call. The solar market can be considered complex and fast moving but if you join this monthly market call you can make sense of it. Register for the next Roth Capital solar market call on October 2nd at 10am Eastern.
Get The Power. Later this year, the residential solar market is going to get some major savings with most of their balance of systems when the shift to higher power solar modules really gets going. With power density going up more than 10%, those savings will trickle down to mounts, rails, inverters, labor and wire and hopefully into installers’ wallets. Make sure you are getting the best modules and pricing possible by joining the SolarWakeup Buyer’s Group. You can see the pricing on our price discovery page.
- News & Observer: Duke Energy reportedly a takeover target by a Florida utility company
- Greentech Media: California’s Interconnection Rules Open Doors to Flexible Solar-Storage, Vehicle-to-Grid Charging
- PV-Magazine: Women entrepreneurs are essential to last-mile distribution of renewable energy technologies
- Rocky Mountain Institute: Clean Energy Is Canceling Gas Plants
- Reuters: Wildfire smoke slashes solar energy production in California
- Utility Dive: Vistra to retire 6.8 GW coal, blaming ‘irreparably dysfunctional MISO market’
- PV-Tech: DSM sells solar coatings business to Covestro as part of larger €1.4 billion deal
- Axios: Shell plans up to 9,000 job cuts by 2022
Opinion
Best, Yann