These are the top 10 most read solar articles by your peers this week!
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The Top 10 is ranked by the number of SolarWakeup.com readers that clicked on the news article during the previous week. It is the poll of the most relevant solar news of the week as judged by your colleagues and competitors.
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Yann
Hawaii will make solar easier. HECO is looking to increase rates by almost 7% to invest in some grid infrastructure. As rates increase, the proposition for the new version of net metering, which favors storage implementation, will become more attractive. As energy rates increase consumers will be more attractively compensated to produce their own energy, and coupled with dropping costs in energy storage should make the market interesting again.
Brazil solar market auctions. Companies have been hoping for positive results in Brazil for several years. Starting with auctions in 2014, Brazil was looking to break through as the largest market in South America. Combined issues in the political and economic sectors, ability to execute on the contracts were hindered. Those same conditions are leading a lag in growth in energy demand. Companies appear to be bullish on the future of the market nonetheless.
Solar’s competition. The headline may lead you to think that some slides will be explaining solar’s rapid cost decline which it does but the main takeaway from the article is more important. Who is solar’s actual competition? When was the last time solar competed against a natural gas plant? Utility scale solar has a different value proposition and competes against avoided cost while rooftop solar competes against delivered energy. Comparing rooftop to utility scale solar costs makes as much sense as comparing avoided to delivered energy.
Let me add one more. I think this is a pretty good list but there is another policy topic I look forward to. What State(s) will be seeking to do a nuclear bill in 2017? We have seen a rather attractive environment to push microgrid, efficiency, and RPS topics in those bills. As is true in most policy, compromise legislation yields happy parties on both sides of the issue.
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Have a great day!
Yann
Arizona goes full tilt. The ACC is accomplished its long standing mission. Net metering in Arizona will be replaced with some version of export pricing under the cover of value of solar pricing that stops the ‘cost-shift.’ This could spell the end of mainstream solar in one of the largest States in residential solar. The first half of 2017 could be interesting for the public companies as the various changes are implemented.
The breakthrough fund explained. Kleiner’s John Doerr explains the new Bill Gates fund to Fortune. Some interesting items of note. This is an extremely long dated investment fund. Call it 20 years to make some breakthroughs to solve the energy problem. A big opportunity is in electrifying transportation by causing drastic efficiency improvements in batteries. And policy matters, while the fund is not an advocacy group, it will push investments to be active participants in the policy process.
Community solar still weening. In Minnesota, the expectation was to have 250MW installed by the end of this year, yet it seems that number is just 55MW. There was a lot of activity in the development process but as these things go, things went slower than expected. I don’t expect that it will remain low into 2017 as projects should proceed after the ground allows for installs to proceed.
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Yann
Politics is full contact. The solar wars have been a rough fight. They’ve been rough because it is David vs Goliath in more ways than one. Unfortunately we may be seeing what happens when solar policy goes into minutiae and policy folks want to play nice. Every political outcome is a compromise, it has to be with the process we have in America. The only question is whether you are going to be in the room where it happens, because I want to be in the room where it happens.
The GROWth markets for energy. As consumers become more efficient in their energy consumption, power plant operators have to look for other growth markets. We already knew that electric vehicles are a promising energy consumer market especially as the mid-market priced vehicles hit the streets. We are also seeing the marijuana markets (the original solar pioneers I may add) increase the energy consumption. Lighting, air control, and irrigation are all energy intensive and when margins are good, then the meter can spin.
Something I did not know. I had no idea that General Mattis, the next Secretary of Defense, was an advocate for taking the military off fossil fuels. It makes a lot of sense that he would feel this way as he led the Marines in Iraq. Fuel supply was difficult and dangerous and Mattis pushed to make the utilization more efficient as early as 2005. As the former President of ACORE, Dennis McGinn, has been back in the Navy as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy. ACORE may have an interesting angle to push the Defense Department into renewable friendly policies.
Challenges for all. The biggest challenge in the solar game going forward is a realization of the challenge we have all lived through in the past few years. The market where deals get bought is not necessarily higher than the market where deals get held. The cheap money isn’t so cheap when you take into account the cost of acquisitions leaving few avenues to make profits. So as offtakers drive the price down on the PPA just to get the deal done, where will people squeeze the margin to make the profit they need to survive?
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Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann