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The Good News. After years of fighting, lawsuits, protests and PR fights, Nevada’s solar market is once again open for business. Arguably biggest turn around in solar policy fights where a win actually followed a loss. Most other State battles settle before the complete demise. That’s the untold story about policy in solar, we win a lot. Teams in Nevada saw an opportunity to turn this around and fought the long game to get this done. Congrats to all.
The Bad News. As everyone in solar knows, bankruptcy lenders for Suniva are trying to hurt American families from lowering energy costs and providing jobs to hardworking Americans. The 201 petition to increase the price of modules to $0.78/watt would cost 88,000 solar professionals their jobs. That is the opposite of what we should all want and what we need as a Country. It is indefensible at all levels and politicians need to be educated about this.
Annual Energy Report. BNEF has published their annual energy report that estimates clean energy taking a 7.4trillion dollar share of the 10trillion power market in the next 22 years. 74% of all power investment will be clean energy! That’s a stunning statistic.
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Yann
Last call to join me in the energy storage conversation next week in San Francisco. The focus is on speaking with IPPs and operators of solar farms, primarily in Western States. I want to see how energy storage plays with your portfolio, operating and in-development. I look forward to meeting with many of you.
Getting into double digits. Solar and wind reached 10% of energy production in April. This is the first time that it reached double digits and got to 7% in 2016. That’s a long way from the less than 1% talking point we had just a few years ago. Note that this information typically leaves out distributed solar which could skew the data to the lower band of reality.
Cost of Money Winner. I want to be Apple’s solar buyer. Give me that cost of money and access to the capital and let me create an IPP of solar assets. With the green bond capital, Apple could probably get solar to match its usage across most markets using energy storage and other renewable sources. We all thought pension funds were the cheap capital, it seems that they were the long term capital.
Corporate Outreach. Amazon going solar isn’t a big deal, they’ve done much bigger solar for their web services business. However, Bezos talking about solar is a big deal. He’s currently the richest man in the world and runs a company that lives in almost all of our lives. Bezos thinking about and talking about the company’s solar goals means a lot to reaching solar supporters outside of our industry.
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Yann
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Peak Coal? Production. Down. Consumption. Down. Globally, coal looks like it has hit its peak. Production is down over 6% globally and consumption is down almost 2%. New power plants are virtually non-existent, which can’t be good news for coal industry.
Appealing to the Base. Oil fell off the $100+ levels and settles at or below $50 per barrel. That didn’t bode well for some parts of the oil drilling sector especially in Texas. The Houston Chronicle looks at how solar saved the day for some hardworking Americans that are going from the oil fields to the solar farms. This comes right behind solar hiring hundreds in Virginia with no experience required. This is the argument that needs to come out in the 201 petition argument. Raise the cost of modules by any amount and hardworking families will suffer. SEIA needs to head down to Texas right now and make an ad, the Houston Chronicle did the hard work for you. If you want, you can hire me to do it for you.
CEOs want it, CFOs approve it. A lesson many of us learn very early in our solar careers and it’s never a bad idea to repeat it. Educating CFOs is part of the mission that we must all focus on every day. Nice message from GreenBiz as they head to Verge in Hawaii next week.
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Yann
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Power loses to Healthcare. When the CEO of GE steps down, it has repercussions throughtout the giant company. It also creates some noise outside of the company to determine where the board, vis a vis shareholder value, sees the value coming from. Immelt’s largest acquisition was Alstom Power so there was some rumor that the energy unit could make its way to the corner office but it was not to be, the head of GE Healthcare will take the reigns. I can only imagine that GE saw a changing energy sector to a distributed grid at the same time GE Current wasn’t necessarily a huge success.
Research carries some weight. Research dollars often get a black eye when it comes to government spending. But with Trump’s new budget proposal (which isn’t going anywhere), big name CEOs have come out to protect the research money. I am most surprised by the US Chamber being on the list though the signatories are quite eclectic.
Regulators Rule The Day. When it comes to making an impact, we should focus on congressional seats first. The reason is because State Reps want to become members of Congress. You control a portion of that vote and you can control an issue. On the other hand, members of the regulatory body have an outsized ability to shape a State’s leadership or lack thereof when it comes to clean energy growth. The Northeast has quite the regulatory conferencing going on right now between NECPUC and the EEI conference. But more on EEI tomorrow perhaps.
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Yann