This is your SolarWakeup for September 16th, 2015

A cloudy first day of SPI 2015 today and I am not just talking about the weather. SEIA, through Rhone Resch, is rightfully pressing the panic button in its communication to the solar industry. There are some 200k solar professionals working in the space and if we had been proactive and actually calling our Senators, solar ITC could be much farther along. If you are a small contractor selling cash deals to residential and small commercial customers, solar without the ITC is painful for your business. Run a financial model without the ITC and tell me what it says, in the meantime you can pick up the phone and ask your Senators to help.

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Have a great day!
Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 15th, 2015

Money talks! That’s what you are getting across the Country as the companies interested in making sure solar doesn’t disrupt energy markets, especially their long time monopolies. Those money interests are right here in the solar industry and you are most likely helping fund anti-solar ITC efforts by attending SPI. A year ago, I asked if SPI will have to split up. The reason? The event is put on by SEIA and SEPA, and those interests are no longer aligned in growth of solar. SEPA’s members are mostly utilities and they have spurned SEIA’s request to push for an ITC extension. Don’t buy Julia Hamm’s response about tax status, it is very bad PR on her end. Let’s see how it plays out this year, but there is a rift and SEPA needs to step up and push for an ITC extension or pull out of SPI 2016 and perhaps choose to sponsor EEI’s annual conference.

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Have a great day!
Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 14th, 2015

Planes across the Country are full of solar people flying to Anaheim for SPI (me included). On Friday, California showed again why the majority of total and annual solar growth is in their State. The legislature passed a 50% renewable energy by 2030 bill, clearly putting them into a leadership position on a macro level. Don’t let the details be missed, utilities want to gut the policies that will make solar a portion of the 50% which would put California behind South Carolina in comparison. So as you see the headlines, stay aware of what the other (incumbent and monopolistic) market participants want to do to solar.

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Have a great day!
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 September 11th, 2015

Solar profits are a funny metric. Yesterday, Sunrun had its first earnings release post IPO and along with every other solar company, the street will hype about their losses and how it cannot be sustained. On the other hand, the company will be judged by how many MW it added to its balance sheet. So here’s the catch, how is a solar company supposed to add assets to its balance sheet and not pay for them? If the company doesn’t use equity to invest in the assets, they aren’t their assets and will sit on someone else’s balance sheet. I am oversimplifying the complexity of solar project finance but you catch my drift. Stop judging solar companies on EPS, instead look at their assets and the retained earnings those add to the company.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 10th, 2015

A speedbump is perhaps the right description or perhaps its more like those spikes that I see at the rental car places. The US solar market is growing tremendously and next year will only get bigger before the dreaded ITC cliff. Your help is still needed, in a full court press to your Senators. If you want to see what can happen to a solar industry for lack of regulatory support, look across the pond to the UK where overnight the distributed rooftop market was essentially canceled. See you at SPI next week!

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Have a great day!
Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 9th, 2015

I get excited about big deals in solar. Not only about the big projects that make global companies grow, like in Brazil last week, but the corporate deals that make investors wonder why they didn’t invest a bit more like DBL Investors. DBL, as you may know, were early in Tesla, SolarCity and also in NEXTracker. NEXTracker was acquired by manufacturer, Flextronics, this week for a whopping $330million. As the US market adds 1,400MW in Q2 of 2014 and surpasses 20GW of capacity, the market is huge and ready to make investors a ton of money.

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Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for September 8th, 2015

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board went after solar and in particular the head of policy at Sunrun. Now he gets to respond to the WSJ and to the readers that think they know, especially the fact that WSJ only highlighted his stint at the Department of Energy. Many in solar just want the ability to compete and not necessarily ask for a leg up on the incumbents. Here is the money line from his response, "Conservatives understand that unilateral disarmament isn’t free markets, it’s big government picking winners and losers at its worst.”

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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 September 4th, 2015

This question always comes out in a conversation about a solar project. Will costs continue to decrease? Should I wait to move on solar? Obviously with a 50GW global market, it’s becoming less of a barrier. But it yields an interesting discussion if you think about it. What did your computer or cell phone look like 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Technology improves and in solar’s case efficiencies will lower prices. Even if costs drop 50% over the next 15 years, solar has become too cost effective to ignore because the savings over time make up for the reductions in costs forthcoming.

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Have a great day!
Yann