Who doesn’t love some inside baseball and behind the scenes. The top story tonight is by the NY Times about the image being put out by NRG. As an IPP, NRG has many faces including one of polluter but you can see the CEO looking to shift that image into a solar direction. Interestingly, this is what got David Crane fired which is a big part of the story as well. The deep nature of the article showing the internal movements makes me wonder how this article got started. The main point of contention I have is that the demise of EVgo and Resi are blamed on timing, which I don’t think is entirely accurate. The other article is also interesting because I have been wondering if someone would cover it. The last 10 minutes or so of the SolarCity earnings call show some internal thoughts by the management about net metering. I draw no conclusions but it is worth listening to.
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Yann
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Yann
Sunrun was the last of the big 3 residential companies to announce their earnings after market yesterday (stock is up 15% as of this writing). The tally is 65MW for Sunrun, 201MW for SolarCity and 61MW for Vivint Solar, the links will take you to the quarter presentations. If you listened to the webcast by Sunrun’s management team, you would have heard some trends to note. Asked about the acquisition of SolarCity by Tesla, management sees Tesla is an ally for education and regulations which should increase consumer understand of solar. Solar is part of a $500billion retail energy sector and management expects a longer term trend that leases will be more important to loans because of changes to the tax credit and potential for energy management aspects included in storage. Creating some new expectations for the market from late last year the companies see more reasoned growth coming as all of the companies have lowered their guidance when compared to a year ago. Generally speaking, I expect much more consolidation in this space beyond the TSLA/SCTY acquisition, so expect more deal making ahead.
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Yann
It was earnings week in solar and I want to give you some below the fold headlines about what I heard. Sunrun is up tomorrow and should reveal some more story lines about residential. SolarCity posted over 200MW of deployed and installed for the 2nd quarter which I still find impressive, even if Wall Street isn’t too excited. Elon Musk on the call revealed their new idea however, the solar roof. Integrated PV into roofing material, much like the Dow solar shingle which also existed under Uni-Solar brand a decade ago. I am uniquely interested to see if SolarCity is also going to be a roofing company which should be an interesting talking point at the NRCA headquarters. SolarCity didn’t comment whether they would be the roofer or work with the roofing community. In other news, Sunpower is shedding some 1,200 jobs, a 1,000 of which are in the Philippines. One reason is to focus more on residential, which makes plenty of sense given that the high efficiency product yields about 50% of their revenues and has over 20% margins compared to the negative margin in the power plant segment (see the presentation here). More to come on the resi market next week when we get all of the story lines from the big 3.
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Yann