This is your SolarWakeup for January 8th, 2023
Let’s Catch Up. Welcome to 2024, I hope you all enjoyed your break, doing whatever kept you busy. For the many new subscribers, welcome to SolarWakeup. For returning subscribers, thank you and please forward this newsletter to someone that may enjoy our daily chats. I’ll be at Intersolar North America next week if you are there to say hello! Lastly, please engage with our sponsors that help keep this community thriving and consider joining the ranks. We are the oldest and largest newsletter in the solar industry and now’s a great time to reach your target audience by sponsoring SolarWakeup.
Mild Winter Meets Winter Storm. Grid planning is always a tale of two extremes. While the winter has been so light that owning a ski resort may be the worst investment idea of 2024, planners are sounding the alarm on what would happen if a weather event strains supply with a major gas plant retiring in May. I’ll note that sounding this alarm is an amazing economic lobby for higher payments by the power markets to keep the plant operating. This has happened several times in the past and could be the case here once again. On the other hand, this should also increase the focus on having new generation and storage approved for construction and revenues.
An Economy’s Bandwidth. Talk to any economic development professional and they will tell you that the biggest hurdle for them is access to grid connection. Our pain of interconnection is similar for those looking to build new factories, data centers or offices. There simply isn’t enough bandwidth on the grid to build our the economic development at the pace that capitalism is trying to build it.
California Needs A 180. It’s a shame to see the turn that the California residential solar market has taken. Ultimately, the economy needs rooftop solar to be robust and enable those connected assets to be interconnected and ultimately become the reliable asset that they can be. But none of that will happen if the ecosystem that has been built over 20 years is left to wither. Unfortunately the headlines of the layoffs will continue until regulators reengage in a fruitful discussion with industry on stopping this.
Storage Growth Intelligence. So much to be said about the storage market and how it could evolve in various markets. I’m heading to London next month to check in on the happenings across the pond but in the US market analysis says that growth should be robust. One of the things that’s becoming clear is that portfolios will be built, they will use various suppliers based on supply availability and regulators will require upgrades (which has already happened). Asset owners will need to run those assets efficiently and reliably while ultimately realizing that they will also need to perform robust data analytics across their portfolio. Not all controls are created equal and they will likely not work on an interconnected basis across platforms, so making that decision intelligently is part of that game. With three major trade shows this year from ISNA, ACP and RE+ (forever SPI), you’ll see how much storage talk happens across those convention floors
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 22nd, 2023
Adieu 2023. You’ll hear from me one more time in 2023, as I recap the storylines that will remind me of this rather strange year. So this will be the last regularly scheduled newsletter for the year and an interesting thought popped into my head as I sat down to write this. BNEF’s Nat Bullard, who started writing his weekly rundown 2 years after I did, announced today that he will be ending Sparklines after a 9 year run. NREL also used to have a newsletter that ended circa 2013. I’m not ending the SolarWakeup run, while many of you have commented that I’ve been writing less, which is true, I still enjoy getting the news out to you. Which means that SolarWakeup will continue its run as the most influential newsletter in solar (and storage). I also don’t have hundreds of thousands of subscribers (though I think I should) because this isn’t my job. Writing this newsletter is how I get better at my day job, it makes me learn every day about what is going on and then have a thought about it. This level of routine, which is not in my DNA, has forced me to take into account so many different market variables and then publicly challenge you to correct me on that view if I’m wrong. So here’s to many more rundowns and thoughts, with your job being two things. First, I hope you value this enough to tell folks that they should subscribe and second, you challenge and correct me on my views so that we can find ways to keep getting better at this.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 21st, 2023
The 2023 Year, Your Views. It’s been a year, hasn’t it? As we put a bow on 2023, I will put some thoughts down over the weekend but before I publish that I want to hear from you. In 2022, we won the IRA battle and this year has been about the foundation of winning the win, i.e. making it work for us. What’s the one thing you’ll remember about 2023? Hit reply and let me know, your views could make it into the newsletter.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 20th, 2023
Set It And, Set It Again. I’ve said it here before that storage makes solar more valuable and capable because the asset owner determines the time of delivery not the sunshine. That allows for the marginal value of the electron to be maximized and not commoditized, which is especially important when the grid is overproducing demand. That being said, unlike solar, which has all of its complexities determined prior to day 1, storage has capex on day 1 and works to optimize that investment every day starting on day 2. That’s where your operating system gets important, it will tell you what’s happening, how well your asset is performing and how much money you left on the table because your battery is underutilized. I’m just kidding, that’s what you’re expecting but certainly not getting in 80% of the projects out there. You’re also in for a surprise when regulators start to talk about new compliance and revenue streams that your battery needs to be updated for. That’s the basis of my chat with Andy Colthorpe from Energy-Storage News in today’s top story.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 18th, 2023
Retirements And Growth. Last week, independent of each other, we got a report using underlying FERC data that shows nearly double the expected growth in the next five years. This is growth higher than we expected just last year. This is not inconsistent with what we’re hearing in ERCOT, data centers, electrification of the home/business and transportation. At the same time, NERC’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) is highlighting what NRECA calls a “grim picture” of the reliability for consumers. NREC highlights 83GW of planned retirements and 9 states that had capacity shortfalls causing rolling blackouts. They are placing MISO into a high risk for shortfalls [during normal peak] category with pretty much the rest of the Country in an elevated risk category. This is going to create some short term action that doesn’t make much sense for long term reliability or consumers but it’s clear what is needed. Maybe short term actions need to be taken, like California’s rush to add batteries, but also a view on long term policies that match where capital investment is going, i.e. energy transition and consumer pushing behavior.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 14th, 2023
Quick Question. Read today’s top article and ask yourself this, what happens if the load forecast is right?
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 13th, 2023
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 12th, 2023
A COP Deal, Means To Me. COPs have this sensation to me of being so global and meaning to solve such a big issue with a deal that I can’t wrap my mind around what a deal actually looks like and how I feel about it happening or not happening. From Kyoto to Copenhagen and Paris, it’s meant to drive the world towards a cleaner and more viable planet but did the deal itself do more than manifest a goal? Is it the ‘what gets measured’ portion of the saying? And before I ask you, who decides that the goal this year is to create a deal to phase out fossil fuels and how does that narrative get out there. Because if anything is spectacular is the media discipline of that message, it came out of nowhere and had every major opponent of it scrambling to counterpunch. So how do you think of a COP deal? If at all…
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 11th, 2023
The Battery Cost Curve. Great news for the energy storage asset owners and the grid which will benefit from the growth of flexibility. These charts remind me of the early days of solar, when we tracked the cost of silicon and solar cells. Today, nobody asks who made the cell in the module. In reality, buying batteries is far more complicated and delicate than solar panels. What you buy, when you buy and how you contract is a dance of quality, price and timing. Then you have to make sure you get what you want and what your partners expect. All that to say, battery cell pricing is going down, DC block pricing is going down slower and the knowledge needed to get the right product specified for your project is the most important thing. (Originally posted on Linkedin)
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 8th, 2023
Is It All Behind For Resi? Suppliers into the resi solar market have been on a PR circuit to talk about margins, inventories and demand. From that point of view, it’s all coming to an end for resi and demand will pick back up in Q1. The problem is that the market has fallen behind on policy spend and focus with major losses racking up. The largest suppliers are barely coming up with the funds to join the trade associations that do this work, so of course the associations can only do so much. Solar got big and it looked easy to make a buck for outside investors that weren’t here when the fights to create net metering were happening so they don’t think regulators would hurt something that’s obviously good for the economy. I’ve spent nearly half my career in solar talking to solar installers and while it’s not my day job at the moment, I still talk to many. The reality is that while the market is hard for suppliers, especially those that are or want to be public companies, the companies are spending too much time complaining about the market and not enough time taking market share from each other by investing in the installer relationships. I know what I’d be doing if I was running any of these companies and blaming market sentiment wouldn’t be at the top of that list.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann