This is your SolarWakeup for September 25th, 2017
Get Your Tickets, Selling Out Fast. The first event won’t be big, we’ve got space for about 50 people. I’ve released tickets that you can buy here but get them before they sell out. The tickets for DC will go on sale soon as well. I’ve got some great interviews getting set up and will announce the 2018 schedule next month with the target of 10 Cities across America.
Injury Yes. Remedy Next. SEIA, SolarWorld, Trump. On Friday, the expected happened. The trade commission found injury to have been caused under the 201 petition. This opens the next steps and makes solar political. On October 31st, the ITC will have a hearing to discuss appropriate remedies. Suniva has asked for 40 cent minimum price for cells and 78 cents for modules. SolarWorld has not responded to requests for comment on their requested remedy. I’ve also asked Stion which remedy they would like to see but have not received responses to my emails. SEIA will keep fighting and the many manufacturers in solar vow to keep leading alongside. On Friday, SolarWorld came out with a statement that showed their true colors. They want to negotiate a deal. Getting the injury finding was the leverage they wanted to figure out a way to screw over the solar industry but they’ve forgotten that Trump gets the last word. By mid-January, Trump will dictate what the remedy is regardless of the ITC’s proposal or any deal. I’d like to hear from my readers if they are buying SolarWorld modules or have plans to. Please reach out if you have a PO in or will be placing a PO in the next few quarters.
Puerto Rico In Despair. We take it for granted. Electricity drives our society and whenever we want it, we have it. Puerto Rico, after getting crushed by a Hurricane Maria, doesn’t have it and who knows when they’ll get it again. The infrastructure is non-existent and I’ve seen images of solar farms that look like a bomb was dropped on it. A society without energy can’t pump gas, can’t work, can’t transmit cellular communications to coordinate aid. Puerto Rico needs hundreds of solar microgrids in a box to get through this. I don’t know how to get them or distribute them but it needs to get done. I’ve got ships leaving South Florida for Puerto Rico on a daily basis but our industry needs to get this done, somehow, someway.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 22nd, 2017
A Veteran, a Texan, and a Governor Go Into a Bar. This isn’t the start of a bad joke or one of my favorite country songs. This is the end of the pleading going into tomorrow’s 201 injury finding. There are more co-signers to a single letter than all of the proponents of this nuisance bailout. While I am hopeful that one of the yes votes sees the transparent attempt by S&S to hold solar hostage, I expect that injury will be found. I am hopeful that the next stage, where lobbying comes into play much more, that the remedy would be a lot more nuanced than the minimum price bullshit that Suniva proposed. Keep in mind that S&S want to take jobs away from veterans, from coal miners, from oil workers, from hardworking Americans that sit around the kitchen table wondering what is the best career for them and their kids. This is a bailout for bad business executives and has no tangible market impact that would do anything positive for the American economy, including at either petitioners company.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 21st, 2017
And Then? And Then, and then, and then. On Friday the ITC will decide if there was serious injury to the section 201 petitioners. While we all know that this is largely a ploy to increase the value of the bankrupt assets to the lien holders, the ITC looks at it as a recourse of last resort. I.e. the ITC wants to know how Suniva and SolarWorld will be able to come back to life if they get their remedy. Until now, neither company has offered any insight to how the turn around would occur. No plan on becoming less reliant on single customers by building a dealer network, partnering with financial products, returning to bankability (good luck with that) or how to retain employees that will largely be persona non grata in the solar industry as employees of either company. This should raise serious red flags to the ITC that they are being used by foreign funds to milk the American consumer of hard earned money by making solar more expensive. No and then, just the tariff please is what they appear to be saying.
What Happened To California’s 100% RPS? Early this year, in an interview with Senator Wiener of San Francisco, we talked about SB100. The bill made it almost to the finish line getting stuck in a final committee. Reason for the hold up? A large trade union that maintains a large foothold in the withering fossil sector in California. The sad part is that solar actually has a really good union relationship across the Country. Not directly unionized, solar investors and companies use union contractors for the installation of their projects. In California more so than anywhere else, fossil power plants will be replaced by renewable energy and SB100 ensures that this change happens with some regulatory certainty.
Grow Your Customers, Utilities Need EVs. To me it is the single most obvious business move since I’ve been running companies. Utilities need more customers to buy EVs, share EVs, and use EVs on demand. This takes market share from the oil companies and grows the need for power, transmission of energy and consumer’s dependence on energy providers. Florida is an amazing example of utilities that are NOWHERE with regard to EVs, even though their demand growth is flatter than our State’s topography.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 20th, 2017
I am often surprised just how far this platform has come and the reach it has. After my announcement about SolarWakeup Live! yesterday, so many of you reached out with kind words of encouragement. We are sending well over a million emails this year and the network is bigger than ever. I did get a few questions about the event and the reasons for it.
Why 1 on 1 Interviews? Solar conferences are broken. In this format, we are going to do a deep dive with 4 speakers on their domain expertise that has value to the local market. I will be doing the interviews from a perspective of someone that has been there and done that. I don’t like at the questions as a reporter or a theoretical exercise but does it grow the market, can it be financed and does it make the industry money. My aim is to ask the question that a solar CEO or developer wants and needs to hear the answer to.
Why Only A Half Day? Events don’t need to be multiple days to drive value and if the goal is to bring a community closer together, then a half day is sufficient. Folks from out of town can plan a trip to the markets and include an afternoon of learning and networking into a bigger trip, justifying the travel expense. Most importantly, I want to bring this to at least 10 cities next year and longer events just take too much logistical planning to make that work.
How Do I Fund This? Unlike SolarWakeup, these events will be paid for by sponsors because events are not cheap! To make the sponsorships better than anything available in the conference market, you will see sponsors for the entire month leading up to and after the event on the daily newsletter. Because of this, there will be limited sponsorships sold to cover the costs of event and hopefully bring more information in a relevant format to you.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 19th, 2017
SolarWakeup Live! The big news you’ve been waiting for. The first SolarWakeup Live! event will be in Boston at the end of October and the second in early December in Washington DC. Over the next few weeks, I will be able to share the speakers with you and give you more information on the location. The mini-conference will go deep into the issues affecting the local market, no panels where panelists only get a few minutes to give talking points but a 1 on 1 discussion that goes in-depth on what you want to know. There will be limited sponsors for this event, if you are interested in discussing how to help please reach out.
The Contract Versus Subsidy. The BNEF summit in London is currently underway and the annual discussion about utilities in a solar era is underway. This year, there are more and more projects that are subsidy free. We have come to the point where most solar developers would choose length of contract (with good credit) over higher PPA rates. For example, most solar investors would take a 30-year 3 cent contract versus a 10 year (then merchant) 7 cent agreement. With the advent of dc-coupled storage, intelligent solar will be more focused on pricing signals from the grid as opposed to contract lengths which has been the principal attack on PURPA contracts.
Friday’s ITC Decision. On Friday the ITC will make a decision if injury was caused to US panel manufacturers. The answer is a resounding no, injury was not caused to SolarWorld and Suniva. Both companies were rewarded with many subsidies by various Government entities and in some cases simply failed to adapt to the solar market. In other cases, customers were left without timely deliveries when supply chain software wasn’t executed on properly or new manufacturing lines didn’t optimize in time. Solar is hard, that is no secret. But riding the solar coaster means we all have to go through the ups and downs together, nobody gets to skip the line and go to the finish line because they didn’t feel up to it.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 18th, 2017
Internet is back but the shutters will stay up as everyone keeps their eyes on Hurricane Maria for round 2. Maria is currently decimating the Caribbean again and will hit Puerto Rico this week as a major hurricane. If we are thinking about grid infrastructure and storm readiness, 2017 may be the year we re-evaluate the way we do power.
Three Right Turns To Paris. On Saturday, rumors came out of DC that the White House may be thinking about staying in the Paris agreement, which resulted in a questionable approval from this writer. Paris has always been a self-reported, non-binding accord but staying in is important from a leadership and societal standpoint. Many different White House voices came out since the reporting that contradict and confirm the news so I guess we all remain glued to our Twitter feeds, follow me @yannbrandt.
What Corporates Want. As Facebook chooses an Ohio location for its newest data center, clean energy availability always comes up. When we spoke with Sam Arons from Google, he said the same thing, data centers would not get located where renewable energy is not available or prominent. Now that Amazon is looking to place its HQ2 with 50,000 jobs, cities around the Country are looking around to see where they can get more renewable energy to tout as well as mass transportation. My point is that the new workforce’s values mimic the companies that invest billions. Clean air, clean water and clean energy are not ideals to think about when it’s too late, do it and you will stand out.
Grid Study, Net Metering Study. Is this round two of a useless, pre-ordained DOE study? First, I didn’t realize that net metering became a national issue. Power to the States only pertains to some things I guess. Moreover, it seems that things being left out of the scope mean that the study is looking for a certain result. According to the article, societal benefits and network effects are amongst the issues that will not be reviewed. I guess we shall say, stay tuned…
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 15th, 2017
As we head into the weekend, an update from South Florida misery. Power is back! Wifi is down. I don’t know which one is worse (I’m kidding, but it is close). Over the next few weeks, I want to examine and share with you my experience going through this storm. I wrote on my facebook that for the first time I felt like a climate change refugee with the primary mission of keeping my family safe, driving hours on end to get out of harm’s way. I came back to my County, completely destroyed thinking about the regulations that focused on important yet small (in comparison) priorities. Reading about number of workers brought in to fix the infrastructure, I start to think about the role, incentives and oversight of monopoly utilities. This includes Comcast, currently on my shitlist because I have to tether to my AT&T phone.
Time To Coal Off The Planet. Every coal plant should be turned off tomorrow. We’ve seen how resilient the planet is when we stopped doing stupid stuff like polluting rivers or destroying forests. Coal electrified industries but now coal is bad for people, planet and profit. The government should buy the plants and promptly shut them down. Seems abrupt but it’s necessary and urgent. If you think about it, there would be issues with power markets but I don’t actually think the grid would suffer except in pockets which would quickly be remedied by renewable power, cogen and energy storage.
Will California Go 100%? Well it doesn’t look like the 100% RPS bill will happen this year. Some corporations and PG&E came out against it. Surprisingly the electrical union came out against it as well, still thinking that traditional power could be bigger than renewables. My guess is that has more to do with the front office tenure than actual business strategy given that RPS in California doesn’t count distributed generation and most large scale is built by unions. Legislation never really dies, SB100 had a great session and looks that much better going forward.
September 22nd. A lot of talk from SPI centered around the 201 petition. Having spent the weekend in Atlanta, I kept going back and forth on reaching out to the Suniva people. I’ve said it before, they are good people and we’ve always had a good relationship. This 201 petition is stupid and I think they know that. On the 22nd, the commission will vote and a lot of bets are being placed on a 3-1 vote. This is really a 2-2 vote but since a tie prevails to the petition and only yes votes can vote on the remedy, a no will vote yes. That being said, a yes can flip and we could get a 3-1 vote against the injury. Let’s hope that the powers are pushing a yes to a no and we can put this thing into the past. Another speed bump on the solar coaster.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 14th, 2017
The Value of Electricity. We take it for granted until we don’t have it. Yesterday, a nursing home 15 minutes from my house had 8 elderly patients pass away from the 90 degree heat. Most of Florida lost its power on Sunday morning and power coming back on has been slow. It has been over a decade since we lost power due to a hurricane and the value for backup was obviously misunderstood because the nursing home should have had a generator to keep its residents safe. But I don’t have a generator either, in fact only one person on my street does. The reason is the value proposition has been near zero for a long time, now the value is at its peak again. The same is true for how we build our energy infrastructure. Why would a Florida utility use wood poles that snap in half during hurricanes? The cost of everything in energy is geared to be as low as possible because we fail to value what type of energy it is. Guaranteed, renewable, backup, all things that need to be valued going forward.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 13th, 2017
Living On A Peninsula. I spent the day yesterday driving for nearly 16 hours to get closer to my evacuated home. The benefits of living on a peninsula elude me at this moment and I think about how a disaster prone State with two highways out and limited infrastructure to bring food, water and gasoline to those trying to flee pending problems. On the highway we would see cars with 5 gallon tanks strapped to the roof because you’ll find exit upon exit with empty gas stations. Meanwhile the power is out for more than half of Florida including me. My power pole snapped in half which is strange considering I’ve been paying for storm hardening for a decade. Now the pole will get replaced again and consumers will likely be on the hook once again. Peninsula living…
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for September 12th, 2017
A More Diverse Solar Industry. The Solar Foundation has come out with the 2017 Diversity Study that still shows solar coming in short in comparison to the overall workforce but ahead from where we came from. I am wondering what has caused some of these statistics to become reality but will think about it some more before putting pen to paper. The comments about moving up the ladder are particularly interesting and the impact of the lack of longevity in our sector that I have seen over the years.
SPI Starts. Obviously I am not there, which was sad for the empty chair at the 11am panel yesterday. I hope it is fruitful and you get to meet all the right people. Focus on the relationships and not the immediate value that the business card yields because things move quickly in this industry. Think about how many different cards you’ve brought to SPI in your career.
The Peak Demand. The RPS is so 2007, except for the 100% RPS of course. The peak demand RPS will move the value of renewables to the peak of the customer’s demand. This will become known as the RPS for battery storage associated with renewables. Unless you are looking to wait for several years to develop renewables with a new interconnect and find offtakers, you need to add storage on your existing solar portfolio to shift your production peaks to meet this kind of requirement which will carry great value. Get used to me talking about dc coupling storage more often, I am infatuated with what solar with dc-storage will do to our industry.
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Yann