This is your SolarWakeup for December 5th, 2016

Only 1 lesson to learn. Don’t get me wrong, beating Amendment 1 in Florida was a great victory. Being against solar was an easy branding exercise and then people like Jimmy Buffett did more with their soapbox than any money could buy. The biggest lesson that needs to be learned and not repeated is that this was self inflicted by the solar industry. Amendment 1 was a defensive tactic to stop the announced solar PPA amendment. If the solar industry doesn’t learn this lesson, it may try to do another ballot amendment next year. Be very wary of such attempts.
China is taking the lead? While the President-Elect is going twazy (twitter crazy) over China, our inability to understand science has kept real climate change action at bay. In the meantime, China has turned 180 degrees and working on becoming the global leader on climate change.
The Asia solar market is? Every year we hear about the next markets. Middle East, Africa, Latin America! But lately it has been all about Asia outside of China. Japan is reaching the tail end and everyone has HUGE pipelines in Thailand, Philippines and neighboring Countries. Story today says that it may all be for not and is delayed if it happens at all.
My Christmas wish list. In case you were in the market to buy me a gift (since I send you SolarWakeup for free every day), the kind folks at CleanTechnica put together a nice list. The electric motorcycle seems particularly fun.

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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 December 2nd, 2016

Good news from Trump world. When Hillary Clinton was asked to compliment PEOTUS, she went for the kids. Namely Ivanka, who has been the soft spoken leader of Trump’s children, is said to be making a move into some policy issues. While she is not moving to DC, insider sources say that climate change will be a key issue area for her family lobbying efforts. Let’s see who she hires as the Chief of Staff to see the impact she will be able to have.
Welcome to Florida! You all know that I reside here and while in my 10 years in solar have done little business here, am intrigued that the market could become more relevant. Vivint announced an entrance earlier this year but now SolarCity is opening a warehouse in Central Florida and hiring 300 jobs. Emergency meeting at the Governor’s Club tonight
More data for solar. We’ve covered this in the past and even wrote about the overlap of support that solar has from both sides of the aisle. A republican polling agency came out, yet again, that 75% of Trump voters support ‘action to accelerate deployment of clean energy.’ The question is, does the support from the GOP voters translate into legislation for policy from the GOP. We surely have not seen it at the State or Federal levels but optimism ahead.
Illinois Energy Bill goes to the Governor. A nuclear power bailout bill that was stacked with energy topics over several hundred pages. Most importantly the solar topics on changes to net metering and ‘insane’ demand charges were removed from the final version. The power of the grassroots continues to show in these policy debates.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for December 1st, 2016

The hardware race. It’s no secret that pricing for hardware keeps coming down. String and central inverters are now into the single digit pennies per watt which made entry into the market for microinverters that much harder. That pricing is coming down as well now and market share going up. Microinverters are coming in a timely situation because storage will play a much bigger role going forward, module level data will be helpful with time of use rate design and value is starting to outweigh price.
Freemium utility markets. After spending nearly $10 million on an attempt to stop solar in Florida, FPL (the largest monopoly in the State) is getting an additional $800 million to put into ratebase on which they will get a double digit guaranteed return. On the positive side, customer bills will be going up an average of 13% which makes solar more attractive.
Baseload gets support from above. New York went first, now Illinois, to keep nuclear power plants open. Many States before these gave special early cost recovery for nuclear power plants that were in development, and of course the biggest loan guarantees went to nuclear power plants. Utilities have found support from legislators to work together to make these plants more profitable, or at least break even. Someone should run a side by side analysis of solar+storage and nuclear incentives and let me know the results.
Off the grid but on the balance sheet. Not really but I am really happy to see the for profit social impact solar companies doing well. Companies like SunFunder have been able to put together the channels to deploy capital into hard to reach areas. Many times the challenge isn’t in the product or the need for it but the distribution network. Breaking through, at scale, drives economic growth much bigger than just solar.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for November 30th, 2016

Unqualified facilities? The avoided cost contracts under PURPA for qualifying facilities have been a large part of the solar pipeline. It was just in the past few years that solar could be financed with the low prices offered by these PURPA contracts, only because of the 15 year terms is it even possible. There are some open lawsuits by FLS Energy and Vote Solar in front of FERC on the recent attempts by utilities to shorten the contract terms. With a few open seats at FERC, you could expect some push by utilities to have the shorter contracts approved, putting at risk the pipeline.
Guaranteed loan guarantee office. One of solar’s favorite topics is the loan guarantee program because as an industry we are tied to it, even though it has been a minor part of the overall capital that has flowed to the sector. As much as Trump may dislike Solyndra, the program is a big winner for taxpayers and only legislation can close the office. Hats off to the former directors of the office that worked hard to make the program a success, both are quoted in the article.
Islands go to storage. We all saw the advanced microgrid project in American Samoa but now to a smaller project on a bigger island. Hawaii changed the net metering program to push homeowners to add storage in a self supply program. In a slow start, with no applications as of 6 months ago, hundreds have applied since. If this program gets fine-tuned, expect storage developers to get excited about the prospects to expand it to the continental US.
In god we trust, all others bring data. When it comes changing rate structure, the national association for regulators says that changes to rate structure must be deliberate and data driven. What experts have been saying for sometime, rate design may be an overstated necessity. Net metering has been an unbalanced but fair mechanism to ensure solar customers receive the benefit that they provide to other consumers. If you disagree, bring data.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for November 29th, 2016

10 reasons Europe loves storage. Or at least ways that storage will continue to thrive in Europe. With an already interconnected grid, storage can help balance and further increase the high levels of renewable energy on the EU grid. The markets lack net metering and deregulated suppliers in many cases causing pricing transparency issues. Here are the 10 requests the EU solar trade association has for market regulators.
Campaign coal falls flat. Only Santa is giving out coal this year because the market keeps digging a deeper mineshaft for coal. Michigan’s largest utility confirmed that they will be shutting down 8 out of 9 coal plants regardless of clean power plan implementation. We’ve been saying it for quite some time, the death of coal comes from natural gas and the fact that it is really dirty and bad for people.
Hating on TeslaCity. There has been some press that billionaires don’t like the press that fellow billionaire Elon Musk is getting. Apparently there is an anti-Elon Musk PR plan in the works that hopes to stop the innovator in his plan to bring sustainable power for all. Timing for buying SolarCity may not have been ideal but as the CEO of Sunrun said, Tesla got SolarCity for a great price. This isn’t a 2017 or 2018 plan anyways, just watch this video again.
How will Trump do it? There has been a lot of talk about what the Trump administration will want to do about energy buthow will it be done is the better question.  Congress still has a lot to do with implementation of rules even if it is in a repeal. A comment period and judicial oversight (read lawsuits) will also accompany those changes. There is a saying in DC, the most powerful person in Washington is the Senate Minority Leader so all eyes may be on Senator Schumer.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for November 28th, 2016

Black Friday means bad news for utilities. As I walked into Lowe’s this weekend, I passed a pallet of black Fridayspecials. In this case it was 60watt equivalent LED lightbulbs. I started buying them when they were about $10 a piece as an early adopter but this sale was selling them for $0.89 each. 9watt bulbs that retrofit into standard settings for $0.89. 85% savings on your lighting. You can’t overstate how big of a deal this is for the load profiles for utilities. Electricity sales were down in 2015 by 1%, I wouldn’t be surprised if 2016 was even lower.
NRG quietly adding big MW. NRG has closed its transaction with Sunedison and adds 1.5GW of operating and development assets to its portfolio. The costs are also attractive, NRG is only paying $0.122/watt AC over the entire portfolio.
Solar freakin roads. The solar industry had a meltdown when the first solar roadways video went viral. This year it solar roadways will have been installed in 4 continents including the State of Georgia. Payback is terrible, use case is circumspect but I would love to have a solar driveway.
Data signaling trouble ahead? Trina, which is in the crucial weeks ahead of a go-private vote, showed signs of a slowdown in China from their Q3 results. We also had some less than desired interconnection numbers from California in the fall. Aside from a global manufacturing oversupply, what other impacts can these slowdowns foreshadow and how will the larger entities react?

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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 November 23rd, 2016

Demand charges dropped. Start of some big news in Illinois where all day negotiations between the Governor’s office and Exelon resulted in a deal framework. The mandatory demand charges will be dropped from the bill that will keep the nuclear power plants open at least another decade. Final legislative language just started circulating and there is an expectation that net metering will be kept largely intact with the existing 5% cap which is almost untapped, but some changes could be required. We’ve been speaking with the participants and will continue to update as news unfold.
Trump changes his tune. In an on the record meeting with New York Times yesterday, Trump was asked about climate change with a follow up from ‘Years of Living Dangerously’ host Tom Friedman. His answer is more in line with a non-political Trump. He wants clean air but above all, it cannot affect the competitiveness of domestic manufacturing. Industry should continue to reach out and educate how solar is economically attractive today and going forward with no increased fuel costs. So while he may dismantle the Clean Power Plan, most goals have already been met on a national level as Politico points out.
An island goes solar. A good project with great video production, that’s something I can really get behind. Tesla replaced diesel generators on an island in American Samoa with 1.4MW and 6MWh within a microgrid to give the island 3 days of autonomy instead of using nearly 110,000 gallons of diesel per year. Watch the video, I’ve shared it with my family and they all asked the same question. If you can do that, why aren’t we doing it everywhere?
Loans keep going bigger. Research is showing that loans are going to surpass leases and if you look at SolarCity’s data you can see it happening in that microcosm as well. One provider, Mosaic, is adding another facility to its war chest in order to get installers the money they need. In many ways, you are seeing a distributed network of installations happening by decentralizing the network as well.

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Yann

Illinois Energy Bill Makes Progress – Demand Charges Are Dropped

 Senate Bill 2814 introduced during the regular session came back during the latest special session with a new amendment, House Amendment 2. This amendment had multiple objectives but the primary one is a mechanism to keep two nuclear power plants in operation. The two plants, Clinton Power and Quad Cities, were announced to be closed on June1st 2017 and 2018, respectively. The Zero Emission Standard is the vital part of the bill that Exelon has stated would allow the plants to remain in operation. The bill also includes a fix of the renewable portfolio standard and energy efficiency investments, both … Read More →