There’s an interesting spin in the media these days, especially given the variety of new owners that are buying up platforms; those purchases made for some reasons obvious or otherwise. Your PR teams, assuming you have one, does a good job of placing stories and pushing your agenda to the reporters. This platform is different, it’s independent and has no advertisers. These days, SolarWakeup drives significant traffic to the news sites and because of you it is affecting the stories being covered. More often than not, you will find a story that covers the top story of the day a day late. Point of the story is that I am thankful for the scoops you give me and pushing the right message for me to cover each day. Together we are making news many times over.
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Yann
Why not! That’s the answer to the question posed by Harvard in today’s top story. I don’t feel bad that we are using less coal, mining less of it and cleaning our air by doing so. I do have empathy for the coal workers that took to the mines and did the dirty work to provide for their families. Coal isn’t a political statement for them, it’s a livelihood and it is geographically focused to a few States, about 16k jobs in WV and 12k jobs in Kentucky. With a few, very easy policies I could see each of those States creating a solar market that hires half of those jobs. Retraining is simple, companies will train future employees or groups like IREC will provide training programs through local community colleges. Our focus should be on the employees working in coal, not the politicians, and make sure they push for the policies that are needed.
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Yann
One of the issues in solar is that few things have scale. And the things that have scale or volume can get commoditized very quickly. As the lease appears to be in flattening or decline, the loan is making up the difference. Loans and in direct competition with PACE where PACE is available. PACE is harder to commoditize but barrier to entry on the loans is very low. The loans are going to be helpful to the local installers that are seeking to build 50-100 systems per year versus the public companies that need 10s of thousands. Loans are not without issue either because at $20k a deal, you need a very efficient and smooth process to make sure that the fees don’t eat the margin. Interesting about Mosaic’s raise is that it is said that the $220mm is not to pay for the loans instead to grow the platform but surely there is more that story because the platform shouldn’t need $220mm for the platform. Warburg follows many other PE firms looking to get the flow of structured products coming from solar.
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Yann
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