A few notes for you this morning. Hemlock, after winning a summary judgement over SolarWorld, has submitted the financial claims. The losses amount to over $793million which is far more than the cash on the balance sheet of the module manufacturer. The question is, will the brazen CEO fight more, ask for another bailout from Qatar or make a deal to drop the trade cases in US and China. This is a simplified version but a deal should be possible at this point. On another note, please take a moment to read and discuss the NY Times story. I don’t have all of the details yet, but I am fairly sure that the information listed in the story is either wrong or severely misleading. It may be possible that the homeowner was in a specific rate schedule from the start that was changed but the NEM 1.0 policies did not change in CA and the NEM 2.0 policies still offer a significant benefit to CA homeowners, especially in PG&E territory. Someone pitched this to NY Times and we should all be concerned about how they were able to push this story on a great reporter.
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Yann
SunEdison is looking to offload its class B shares of Terraform Power. This may not be completely voluntary but due to significant holdings by Appaloosa and Brookfield of the stock. The question I have about this is more nuanced than just selling the shares. Keep in mind that SunEdison probably had to make some deals in order to create the yieldco in the first place. The class B shares had something to do with that including making sure the a knowledgeable asset manager was taking care of the projects. With new ownership trying to take that responsibility over, what leverage will the offtakers and other contractual counterparties have over the transfer which could be construed as a change of control requiring some consents.
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Yann
Selling solar based on aesthetics? Elon Musk seems to think that the Silevo modules will give SolarCity a leg up on the competition. All things being equal, especially price, I am sure that aesthetics can play a role in the decisions made in the residential market. That being said, manufacturers like LG, Suniva and Sunpower make their claim to residential market share on efficiency as opposed to price so maybe aesthetics can play a role for a buyer that is deciding between multiple vendors. Musk is reaching out for a different aspect of consumers though. He wants to create something that people want, but they don’t know it yet. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
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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