Trade Saga. We’ve been here before, another anti-dumping trade case has been filed. This time highlighting subsidies and unfair pricing from product with the origin of Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. There was some thoughts that India could be included but it was not. We now embark on a 6 month process with a check-in in July for a preliminary determination. The filing has the name of some US based manufacturers that filed the case, namely First Solar and Q-Cells. Given the IRA benefits for domestic manufacturing, I wonder what the impact of local subsidies could imply to the case though I don’t expect much. I’ll refrain from my thoughts on this overall saga that has plagued this industry for a decade plus but wouldn’t it be great to be able to buy solar panels at the sub 10cents per watt that other markets get to?

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Yann


Houston. Good morning from 37,000 feet as I head to Houston for the Voltility Energy Storage Summit. This is becoming one of my favorite events because it is centered around networking and not pay for play advertisements on the handful of panels. While I love going to many events and understand the incredible cost to put them on, having done that with SolarWakeup Live! I love being in person with other leaders building out this market. Should we bring back the SolarWakeup Live! event?

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Yann


Negative Price Signals. I always have a hard time with bad headlines. While the Washington Post article doesn’t say anything novel, the headline implies that solar is such terrible energy that it gets thrown away. What it doesn’t say is two important things. First is that cheap solar energy has lowered the cost of energy for all of California in a way that nobody every predicted with a plethora of low cost PPAs that have no commodity price adjustment for fuel. Second, is that a negative price, is a price signal for investments that leverage arbitrage, like batteries. Energy storage arbitrage will enable more solar to be built than the 47GW that already has been built and ultimately create a base case for solar making up for most of the generation on the CAISO grid. That being said, there’s control complications that need to be taken into account and keeping those batteries flexible won’t be easy. This article is the exact reason why I love chairing the energy storage division for SEIA, because the combo of solar with batteries is exactly what we need in this energy transition.

Resilient Puerto Rico. Some humble brags for my team at FlexGen for signing on to a great project in Puerto Rico with Arclight Capital’s Infinigen. We all know how unreliable the Puerto Rico grid has been after many storms have harmed the infrastructure. This is an important step for more resilience that I’m proud to be a part of on Earth Day. 

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Yann


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Yann