Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for July 31st, 2020

Weekend Vibes. Happy Friday and end of July. Here’s your rundown and fast feedback on today’s news in solar.

Support Energy News. EPA doesn’t like the coverage they are getting from E&E News and  canceled their subscription. If you can, support E&E by subscribing. They used to have a fantastic TV studio that I’d love to host SolarWakeup TV in. In the meantime, solar should make a deal with coal plants across the Country, shut down the coal plant and replace it with solar plus storage and use the savings to clean up the site and help with job training of the displaced employees.

Virtual Power Plant Contracts. A month ago, if you listened to the SolarWakeup podcast, we had this story in my conversation with Nick Chaset from East Bay Community Energy. This is another virtual power plant using local resources. This type of project will become harder to do in the future based on the decision by the CPUC to take local resource adequacy responsibility off the hands of CCAs and giving it to PG&E and SCE.

Home Electrification. In a double newsday keeping my PR friends busy, Sunrun signed a JV with SK E&S, a Korean conglomerate. Each company will contribute $75million to a joint venture aimed at home electrification, which will be interesting to watch and understand what that means. SK E&S will also buy $75million worth of Sunrun shares at $36 per share.

Earnings Season. Sunnova beat and reaffirmed guidance for the year. Generac is predicting positive cash flow in clean energy in 2020. Next week we get Enphase and Solaredge. In case you missed it, listen to the Generac earnings call and you’ll get a look at how a CEO should handle an earnings call. It was a easy flowing conversation off the cuff without talking points and scripts. Solar companies should take note.

Utilities As Public Good. Utilities get monopoly status because they have a public responsibility, a responsibility to serve. This has been hijacked by shareholder desire for growth and dividends. First Energy is not out of the woods as 5 people get indicted by an Ohio grand jury including the Ohio Speaker of the House. It shows how far utilities are willing to go to get what they want from politicians and regulators. It seems beyond potential to rectify the situation but let’s hope it can be done.

CPV Project Goes Bust. A SolarReserve project has gone bust and a DOE loan guarantee will lose a little over $200million. Digging into PR talking points from 5 years ago, here is what the SolarReserve CEO had to say about the future of CPV at the time “We can’t power the planet with rooftop solar and the case for developing CSP when PV is cheaper.” I think rooftop solar won. 

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 30th, 2020

No Column. Catch up on this week’s podcast about virtual batteries with the CEO of Extensible Energy. You can find it on your favorite platforms. 

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 29th, 2020

Stimulus Package Gets Stuck. DC politics are thick right now around the stimulus package. There was a path to a quick passage in the Senate but that will not happen which means your work to advocate for solar to have a chance to be included continues. Politics are a fluid race to the finish but the finish line is always moving, it’s also the industry we’re in so let us take a deep dive on politics, policy and solar.

Bipartisan Means What? Poll after poll shows that solar support from voters is bipartisan, in some cases even a swing issue. Solar pros often tout the bipartisan nature of what we do, and I agree with them. I also agree that solar is resilient to withstand most solar politics, the industry is still doing well under Trump which was considered a major risk. But, there is a caveat. Solar is not that bipartisan, most instances of solar market creation by State and Federal government happened when political power shifted from republican to democrat. I asked my Twitter followers for good examples and here are some of their views. NJ, VA, and MD are some examples. I think SC is an example where a GOP majority worked with the industry.

Why Does It Matter? 7 GOP Senators gave solar the bipartisan support that we seek as an industry, here is a public policy poll that shows you why it was sent. Maine, North Carolina and Arizona all have clean energy jobs as +40 when polled. Senators from all three States signed on to the letter, betting that the letter is the only action needed to get some of that vote. This is an important note to consider because it underpins the comment “solar will be fine regardless of who is in charge”. Polling and experience suggests that neither party wants to destroy the solar industry but differs in their willingness to grow the market.

Like It Or Not, Policy Matters.  Status quo may be enough for some but growth in this market means being involved in policy. Look at the work done in Virginia by advocates that took dominion from <200MW to a future of 19,000MW. That is policy at work. Florida still benefits from the policy pushed in 2007 by then Governor Charlie Crist and Vote Solar. It is very dangerous for the solar industry to be spectators in policy, you can advocate hard for policies without being partisan. This is my call to action because we are still underinvesting in policy, your budget should include at least 1% of revenue for policy activities.

Just Look At Oil. The big 5 oil companies are spending nearly $1million per day just to lobby on the topic of climate. That doesn’t include the millions spent on PR and marketing consultants to get stories like today’s New York Times story. Add the State level lobbying dollars and you realize that we’re not in a fair fight. 

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 28th, 2020

FERC Gets Nominees. Trump nominated two commissioners to FERC yesterday, both of which had clean tech Twitter giddy, including a thought bubble that he may be lobbying for votes in the clean energy industry. Allison Clements comes from the Energy Foundation and NRDC, serving as the Director the Sustainable FERC Project at the time. Mark Christie is on the Virginia SCC currently and will allow the Virginia Governor to nominate a new commissioner to fill the seat. Christie is described as a by the book lawyer and has years of experience in regulatory oversight.

Ponies At The Petting Zoo. Some utility dockets are dry and otherwise uninteresting to the solar market. And if it seems that sometimes there isn’t anything in it for our industry, you would be right. That doesn’t mean that turning that docket around gets pro-solar overnight but solar advocates have gotten really good at the incremental gain, a step forward. Duke was proposing a grid plan that had the opposition of our advocates and now will amend their plan to include climate change as a factor. A step forward and we get to see the ponies.

A Clean Grid. Speaking of a clean grid, UK grid operators are forecasting negative emissions in 13 years. National Grid is the utility that is active on both sides of the Atlantic and could be a quick leader in the US with their lessons learned in the UK. Over the next decade it shouldn’t be hard for us to decarbonize the grid, I follow this strange bot on Twitter that tweets out EIA data on an hourly basis and coal is almost always the top generating source. Coal still represents 15x solar in terms of generation and it is the low hanging fruit when it comes to fighting pollution. It’ll take everyone to get this work done.

Two Points. Two points that I’d like readers to consider on having solar as a major part of the solution. First, utilities that are monopolies should no longer be allowed to lobby. Regulatory capture is too real and merging that with a lack of competition in a non-free market has shown to be a disaster. Either they are monopolies or they play politics, not both. Second, regulators need to figure out how to bring more solar to C&I rooftops. The large warehouses don’t match energy load to potential capacity but represent a distributed location for GW of capacity that needs to be leveraged.

Innovating Trade Groups. COVID has made trade groups get creative on reaching out to members and the industry. With a natural bias, CALSSA has been raising the bar including hosting informative web-based content every week since the shutdowns began. This week that includes content on inverters that is useful to installers across the Country. You get to hear from all major inverter companies with expert moderation. At $50, this is a steal for the content you get. Register Here.

Oil Money Will Get Sunny. Solar investments are often merged inside portfolios that also invest in other fuel sources. Bankruptcies, headwinds and oil major losses mean that those portfolios need to diversify and realign their investments. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing oil and gas related funds interested in solar, just look at the solar stocks. Solar was expected to suffer a deep and long pullback but appears to have had a few week drop and will come out with a growth year in 2020. Solar is a safer investment, aligns with the future politics and has the best return on investment in the energy space.

Friends. If this was forwarded to you or you have friends that don’t read SolarWakeup, please get them to subscribe. A friendly post on LinkedIn (tag SolarWakeup) would be greatly appreciated. 

Opinion

Best, Yann