Bernie, Obama and Biden. Within the last week Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign and endorsed Joe Biden. Obama joined with his endorsement yesterday as well. Part of the Sanders endorsement comes with moving the Biden campaign into a more progressive platform including on climate. I look forward to seeing policies like Jay Inslee’s climate plan make an appearance but it is important to remember that the election between Biden and Trump will probably not have much policy depth.
Steyer Weighs In. The former presidential candidate writes in an op-ed that DC shouldn’t keep throwing good money after bad when it comes to oil infrastructure (my summary). I assume he is referring to a possible deal around infrastructure that bails out bankrupt oil companies. Reality in this scenario is not whether one gets the other, its whether both or neither happen.
Solar Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania solar development is the next frontier, like Texas before it was. Yesterday we saw an announcement from UPenn that it signed a 220MW solar deal. The School District of Philadelphia is hiring a new Solar Energy Teacher for Pennsylvania's first Solar Energy Career and Technical Education program. The Bright Solar Futures vocational training program is the first of its kind in the nation and will kick off at Frankford High School this fall. The job post can be found here.
Talking Solar. This Friday at 2pm EST you can join in on a discussion I’ll be attending with other clean tech news outlets, register here. And on April 22nd at 10am EST, I will be speaking with Phil Shen from Roth Capital to update on the current trends in residential solar. You can register for that call here and you should join Phil’s mailing list by emailing him at pshen@roth.com.
Solar Stimulus $0 Year 1 PPA. My friends over at Sustainable Capital Finance are offering an extremely beneficial financing option for businesses & non-profits looking to adopt solar. Their Solar Stimulus PPA offers a $0 solar energy spend for the first year of operation, helping organizations redirect those dollars towards payroll and other critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer whose potential clients have voiced concerns over COVID-19 in relation to adopting solar, this is a great solution for you.
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Yann
Making Virginia Official. Governor Northam has signed the Virginia Clean Economy Act into law. The 100% clean energy by 2050 bill also accomplishes several other clean energy goals between now and 2050. Just a few years ago this would have been hard to imagine but when a few elections ushered in new leadership, Virginia’s clean tech policy advocates had the ability to see their hard work pay off. Advocates had been working on this well before the politics seemed possible and there is a lesson learned. In politics, the education and advocacy never stops even when things seem unlikely. Same is true in your state and in DC, it may seem far fetched right now to see how we move our ball forward but we need to keep trying and working it.
Negotiating Package 4. Speaking of politics, it appears that while negotiations have broken down in the Senate they have reappeared elsewhere. Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin look to be negotiating the next package. Before you get too excited, most of the public discussion are said to be around economic issues like expansion of the PPP and more stimulus. And that is where my hope is, solar has the unique opportunity to create economic growth for the oil sector and others hurt by the pandemic.
Oil’s Postcard From The Future. Over the weekend, OPEC+ announced a major cut to product at almost 10million barrels per day. The pandemic has created a bigger problem than drilling though, nobody is using oil quite like they were before. Airplanes are grounded and cars are sitting in driveways which has reduced consumption by somewhere around 25million barrels per day. The Texas oil sector still needs support and will likely be looking for that help in DC in the coming weeks. With the House set to return on May 4th, expect dealmaking to happen between now and then.
How Are You Adapting? What are you doing different now that you expect to continue well past the current work restrictions? If you have a unique process that you care to share, I’m interested to see how the rest of you are adapting to the reality that meeting face to face will not be happening for the foreseeable future. I am still hopeful that things return to somewhat normal by this summer, meaning we all get to meet again at SPI but I know that hope is not a strategy.
Solar Stimulus $0 Year 1 PPA. My friends over at Sustainable Capital Finance are offering an extremely beneficial financing option for businesses & non-profits looking to adopt solar. Their Solar Stimulus PPA offers a $0 solar energy spend for the first year of operation, helping organizations redirect those dollars towards payroll and other critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer whose potential clients have voiced concerns over COVID-19 in relation to adopting solar, this is a great solution for you.
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Learning The Lessons of 2008. I’ve heard from some of you and see it online from many. Now is not the time to ask for things like the ITC extension or the grant. Especially when the headlines from the weekend read that democrats are holding up additional aid for PPP. The truth is that good policy doesn’t come around until the politics allow for it and right now is when the politics work. Solar doesn’t just want policies like automatic permitting, we need them to rebound but other than now, getting that done would be almost impossible. A year from now, all we would hear is that we shouldn’t pick winners and losers or the need for balanced budgets. The politics allow for solar to see a future where every roof in America can have it and every new power plant is solar with storage, let’s give it our shot.
Pollution Is A Cost. A new Harvard study found that the death rate was higher in counties where long term exposure to pollution was more prevalent. This isn’t the first correlation between quality of life being worse off when pollution is a part of it. So why haven’t regulators been able to include societal benefits when utilities file for new power plants? Well, politics tend to prevail when money talks, even when lives are at stake. Like I said last week, we now have exact data on the cost of pollution, regulators should use it.
WFH vs Traffic vs ICE. There is an interesting problem developing all over the country. With everyone working from home and no longer commuting, you see the impact it has on pollution. While they are at home, energy consumption in commercial buildings is also down. So now the technical problem is what if working from home isn’t temporary. If companies are getting used to the remote nature of workers how does that impact the solar industry. Overlay the natural progression to electric vehicles, you now have the reverse charging that we were anticipating which was a commuter charging their EV at their work. Less cars on the road means less traffic which means less pollution. More people working from home means energy consumption trends change. The working technical papers for utilities probably wasn’t anticipating this, let’s see what they and the solar industry come up with.
New Survey Next Week. We are taking the week off from the tracking survey. There are too many open ends in the market and we had the last four weeks to summarize. It will come back next week. A free copy of the summary is available to any residential solar installer, just hit reply and ask for it.
Solar Stimulus $0 Year 1 PPA. My friends over at Sustainable Capital Finance are offering an extremely beneficial financing option for businesses & non-profits looking to adopt solar. Their Solar Stimulus PPA offers a $0 solar energy spend for the first year of operation, helping organizations redirect those dollars towards payroll and other critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer whose potential clients have voiced concerns over COVID-19 in relation to adopting solar, this is a great solution for you.
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Yann
Sales Still Soft. The results from this week’s SolarWakeup tracking survey show a slight improvement in sales week to week, still down 39% from the pre-corona Q1 average. The variance from contractor to contractor was larger than prior weeks which makes me think that some contractors are doing better in the new sales environment and adapting software solutions to make homeowners comfortable enough to still go solar.
Zoom And Other. Venture capital has been most interested in solar by investing through proposal tools. When asked, the survey responses show that this market is still wide open and completely fragmented. More interestingly, many of you said that you use a custom or mixture of solutions. In this survey, no platform got more than 8% of the responses. Maybe you want to give me more insight on this, you can do so by clicking reply and just typing the name of the tool you use to create your solar proposal. On the positive side, 50% of you said you closed a sale via video conference last week!
Getting Approved. Necessity is the mother of invention and social distancing is the mother of all necessity. San Luis Obispo County has enabled their permit process to let micro inverter solar installations get an instant permit. It is possible, the proof is here and SolarAPP can’t come fast enough. At the same time, the capable team at CALSSA is working (from home) with building departments across California to make this more mainstream. If you have a building department contact, look out for the info coming from NREL. From the survey, 70% of the building departments postponed inspections and 37% have closed. This is going to slow down the process of moving the backlog and possible slowing payment installers receive from loan providers or homeowners. Improving from last week, 52% are now accepting no-touch permitting and 22% are doing remote inspections.
You Want (Need) PPP. 46% of the survey responses say that they have delayed payments to suppliers, vendors or service providers. More concerning is that 78% are worried about the working capital position which is healthy given the unknown but also alarming. This means you should be talking to your partners about what it’s going to take to weather the storm at least until PPP funds are actually in bank accounts across the Country. It’s best to be upfront about the concerns you have and people will work with each other. The solar industry didn’t cause this issue and will help see it through together.
A Congressional Showdown. The political negotiations of stimulus package 4 have begun. Now is the time to make your voice heard, work with your local trade groups, write a letter with some other community solar companies and tell your story to your member. There’s a good chance that ability to take the ITC will be depressed this year because of the slowdown so a grant could be helpful to the industry to help it rebuild and regain the momentum that we had.
Have a great weekend!
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Yann