This is your SolarWakeup for October 24th, 2019
No column Today. See you in DC tonight!
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 23rd, 2019
DC, Vote Solar, Collision Course. Join me in DC for Vote Solar’s Equinox tomorrow evening. There should be some great surprises and news that matter to your business. Get your ticket right now.
David Roberts Chimes In. David has been noting that he wanted to cover the blackouts from a different perspective and be last to the rush of articles. Here are his thoughts on the things that could be done.
One Of Those Things. Is happening on January 1st with the new home solar mandate that is kicking off. This legislative effort was the work of many and required many different parties to get to the table.
More Is Needed. That is why hundreds of mayors sent a letter to Congress asking for the ITC to be extended. Have you sent yours?
Because We Are Outmatched. PG&E alone has 100 regulatory staffers in Sacramento, add that to every other utility lobbying force across the Country and then add the oil and gas lobbying staff. In case you wanted to see the numbers behind the lobbying, Axios has you covered.
Reality Check. Yes, the republican co-chair of the climate caucus isn’t running for re-election. His decision not to run has nothing to do with climate and being the co-chair makes him persona non-grata in the GOP caucus. This is a political problem.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 22nd, 2019
SEIA Election Endorsements. There is an important election going on for SEIA’s board, particularly the DG Division. If you are a member, please vote for Karla Loeb for the Chair of the DG Division. Karla is the head of policy for an east coast solar provider and has been a strong supporter advancing solar in States that are often forgotten. Most importantly she is intimately knowledgeable on DG matters. For the Vice Chair of the DG Division, please vote for Michael Healy. Michael has been on the SEIA board and provides important institutional knowledge to the board. Both Karla and Michael are near DC and will absolutely be as involved as anyone you can hope for.
IEA Highlights Rooftop. IEA is out with their new Renewables Report for 2019 and they are highlighting the massive potential of distributed solar. From a global perspective, IEA sees commercial solar taking off and even after 600GW, it would only represent 6% of the technical potential.
Google Shares Knowledge. If you were wondering how Google executes on its renewable contracts, they are providing answers. Their auction system ensures not only qualified bidders, allows for understanding of the offer and then provides the best price. The white paper is short and to the point, and full of information.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 21st, 2019
A Give Back Evening. Last Friday I spent a few hours with my friends from the California solar industry at the CALSSA annual dinner. I personally try to attend as many of these as I can in both my SolarWakeup and Quick Mount capacity to support the important work of the State trade association. On Friday I was excited to see the generosity of members, raising over $100k for CALSSA, with major donations coming throughout the evening. Companies showed up for the $15billion market that pays their bills and creates their jobs but think of that, CALSSA operates on an annual budget that is about 0.01% of the total market. As I was leaving I realized some notable companies that make a ton of revenue in California were missing. Where were they? Where were you? This has been bothering me all weekend, why isn’t every company giving at least a few thousand to CALSSA and State chapters? PG&E has 100 regulatory staffers and CALSSA has a $1.6million budget. Thanks to all that gave and those that didn’t, you should ask yourself why and try to defend that decision especially if you made a profit in the California market.
Is Solar Divided? Something is brewing in the solar industry (in reality it’s been there for a decade) but it’s getting worse. Utility scale solar and distributed solar are at odds in regulatory proceedings as well as trade group boards including SEIA. Right now it’s just healthy debate but it scares me that we don’t see the benefit of each other’s position. Solar is a market in totality, residential solar likes the headlines of solar being the cheapest form of electricity and utility scale likes the headline of 2million homes with solar and amazing public support. Let’s be realistic about one point and I say this to my friends in utility scale solar that are always missing from State chapter events. Your market will tank and the likelihood of legislative victories will disappear if the people that you need for support can’t put solar on their homes. Utility scale solar needs net metering, ITC and interconnection rules and fights so that there is a market for large scale solar. There is no large scale solar market without the regulatory environment that has the support of voters. If a homeowner cannot put solar on their home or net metering doesn’t exist, the perception will be that solar doesn’t work or is too expensive. I’m happy to debate this with any of the large scale voices in private or public and in the meantime challenge you to send a $5k check to a State chapter near you.
A Decade Of Incompetence. The CEO of PG&E was out on Friday stating that utility driven blackouts could last for the next decade. Now ask yourself what would happen if you were asked by your CEO or board to fix an enormous problem, a problem you may or may not know the answer to, and your response is that it would take you ten years to fix it. Every CEO I know would either terminate you or give that problem to someone else. I can’t believe that the CEO of a major monopoly utility in control of all of the assets in the system could say that a problem like the blackouts would exist for the next decade. What happened to the ‘responsibility to serve’?
Our Work With Ag. I’m a loyal listener to Kara Swisher’s various podcasts and she’s been highlighting tech’s work in agriculture. Solar and farmers have had a nice relationship over the past 5-10 years renting land to solar farms but I wonder what else is possible. Farmers play such a vital role in American society and this story needs to be told with more vigor. I’d love to have conversations with farmers around the Country to understand their view of the industry and what else they’d like to see.
A New DOE Secretary. Go ahead and Google Dan Brouillette, your likely next Secretary of Energy. A longtime hill staffer with some ties to the auto industry but a nuclear scientist he is not. Fun note, Brouillette was part of the legislative team that drafted the bill that gave us the loan guarantee program which made money for taxpayers.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 18th, 2019
Solar Growing Up. Florida has the strictest building codes in the Country and part of that is testing your product in Florida test labs and having the State approve them. Solar has never done that in the past but now that is changed. The second biggest residential solar market in the Country is getting the solar market to grow up and I’m glad Quick Mount was able to be a part of that.
Pushing Your HOA. A state rule preventing HOAs from limiting solar is key, but not all states have done that. Know your rights and fight for them at the legislative level if you need to.
Attacking The C&I Market. One fund is saying good bye to PURPA deals and replacing them with C&I. As we see installed projects trading in the secondary market, I wonder what effect this will have on the expansion of the development funnel for projects and how they’ll be financed. Open Energy is working on a new tool that prices C&I projects for developers to allow them to get deals moving forward without having to go through an entire underwriting process.
Farewell, Again. Rick Perry is out. Officially.
If Only. I had a dollar for everytime I said years ago that we should go all in on ERCOT development. Shoulda coulda woulda.
CALSSA, Vote Solar, MDV-SEIA. For the next 6 weeks there are some of the biggest events in the Country to help your business. See you there!
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 17th, 2019
More tomorrow. Don’t forget to get your tickets for next week’s Equinox DC hosted by Vote Solar. If you donate, spend or sponsor for more than $1,000, you get to write a paragraph on SolarWakeup.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 16th, 2019
Why Not 1%? What would it take for you to allocate 1% of your revenue to policy spend, either internal FTE or supporting trade groups? I’ve given this some thought and think that most of it has to do that the business didn’t have the spend automatically ingrained in the business plan. The funny upside is that everyone’s revenue would grow by more than 1% if we all did it but nobody wants to be the only one doing it. Maybe 1% isn’t the right number but what if it was 0.5%? Can a $1million business afford $5k? Can a $100,000,000 afford $500k?
Getting Pricing Signals. Pricing signals are naturally imperfect until the market adapts to the inputs that drive the signal. If the market driving that pricing is large enough, than the value would be high enough to drive the market scale, just look at any SREC market. Limit the demand and have too much supply, the pricing would be too low to make a difference. For energy storage there is even more value, you don’t need to create a legislative demand. All we need is for the power markets to value things like speed, stability and flexibility and operators will be able to monetize. This is especially important for the solar market because it allows solar farms to pop up without off takers, just through the time flexibility provided by storage with the right signals.
Educating Consumers. I want to know how your sales pitches went in the past week. How much demand did you get for batteries and what did you say? Did your close rate go up or down? What amount of information did they give that showed misinformation and what was the biggest misunderstanding?
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 15th, 2019
Looking At Colleges. Colleges still represent the most untapped off taker portfolio in the solar market today. As a group, they have the largest combination of energy consumption and bankable credit. College institutions also have a will to be 100% renewable and now is time for the solar industry to solve this problem for them. There have been examples of how this has worked, see Stanford and Hopkins, but I’d love to hear other ways that you’re solving this market opportunity.
Newsom Speaks Out. Here is the twitter thread from the California Governor on PG&E. This is the strongest statement thus far but falls short from calling for something specific, likely due to the process that the CPUC must enter into as the regulatory body where his demands may come out.
RWE Setting The Stage. RWE clearly doesn’t want out of its coal plants ahead of schedule. This doesn’t really mean they don’t want to close them, it just means that they want something in return for closing them ahead of time. Shareholders strike again…
CALSSA Auction Dinner. Join me on Friday night in Berkeley for the annual auction dinner hosted by CALSSA. This raises funds to keep the largest market in the US running which is key for most of you. Get your tickets here
Vote Solar Equinox DC. One week later on October 24th, join me in DC for Vote Solar Equinox DC. There will be some amazing speakers, as always, and help Vote Solar raise funds to keep markets open all over America. If you don’t think funding this event is for you, the beverage sponsor for Equinox DC is Vinyasun, a local Florida installer. Justin Hoysradt understands that funding policy means more business opportunity for his small business. If you donate, sponsor or buy $1,000 worth of tickets, you get to write a paragraph for this newsletter. Send me the receipt to get the reward. If you’re more interested in a $100,000 donation, hit reply and I’ll make the appropriate introduction.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 14th, 2019
PG&E Blackout AAR. The PG&E blackout is now over and it’s time to review how it went. First reports show that a medically dependent resident lost his ventilator and passed away 12 minutes after losing power and the City of Moraga went through a scary 70 acre wildfire hours after losing their electricity. Because PG&E systems and emergency systems were not working as planned, emergency responders went door to door to wake homeowners up in the middle of the night, grab their things and flee. For many of you, this may trigger a recall to my climate story from Hurricane Irma two years ago when we packed up and fled the State of Florida. That same waterproof box still holds the important items, passports, birth certificates etc but Friday morning my wife asked me if the waterproof box was still functional for a fire event. Moraga is less than 10 miles from our house in Walnut Creek and here we are buying a fireproof box. There are going to be a lot of stories about how PG&E did (not well) and what the solution is (solar/storage/microgrids) but also some editorials that give the Governor some much needed political cover to act.
Change The System To Solve The Problem. When PG&E filed bankruptcy they knew that the newly inaugurated Governor would have a hard time pushing his power so early on. With hundreds of thousands of union jobs and pensions on the line, breaking up PG&E is easier said than done. The Governor said it right on saying, “This is not a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” he said. “Neglect, a desire to advance not public safety but profits.” PG&E is a poorly managed utility that does too much, covers too diverse a service area and got comfortable. The management has always focused on the quarter end results and not the impact to consumers 5 years down the road. Why should they? Imagine if their CEO had said 5 years ago that they need to focus on electrifying buildings away from gas (they own a gas utility) and help ratepayers go solar with storage. In fact PG&E would incentivize the creation of microgrids in load centers with solar everywhere. They would become change from a centralized power model to a grid that gave priority access to local, clean power. That CEO would have been fired on the spot and would probably have been considered unhireable by other power companies. But the CEO would have been right and nothing to show for it. That’s the CEO that Newsom should push on the PG&E shareholders, the CEO that predicted the obvious future and acted on it and put their own career on the line because he knew and did something about it. Yes, such a (former) CEO exists and he currently spends his time as a member of the Vote Solar board amongst other things, David Crane is the CEO that PG&E needs. Not all shareholders will love it but they should because Crane would give the company and the Governor the cover they need to think longer term. The interests are finally aligned, PG&E cannot keep the current form of management in place, they are only there to restructure the company from bankruptcy and not service the ratepayers for the long term. More editorials will give more political power to the Governor to call the handful of hedge funds and make his demands.
National Grid Under Review. We’ve talked about the delay and uncertainty for developers in MA and I’m glad to see the DPU acting to make sure the right things are happened under SMART.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for October 11th, 2019
Coal On Gas. Coal and natural gas are fighting to see who’s better on climate change, let’s give that some airtime.
ITC For All. The wind wants ITC for onshore projects, 30% upfront instead of a PTC. Great, let’s get the deal done, can you bring Senator Grassley along, please?
Read This Headline Again. I posted this story two weeks ago, it was silly then that we would be threatened with blackouts if gas plants closed. Today, we are living through a blackout BECAUSE we are too reliant on central power plants.
Lived Experience. How did you, friends or family members experience the blackout? Tell me your story.
The Muni Blowback. IOUs are making a media push to show the downside of municipalization of power companies. Several munis are looking to sell back to the monopoly. Watch this space.
Have a great weekend!
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Yann