No Column Today. Your solar news will return tomorrow including a new SolarWakeup podcast about the concept of a competitive power market in the Southeast United States. If you prefer to hear my podcast from the other side of the table, I joined the Solar Spotlight from Greenlancer podcast to talk about solar.
Thoughts. Take a moment to see how you can help our friends in the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Sally is going to be incredibly wet, when it passed my house last weekend we got 10 inches of rain and now is forecasted to do 30 inches in Louisiana. It’s wet and slow, one of the worst combinations for hurricanes.
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Yann
No More Naked Roofs. Every house has a roof on it so why doesn’t every roof have solar? Within our community this doesn’t seem like a stretch and even may be our goal, so why doesn’t this possibility get more airtime in mainstream news? The jobs, the distributed resilience and cost savings for consumers are all benefits that will be the side effect of this endeavor that wouldn’t actually cost anything.
The Google Promise. There are layers to the Google promise on carbon neutrality. In this latest announcement, Google said it will only use carbon free electricity by the year 2030 including in a 24/7 time matching. This will drive significant energy storage and other generation that will allow for that to happen. Second, Google has now repaid its climate debt, meaning its emissions since startup have been offset. This is the first time I’ve seen climate debt paid off, what would happen if every Fortune 500 did this going back to 2000 or earlier?
Making Climate Political. Normally politicians have to message in order to drive polling numbers in their favor. Climate and clean energy issues have long polled well in a bipartisan way but have failed to drive the politicians in their direction. One of the problems may have been that bipartisan issues don’t do well in politics. To that end, Joe Biden’s campaign seems to be happy to take the issue as their own and making it partisan. I don’t love the idea of solar becoming 100% partisan but it’s been somewhat so already. Let’s hope both sides fight over solar as their issue and who loves it more.
A SPAC To Watch. SPAC are all the rage these days. While not new, acquisition corporations are gaining favor in the capital markets as an easier and less turbulent path to public markets. This SPAC, Climate Change Crisis Real Impact I Acquisition Corp, has a notable CEO in David Crane. Crane, as you may recall, sounded the alarm about climate change when he was the CEO of NRG. The Chairperson of the SPAC is Mary Powell, former CEO of Green Mountain Power and still a director of Sunrun amongst other clean energy companies.
New Products, Lower Prices. The SolarWakeup Buyer’s Group has been hard at work to improve the product and price list over the past few weeks. If you haven’t talked with us about it, send us a note or do a price discovery.
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Yann
Here’s The Scoop. There’s something big brewing in the residential solar market. SolarWakeup has learned that industry veterans are coming back into the market in a big way, looking to to build the next national platform through acquisitions of existing market leaders. With the fragmentation that exists today, it makes sense that this would be the strategy and for those companies that seek that exponential growth it seems that the opportunity is coming up. We can’t say more at this point but stay tuned to this space…
An Expanding Market. Even with the impacts of COVID in the space, halting installations and changing sales strategies, the residential solar market is now forecasted to remain strong. After my comments were published by PV-Magazine about the finance market faltering, Woodmac responded and changed the terminology to indicate a strong investment environment for residential solar. The forecasters also increased the 2020 estimates by 700MW to remain flat year over year. This was something SolarWakeup predicted in May on our podcast episode. Even if megawatts will remain flat, SolarWakeup has the estimate at 10-15% increase over 2019 numbers, total spend will be up over 10% given the average system value has increased by almost 15% due to bigger systems and energy storage inclusion. You can now understand what drives the investment thesis in the scoop above.
500+ Air Quality. 6 of the largest fires in California, including the largest ever, are burning right now. Oregon saw fires within 20 miles of populated areas around Portland and the impacts of the fires are dramatic. Air quality measurements are reaching very unhealthy levels, over 600 AQI in some areas. At 500 AQI, you need to consider wearing heavily filtered masks inside your home at all times. We don’t know what this means for long term health but this is definitely not a positive sign of things to come.
Let’s Have Solutions. As I read about Gaval family in Pennsylvania, I think about how the solar industry can be a home for them. We are all thinking about how companies operate with more remote work, I’d love to see the idea of distributed offices instead of larger facilities in metros. Imagine a 20 person office in Mahanoy City, a coal mining town where the Gavals live. The solar industry is advocating for distributed energy, why couldn’t we also distribute our workforce in a similar way.
New Products, Lower Prices. The SolarWakeup Buyer’s Group has been hard at work to improve the product and price list over the past few weeks. If you haven’t talked with us about it, send us a note or do a price discovery.
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Yann
Head Into The Weekend. We are going to put a bow on Q3 this month and head into Q4 with the biggest backlog and solar development pipeline in the history of solar. Here are your top news for the week.
Baseload To ELCC. You should go back and read the LA Times interview with the head of CAISO that talks about the impact of the energy transition and what’s real or not. In the discussion about going to 100% renewables there are lessons that will be learned and one will be that we need to look at reserve margins and resource adequacy. Those two factors, especially local RA and local capacity will be key in execution a reliable renewable grid.
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Yann