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

This is your SolarWakeup for August 3rd, 2016

In a few weeks it will have been 4 years since I sent the very first SolarWakeup newsletter to about 350 of you, now it’s the widest read daily newsletter in the industry. What has been a volatile policy and innovation environment has given me plenty to talk about each morning. Now that we have over 250 thousand solar professionals, there is more to talk about and more content to bring you. In the next few weeks and months you will see more media from SolarWakeup, in the form of audio and video, starting with the podcast series you can find on the homepage (to the right) with correspondent Frank Andorka. Soon, I will soon start video interviews primarily focused on solar startups and other innovators shaking up our sector. There are many exciting interviews already in the works and I hope you join me in the excitement about this addition to the platform.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 2nd, 2016

Pending a shareholder vote and approval from regulators, SolarCity will become Tesla Solar, or at least part of Tesla. Solar power has always been part of the complete sustainability picture for Elon Musk and letting the nuances of a solar balance sheet stop that goal wasn’t going to happen. SolarCity also preannounced better than expected install numbers for Q2 and lowered guidance for 2016 to 900-1000MW. While lower than expected, let that settle in for a second. 1GW, of solar, primarily on households is a boatload of solar energy. The Silevo modules are now shown in a picture and expect them to be at 22% or about 350W which should help with MW goals given that Wall Street doesn’t understand efficiencies. The worry for the solar industry continues, Trina is going private and some wondered why Tesla was stepping in for SolarCity. Sunrun CEO, Lynn Jurich, blogged about the great deal Tesla is getting, perhaps in the hopes of getting her own deal for Sunrun?

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 1st, 2016

Assume for the moment that over the next few years, that utilities and solar come together and negotiate something in the center. Something between full retail rate net metering and no net metering at all. You could foresee something along the lines of a minimum bill, time of use pricing and non-bypassable charges. NARUC, the association of regulatory commissioners, is writing a manual about good rate design. I’d be interested to see the lobbying and education that the solar sector is doing for this manual. Not because it will become ‘law’ but because things like this can be used as tool if the manual is particularly friendly to incumbents. What I am trying to say is that little things matter and the foreseeable future requires that we lead on crafting the tools going forward.

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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 July 29th, 2016

How many times have legislators said that solar must compete on price. Not based on an RPS or carbon price or special carve outs. Now that solar costs have dropped 90% over 10 years and is doubling in market every year and a half, it’s normal for incumbent market participants to push back. Nuclear provides some important base load but let me be clear that power in open markets needs to be priced with market dynamic pricing. If the grid needs the baseload power that nuclear provides than the costs should reflect that. That pricing dynamic will undoubtedly cause more storage to be put in place because solar plus storage is renewable nuclear fusion bottled into a battery. The timing is right because in a few years, the storage sector would have policy staff that would make this exact case but that investment is not yet in the cards. So in the meantime, utilities will get what they can to keep the assets from being stranded.

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Yann