Palmetto State Sunrise. All the parties seem to have come to an agreement. The Senate passed the bill and it goes to the House for reconciliation and then the Governor. This is expected to happen and open the market.
Rating For California CCAs. Peninsula Clean Energy got the first credit rating for a CCA. This is big news and signals a positive future for non-IOU utilities in the State. More to come.
Sunrun Earnings Out. Typical Q1 drop in deployments but a strong quarter by Sunrun. It’s still expensive to sell solar to 242,000 homeowners but lower pricing isn’t going to stop the market share growth according to CEO Lynn Jurich. My take is that residential solar is growing rapidly and everyone should focus on what they are strongest at and we all win.
20% Go 100%. 1 in 5 Americans live in a State that has a 100% RPS. That’s a big number.
More Climate Disaster Ironies. The UN extinction report came out and buried in the flurry of Congressional news. Sad state of the environment for sure which creates a more stark background for Pompeo’s comments on the ice cap melt.
Walmart Adds More Solar. 40MW of solar on 46 locations were signed by the retailer with solar firm, C2 Energy Capital. Projects will be in 5 States and signals an ongoing commitment to add solar by corporations for the expressed purpose of saving money.
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Yann
Cooperative Gets Regulated. Cooperative and municipal utilities are largely unregulated even within regulated utility markets. They make the rules in line with their members and member companies instead of in line with the regulator body. Colorado is looking to make a change based on the fact that Sri-State is losing many members and may not be in a position to do the best thing for consumers if left unchecked.
Bizarre Comment Of The Day. Pompeo says that melting ice caps open new opportunities for trade. Which is like saying that the view of the stars is better when your house burns down. Next….
IPP Is A Hard Business. I spent a good part of my day looking at the first quarter results for the two micro inverter companies, partly to learn about how they are placing themselves strategically within the residential supply chain and partly with jealousy. SolarEdge and Enphase had strong quarters as distributors build back stock, adding cash to their balance sheets and making great margins. On the other hand, I’m not so sure that being a public IPP is such a great idea. To do IPP right, you have to buy the right assets which means sometimes it’s more profitable to say no to a deal. Someone once said that SunEdison can’t go wrong buying any deal even if it negative IRR because their stock price increase every time they buy. That didn’t work out and my hope is that IPPs stay under the radar and just own great long term assets in private.
Doing More To Do It Right. Big news for Quick Mount and a note about bringing more quality to homeowners that go solar. You may be surprised to hear that most solar lenders have an approved list for modules and inverters but not for racking and mounting. It opens up the change and very real likelihood that a leak will happen within 5 years of the system install. That’s why I’m happy to see Sunnova add mounting to their approved vendor list and ensure that homeowners are getting quality systems from their installers. My hope and daily work includes asking other lenders to do the same so that homeowners are protected. I would also like to see more from the trade associations on the topic of waterproofing for solar installations, it’s an important issue that we can no longer ignore.
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Yann
Tariff Details Coming Today. Lighthizer announced yesterday that the new tariff list will go on the federal register later this morning and will go into effect first thing on Friday. Once the register is populated then the analysis can start whether this has an impact on the solar industry. Don’t discount the impact this has on domestic supply chains and the local costs.
Big Quarter At SolarEdge. The public inverter company had a massive quarter and growing both year over year and quarter over quarter. This is the benefit of being a global company so you can flatten the solar coaster’s seasonality. New revenues from non-inverter business units is starting to impact the company as well.
Senator Wyden Tax Fix. Senator Wyden, who was on the wrong side of the 201 trade fight, is on the right side of clean energy tax incentives. His plan calls for the rebalancing of tax incentives for energy generators and includes PTC and ITC aspects. For solar it calls for the permanent 30% ITC and pays for the policy with the removal of the fossil fuel subsidies.
Climate Change On Campus. Part of the election discussion around climate change is a generational one. Axios goes onto the college campus to talk about the need for climate change policy with the next generation.
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More Tariff Trouble. My day was going fine, enjoying a nice weekend in Florida visiting my new nephew, when Trump comes across the Twitter and lets America know that he’s raising tariffs on more imported goods. This is potentially a big deal for solar if it actually goes into effect and gets worse. Remember, the negotiations were close to complete according to reports when he sent the tweet. Now China is thinking about calling off the talks altogether. We all know he likely sent the tweet with a wink, playing foreign policy chicken with American jobs. The reality is that American factories rely on robust supply chains that include on and offshore suppliers. Less offshore supply increases the price on domestic supply and therefore slows factory operations. Let’s hope this doesn’t drag solar down more, this may be tariff number 5 or 6 on our industry.
Inslee Goes 100. A big release by the Governor Inslee presidential campaign. His plan is called 100% Clean Energy For America and it knocks the roof off every State 100% RPS plan that’s been passed. I want you to read the highlights yourself by clicking here, but here is a teaser. No more coal pollution by 2030, 100% clean electricity by 2035 and a focus on front line and low income Americans impacted by climate change. This is the type of plan that we’ve been talking about in back rooms that we said we needed. We wanted the campaign that elevated climate change to the Presidential debate stage and make it an issue. We are there now and we need to grab the opportunity by the horns and turn it into action.
Tesla’s Vision To Standardize Solar. There is some out of the box thinking coming out of Tesla these days. Most of us that live solar every day would argue that it’s very difficult to standardize solar given that every house is different. Tesla seems to be saying that that want homeowners to buy solar in prepackaged quantities so that the logistics of the trucks and costs are repetitive in nature. You can go through the sales cycle on their website which gets millions of hits per month and may be a great sales funnel if they can figure out how to get those visitors to transact.
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Yann