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.
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 19th, 2016
These cost benefit of net metering reports are as useless as expert witnesses in civil litigation. Even though Nevada has already had a study and SolarCity went and get their own study, there is now a new study from the PUC. Of course, this time the data that came from the utility showed a different result. It showed that net metering created a cost shift. This is nonsense but it gives those that try to lobby against solar something to hold on to while they are citing ‘facts’. It is interesting that the reports have a swing of almost $50million from positive to negative. Nobody ends up reading these things because the headline number is all that people will use and it will be used. Just as ‘analysts’ write documents that only use the data that gets them to the headline that will sell the most copies, legislators that need a reason to be against solar will use this report.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 18th, 2016
Don’t read it as a negative headline, this is a positive move to make sure the business is set up for the right path forward. SolarCity had to move their guidance based on market conditions and therefore ensured that their overhead was correctly aligned with the goal of nearly 1GW of homes this year. At the same time, the company announced a capital raise in the form of a bond at 6.5% for up to $124million which should give it enough capital to get to the Tesla acquisition. In Q2, SolarCity spent over $250million in operating expenses which is a staggering amount but take your business and extrapolate it to 150,000 homes in a calendar year and see what you think.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 17th, 2016
It’s been a good week for solar policy around the Country. First in the State that always shows negative news, we have a victory by 4-1 vote in Arizona. Even though the vote was on a small utility territory, many expect the victory to be used as a precedent for some future proceedings. A New Mexico request was also turned down and yesterday we saw a nice move forward for solar in Colorado. What most participants are calling a win-win, over 20 parties signed on to the deal that will hopefully be approved by the PUC. Here you have it solar folks, taking a strong position for consumer choice and advocating hard for it yields results. All forms of solar should win in a way that helps consumers save money and use cleaner energy.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 16th, 2016
Sometimes I get concerned, and I am sure you do too, that solar’s gains are going quickly and that before long the energy system will not need any more. Well that is just a notion that comes from the amazing growth we see in our sector because if you look at the energy chart in today’s top story and see the interactive version here, you will be amazed to see how little PV has actually done so far and how much more we are going to contribute. In the other top story we see what happens when you take a ballot to a gun fight (no pun intended). In Florida, some overzealous policy folks tried to bring a 3rd party solar ballot amendment to the people which costs tens of millions of dollars. The amendment failed to garner the votes and fundraising but also created a counterpunch. Utilities got together, created a crazy misleading entity and raised over $15million, to put their own constitutional amendment on the November ballot. Don’t get too excited about ballot amendments unless you are ready to write a big (read huge) check.
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Yann
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!
News
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.
Have a great day!
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