This is your SolarWakeup for October 8th, 2015

Let's all take a breath. This talk about a global solar meltdown, emerging market collapse is a giant over reaction. SunEdison is leaving the UK not because of any internal problems. It is leaving because the Conservative party in the UK has decided to cater to fossil interests and eliminate all markets for solar. The stock price of solar stocks has come down because Wall Street operates on feeling and not reality. Who knows if the yieldco is the right strategy? But at the end of the day solar projects have cash flow and whether a cash flow comes from mortgages, airplane leases or solar plants, investors will want to own the cash flow stream.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for October 7th, 2015

What is the price of a bond? The answer mostly depends on the underlying entity providing the guarantee. Corporates will sit in the 4-5% range. Utilities are significantly lower and Governments often beat that even more. What is the cost of a green bond? A solar bond? Clearly higher, in some cases 50% higher. I have no idea why that is except that the market clearly thinks there is some sort of risk integrated in this. So we need to figure out how to rebrand bonds from green bonds to safer bonds. GM, with a bankruptcy just a few years back, is trading bonds at 6.25% for 30 years. That’s lunacy.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for October 6th, 2015

I wrote an article about 3 years ago when I bought my first electric car which used 10kWh per day. While my solar install reduced my energy purchase by about 25kWh per day on average, I was still a net loss in energy for my utility (a regulated monopoly). Things have now changed. I have now transitioned to a full electric car which will use about 30kWh per day with my normal commute. I may be an outlier, but not much considering I am owner #101,111, but my solar is now completely neglected by my additional energy consumption. So here is my tip to utility execs (that may or may not have the ability to look ahead by more than a quarter), forget solar. It’s a minor blip in your growth in electric vehicles. Invest in the infrastructure that increases the amount of energy used in transportation so that you can compete with BP, Chevron, Exxon, et al for the first time in history.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for October 5th, 2015

There always seems to be some sort of hype in solar. Wall street has hit the solar stocks pretty hard recently causing some unnecessary commotion. Ask yourself what has changed in the last few months, has anything changed? Not really. Solar is trying to compete with trillion dollar fossil markets, utilities that have a guaranteed return on capital in the double digits (thank you anti-competitive market regulations); both of which have access to capital at below mortgage rates. Solar still pays double/triple that. So when you read about layoffs at SUNE, don’t buy the hype. They have bought several companies and surely there are duplicative roles; the headlines are lip service to day traders.

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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 October 2nd, 2015

Earlier this week, 6 of the world’s largest banks called for strong climate change policies on the same day that the Governor of the Bank of England had a similar speech about the risk climate change poses on the banking system. As Hurricane Joaquin barrels down on the East Coast (and hopefully will miss and not become Superstorm Joaquin), 10 of the largest food companies are calling for climate change policies. Writing a press release is nice, even cute, but if they really want to do something about it, spend money and lobbyists. The ITC extension and net metering battles mean the difference between a cute solar market and a market that is allowed to compete in a free market. Allocate 0.1% of profits for a single year and the impact would be tremendous. If they don’t know where to put the money, there are plenty of solar advocacy groups that would be happy to steer them in the right direction.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for October 1st, 2015

Welcome to Q4 2015, the busiest time of the year for everyone in solar. Now comes the race to closing those deals, build your backlog and place some assets into service. 2016 is sure to be a busy time in solar so keep focus on being informed and thinking ahead. Sometimes we all get caught up on running on the solar treadmill that we forget about the innovative ideas we had. So take your time and do something positive for your company and the industry by being innovative!

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 30th, 2015

Another incredible story coming out of California which has not yet been reported on! While everyone was busy gloating about the 50% RPS bill that passed in CA, few eyes have been following the NEM 2.0 debate but it’s time to change that. The Office of Ratepayer Advocates is there to represent the ratepayers (ALL of them) and is appointed by the Governor. Historically the ORA has been pro net metering and issued opinions that represented the issue fairly and accurately. It seems this has changed (politics?) because in their NEM 2.0 filing, the ORA is advocating for solar fees that are WORSE than the egregious fees the utility in Arizona was asking for. This is the same utility that dropped the issue because it was so outrageous, yet the ORA appears to be going anti-solar in CA. The key issue seems that utilities are looking for solar customers to make up for bad utility investments and subsidize non-solar energy costs in addition to fixed transmission costs. The whole thing is fishy and needs to be reported on properly. Filing is the first story today…

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 29th, 2015

To follow on the discussion from yesterday and last week, I am wondering what a national energy policy would look like in the US. We currently have 50 States that regulated (or don’t) energy at various levels and create an extreme climate of complexity. If the national government took over, would the policy around energy have to center around carbon instead of electrons? Could the national policy revolve around access to the grid and make distributed energy a more important part of central planning?

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 28th, 2015

Quite a week for climate politics including how solar energy plays a role. The Pope visited the United States visiting with President Obama who also met with President Xi of China. Unveiling carbon regulations for the Chinese economy to recover from pollution related downward pressure, all of these policies are key to getting somewhere in Paris during the COP21 talks. For some reason, all of the obvious climate and financial benefits of climate and solar policies appear to be falling on deaf ears within the DC beltway. I don't know what it will take to make this change, but it has to happen at some point.

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Yann