This is your SolarWakeup for August 15th, 2016

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

These are the top 10 most read solar articles by your peers this week!

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 12th, 2016

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

This is your SolarWakeup for August 11th, 2016

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

This is your SolarWakeup for August 10th, 2016

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

This is your SolarWakeup for August 9th, 2016

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

This is your SolarWakeup for August 8th, 2016

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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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 5th, 2016

I think we need to start pretending that there are two solar industries. One for Elon Musk and one for the rest of us. Of course I am kidding. I say this because most of us are driving each of our companies to focusing on a single segment of the value chain while Musk is seeking to bring Tesla/SolarCity to complete vertical integration. From modules to installation crews but now the inverter as well. In a solar only analysis, this seems strange because why build something that others do a great job of building for us at great prices. Instead, Tesla sees itself has a wireless grid company and the inverter is an important brain center for this. So while Tesla builds a solar inverter, do you think this is the right path?

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 4th, 2016

Back in 2006-2008, RPS legislation was going around the Country but for solar they were not enough. The RPS laws often had a push for a solar carve out so that solar could find its piece within the rule. Those standards gave us the NJ and MA markets amongst others. Seems to me that energy storage is going through a similar process. It sounds cliché but storage is 10 years behind solar with a potential growth trigger that relates the two sectors. Like Germany, which doesn’t have net metering, the US attempt to get off net metering and into time of use rate design, the storage sector can ‘trick’ the shift into a box that takes homes off the grid. I’d love to hear from you all about how you are looking at storage and how it intersects your business.

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Yann