The G-7 Summit. Leaders from the G-7 met in the UK this weekend and climate was a central point. The big headlines came in around transportation and competing with China in supporting developing nations with infrastructure investments that align with climate goals. Australia’s presence in the room made any joint statement around coal difficult but as we talked about in the past, that ship has sailed. The group did make bold forecasts on fossil fuel cars, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels and expanding foreign financing to match policies abroad.
A Note About Capital. The communique labeled the support to the tune of $100billion per year. That number is completely meaningless. What governments need to focus on is creating a bankable environment for the development of the projects that they are looking to be built. Allowing for streamlined zoning and permitting and access to revenue streams would create the path for the trillions of ESG capital, in all currencies, to get involved. Policies not headlines would rule the day here.
Markets React To Price Signals. National Grid wants FERC to do more for grid stability and I say that all the RTOs should figure out how to create a deeper market for the price signals that create a stable grid. Ancillary services are in the market but can lack trading volume that saw the frequency response market in PJM lose a build signal a few years ago. Part of the solution is creating a more dynamic market with shorter time spans potentially, allowing for trades to happen far more often that they do today.
Hot Price Signals. California is starting to see the warm weather and a message from the grid operator to expect shutoffs raised the price signal. A long summer ahead.
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Yann
Have A Great Weekend. Keep your eyes on the news coming out of the bipartisan talks for the infrastructure bill. See you on Monday!
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First Solar Grows. First Solar announced that they are expanding their manufacturing plant in Ohio by 3.3GW. This will be the 3rd plant in Ohio and will start manufacturing in 2023. First Solar is doubling down on the domestic manufacturing advantage they have, in part due to the supply chain differentiation the company has. If only the Ohio legislators saw the ability to create local policies that would enable First Solar modules to gain a market within the surrounding areas of this job boom.
Oil Majors, Look Out. Last week came the results but this week the oil majors are pivoting into the PR push by investors and outside influencers. We’ve covered multiple times that I see the oil majors are looking at electricity as a transportation fuel replacement and will be getting into the generation, transmission, trading and retail sale. This marks the start of the future competition between utilities, IPPs and oil majors.
It’s Real. In case you wanted to know if storage markets were expanding, they are and they will continue to grow.
Soft Costs. It’s shaping up to be a big summer for soft cost reduction with the launch of SolarAPP and with continued innovation from the leading solar software companies. OpenSolar, today announced a partnership with the largest US design and engineering firm GreenLancer, connecting OpenSolar’s highly regarded 3D design and sales toolkit with the on-demand planset generation service reportedly used by over 5,000 contractors. With OpenSolar bringing experience from its users in over 100 countries, Birchy and the new US team I know are focused on supporting US installers to drive down costs (Australia remember is at $1.10 per W residential cost all in, with 25% solar penetration). They launched their ‘Opportunity Wide Open’ summer series today, in which they’ll share a range of resources and tips to help solar contractors reduce cost and scale. There will be a lot of approaches but good to see partnerships in technology creating savings for the solar community.
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Q1 Storage Grows. The acceleration in pipeline, backlog and construction within energy storage is real. With 2020 showing the signs of a grid looking for additional ancillary services and consumers adding behind the meter storage, 2021 continued to build on this with rapid expansion of generation+ and stand alone storage. The Texas winter storm in February showed the need for frequency regulation which is likely to be seen again this summer in western states suffering from record droughts.
Report On Solar Forecast. kWh Analytics and 12 contributors published the Solar Risk Assessment report which shows that the P99 estimates for production (P99 meaning that this should be accurate 99% of the time) are not often actually modeled accurately. The report also goes into detail about the degradation estimates for modules and the issues that are affecting the module quality.
Green Hydrogen Targets. Los Angeles and the Department of Energy made news with green hydrogen yesterday. After a decade of targeting record solar costs which were surpassed ahead of schedule, DOE is taking their talents to hydrogen. A note of history, my first solar module supplier was Uni-Solar, a division of Energy Conversion Devices and one of their science project divisions was solid state hydrogen fuel storage for the automotive sector and the corresponding fueling systems. Like many items at ECD, I don’t think this was every commercialized but a note of intersection for our readers.
Soft Costs. It’s shaping up to be a big summer for soft cost reduction with the launch of SolarAPP and with continued innovation from the leading solar software companies. OpenSolar, today announced a partnership with the largest US design and engineering firm GreenLancer, connecting OpenSolar’s highly regarded 3D design and sales toolkit with the on-demand planset generation service reportedly used by over 5,000 contractors. With OpenSolar bringing experience from its users in over 100 countries, Birchy and the new US team I know are focused on supporting US installers to drive down costs (Australia remember is at $1.10 per W residential cost all in, with 25% solar penetration). They launched their ‘Opportunity Wide Open’ summer series today, in which they’ll share a range of resources and tips to help solar contractors reduce cost and scale. There will be a lot of approaches but good to see partnerships in technology creating savings for the solar community.
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Have a great day!
Yann