More tomorrow. Don’t forget to get your tickets for next week’s Equinox DC hosted by Vote Solar. If you donate, spend or sponsor for more than $1,000, you get to write a paragraph on SolarWakeup.
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Yann
Why Not 1%? What would it take for you to allocate 1% of your revenue to policy spend, either internal FTE or supporting trade groups? I’ve given this some thought and think that most of it has to do that the business didn’t have the spend automatically ingrained in the business plan. The funny upside is that everyone’s revenue would grow by more than 1% if we all did it but nobody wants to be the only one doing it. Maybe 1% isn’t the right number but what if it was 0.5%? Can a $1million business afford $5k? Can a $100,000,000 afford $500k?
Getting Pricing Signals. Pricing signals are naturally imperfect until the market adapts to the inputs that drive the signal. If the market driving that pricing is large enough, than the value would be high enough to drive the market scale, just look at any SREC market. Limit the demand and have too much supply, the pricing would be too low to make a difference. For energy storage there is even more value, you don’t need to create a legislative demand. All we need is for the power markets to value things like speed, stability and flexibility and operators will be able to monetize. This is especially important for the solar market because it allows solar farms to pop up without off takers, just through the time flexibility provided by storage with the right signals.
Educating Consumers. I want to know how your sales pitches went in the past week. How much demand did you get for batteries and what did you say? Did your close rate go up or down? What amount of information did they give that showed misinformation and what was the biggest misunderstanding?
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Looking At Colleges. Colleges still represent the most untapped off taker portfolio in the solar market today. As a group, they have the largest combination of energy consumption and bankable credit. College institutions also have a will to be 100% renewable and now is time for the solar industry to solve this problem for them. There have been examples of how this has worked, see Stanford and Hopkins, but I’d love to hear other ways that you’re solving this market opportunity.
Newsom Speaks Out. Here is the twitter thread from the California Governor on PG&E. This is the strongest statement thus far but falls short from calling for something specific, likely due to the process that the CPUC must enter into as the regulatory body where his demands may come out.
RWE Setting The Stage. RWE clearly doesn’t want out of its coal plants ahead of schedule. This doesn’t really mean they don’t want to close them, it just means that they want something in return for closing them ahead of time. Shareholders strike again…
CALSSA Auction Dinner. Join me on Friday night in Berkeley for the annual auction dinner hosted by CALSSA. This raises funds to keep the largest market in the US running which is key for most of you. Get your tickets here
Vote Solar Equinox DC. One week later on October 24th, join me in DC for Vote Solar Equinox DC. There will be some amazing speakers, as always, and help Vote Solar raise funds to keep markets open all over America. If you don’t think funding this event is for you, the beverage sponsor for Equinox DC is Vinyasun, a local Florida installer. Justin Hoysradt understands that funding policy means more business opportunity for his small business. If you donate, sponsor or buy $1,000 worth of tickets, you get to write a paragraph for this newsletter. Send me the receipt to get the reward. If you’re more interested in a $100,000 donation, hit reply and I’ll make the appropriate introduction.
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Yann
PG&E Blackout AAR. The PG&E blackout is now over and it’s time to review how it went. First reports show that a medically dependent resident lost his ventilator and passed away 12 minutes after losing power and the City of Moraga went through a scary 70 acre wildfire hours after losing their electricity. Because PG&E systems and emergency systems were not working as planned, emergency responders went door to door to wake homeowners up in the middle of the night, grab their things and flee. For many of you, this may trigger a recall to my climate story from Hurricane Irma two years ago when we packed up and fled the State of Florida. That same waterproof box still holds the important items, passports, birth certificates etc but Friday morning my wife asked me if the waterproof box was still functional for a fire event. Moraga is less than 10 miles from our house in Walnut Creek and here we are buying a fireproof box. There are going to be a lot of stories about how PG&E did (not well) and what the solution is (solar/storage/microgrids) but also some editorials that give the Governor some much needed political cover to act.
Change The System To Solve The Problem. When PG&E filed bankruptcy they knew that the newly inaugurated Governor would have a hard time pushing his power so early on. With hundreds of thousands of union jobs and pensions on the line, breaking up PG&E is easier said than done. The Governor said it right on saying, “This is not a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” he said. “Neglect, a desire to advance not public safety but profits.” PG&E is a poorly managed utility that does too much, covers too diverse a service area and got comfortable. The management has always focused on the quarter end results and not the impact to consumers 5 years down the road. Why should they? Imagine if their CEO had said 5 years ago that they need to focus on electrifying buildings away from gas (they own a gas utility) and help ratepayers go solar with storage. In fact PG&E would incentivize the creation of microgrids in load centers with solar everywhere. They would become change from a centralized power model to a grid that gave priority access to local, clean power. That CEO would have been fired on the spot and would probably have been considered unhireable by other power companies. But the CEO would have been right and nothing to show for it. That’s the CEO that Newsom should push on the PG&E shareholders, the CEO that predicted the obvious future and acted on it and put their own career on the line because he knew and did something about it. Yes, such a (former) CEO exists and he currently spends his time as a member of the Vote Solar board amongst other things, David Crane is the CEO that PG&E needs. Not all shareholders will love it but they should because Crane would give the company and the Governor the cover they need to think longer term. The interests are finally aligned, PG&E cannot keep the current form of management in place, they are only there to restructure the company from bankruptcy and not service the ratepayers for the long term. More editorials will give more political power to the Governor to call the handful of hedge funds and make his demands.
National Grid Under Review. We’ve talked about the delay and uncertainty for developers in MA and I’m glad to see the DPU acting to make sure the right things are happened under SMART.
Bad Headline Example 2,478. Solar panels work great in a blackout, just put a voltage meter on them. Grid protections require the inverter to isolate when the grid is down and therefore you need the right electrical configuration to get access to the energy from the panels which leads us to batteries. You all know this and the Bloomberg reporter does.
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Yann