From Day 1. For the better part of my career in solar, Lynn Jurich has been the CEO of Sunrun. If you go back to the 2008 era of solar, residential wasn’t really the thing that was expected to be the big thing, especially if you were based outside of California like I was. Think of all the companies in resi that came and went since then but Sunrun and Lynn stayed the course even while they were being counted out and placed in second. Here are some things I think folks should know about Sunrun and Lynn that impact the industry and where it is today. Sunrun held a central conviction that being aggressive on defending and advancing solar policy was a vital interest to the business. That meant investing millions of dollars every year to fight policy battles in Kansas, Wisconsin and other places that weren’t core to their market. It meant playing a founding role in TASC alongside others and always letting team members build partnerships with state associations and having them be the first to raise their hands when donation requests came in. Not only at the State level but I also give Sunrun big recognition for playing a leading role in the ITC extension in 2015 but that’s a story for another year. All of that to say that it’ll be a different when Lynn leaves her post as CEO at the end of the month. Of course, it is great to see Mary Powell join Sunrun as CEO coming in from her board director role that she’s held for 3 years and of course as former CEO of Green Mountain Power.
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Enough Infra Talk. It seems like the one topic that should be bipartisan is getting stuck in the hamster wheel. The problem with big bills that have little price tags is that nobody really gets what they want and they become hard to fight for. Interestingly, it’s the politics of the two infrastructure bills that will either pass both or perhaps tank both. Even the manufacturing tax credit got left out of the bipartisan bill. Schumer’s threat to cancel the August recess seems to have folks’ attention however, we’ve got an Obama birthday party to attend!
Local Manufacturing. One of the best operating roles I had in my career was running a company with domestic manufacturing. Not only did I have the exposure to US manufacturing in clean tech but it was also domestic manufacturing in California. Domestic manufacturing has massive benefits for businesses except for the labor cost. That’s why the best way to drive up US manufacturing is to turn the payroll expense from a deduction to either a credit or multiply the deduction by 3x or 4x. If you want more of something in America, incentivize it with the tax code, that’s why we have one-year depreciation on private jets!
Let’s Be Optimistic. Over the past 20 years the amount of capital that has come into renewables has skyrocketed but the chart that shows the total dollars only tells a tiny story. Pre-2010, so much of the money was going into projects in a few Countries at ridiculously high unit prices and stunning venture capital investments into thin films or other breakthrough tech. The reality is that the $150bb plus that were deployed last year represent over a trillion in unit adjusted deployment compared to a decade ago. Here’s the kicker, there is no limit to how much money would invest in this sector, available capital is endless. It’s the pipeline of available projects that is capped by incumbents slowing development and more importantly the limit to how many development platforms that can reliably deploy that limitless capital. Finding and making the project investable is the gating item to deploy money, having the money is the commodity. Time to pay up fund managers!
Flexible Transmission Assets. Transmission upgrades are now more than wires and substations. One of the uses in the first infrastructure bill is to make the grid more ready for renewables and that includes transmission and distribution level energy storage. Adding the flexible power to the substation should significantly raise the amount of variable generation that a substation can manage. How to drive that investment or send a price signal for that investment is the key question I have now.
SPI Ready. Louisiana, site of SPI in 7 weeks, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the Country and has now reinstitute their mask mandate. We’re back to the what if questions about SPI from where we were last year but it still seems like everyone is ready to get rolling in NOLA.
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RFP Support. As more and more development opportunities and RFPs include energy storage, it’s important to understand the systems that drive the investment model in front of you. While FlexGen leads the Country in integrating energy storage projects and building the leading software platforms that operate them, FlexGen also provides engineering services for the pre-development work that determines if a project should be built in the first place. As you support RFP responses, let FlexGen support you. Hit reply and I’ll connect you to the team.
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