Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for July 13th, 2020

EVs In Focus. Rivian has raised another $2.5billion. What is now becoming clear to me is that the existing OEMs are not able to get real on EVs. They have the teams, money and facilities but can’t get around to making EVs that actually do what they are supposed to, cannibalize their existing market. Tesla will be joined by Rivian and then another but until salespeople, dealers and designers see the benefits of change, they will resist it.

Effective Load Capacity. Twitter has the best headlines buried in it and I hope that reporters will take this one on. California utilities have studied the effective load carrying capacity (ELCC) of various forms of renewables, names solar, solar with 4 hours of storage, wind and wind with 4 hours. You’ll have to read the filing to get the full definition of ELCC but it is as it seems, how effective at providing electricity is each source when the grid needs it. Here’s the headline, tracking PV is 6.9% when judged as an as-available resource. Add 4 hours of storage to it and it jumps to 99.8%. This remains true even in 2030 when the ELCC for solar hybrid is still 93.2%. Let’s reevaluate the race to the bottom on energy cost and get projects built that monetize the value of the assets.

500 Million Solar Panels. Part of the Biden-Sanders plan brings back an idea from Clinton in 2016, 500 million solar panels. In my podcast from a few weeks ago with John Farrell, we talked about his plan for 30 million solar roofs and it’s similar to a memo I wrote a year ago pushing for no more naked roofs, i.e. solar on every rooftop. Biden’s plan is clear, we’re going to do more solar. Industry folks will push for a different metric but people understand solar panels more than they understand watts or kWhs. If you could write the plan for the Biden campaign, what are the bullet points?

Are Modules Fungible? Rinse and reuse as they say. The SolarWorld factory in Oregon was acquired by SunPower and now the factory in Germany is taken over by Meyer Burger. Meyer was historically a provider of factory solutions to OEMs looking to manufacture. Now they feel that their solution is fine branded under their own flag. So I ask you to think about this, what is the value of the label on the module? I’m not talking about quality or materials used, but the label itself. Residential solar modules range from modules in the 30s per watt to over $1. Brand names and names only solar pros know, silver on white and black on black. Is this fungible or drive a homeowner to make a decision one way or another.

Mobile But Stationary. Here is the corrected link for the podcast with Orison CEO, Eric Clifton. Orison is the storage company that makes storage for your home but plugs into your outlet. Podcast link for Apple and Spotify

Trivia Answer. Last week I asked who the largest pure play installer was now that Sunrun is acquiring Vivint Solar. Of course SunPower and Tesla follow Sunrun but they aren’t only installers. The answer is Trinity Solar out of New Jersey.

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 10th, 2020

Talking Orison’s Battery. In this week’s podcast I talk with Orison’s CEO. Orison is the startup that recently raised $8.5million for their energy storage hardware product. If you read the comments about the original coverage you’ll see that there is some pushback about the product from inside solar and I ask him some of those questions. Please rate and subscribe to the podcast.

Two Energy Policy Options. The Biden campaign, in collaboration with the Sanders advisors, released a strong and ambitious plan to fight climate change. More renewables, R&D, job training amongst other initiatives. In November there are two options on the ballot and when it comes to energy only one of them has a real plan. There are some great events coming up that I’ll be sharing with you and in the meantime hope you start putting your money behind the policy that increases the market for your work.

Revisiting Equity In The Workplace. BlueWave Solar released their actions and plan to practice anti-racism in the workplace. The plan is simple and to the point and I appreciate their willingness to be open and share it with the industry.

Readers Helping Out. A personal thank you to Panasonic’s Jack O’Donohue for a kind message on LinkedIn about SolarWakeup. It gave SolarWakeup a new network to welcome to the readership. Thanks Jack!

Share Data, Not Germs. Thanks to the great team at UtilityAPI for sending one of these really cool masks. What are your branded masks looking like?

Nonprofits Want Solar Too. My friends at CollectiveSun can help you sell more solar to nonprofits. By working with CollectiveSun your nonprofit prospects get easy $0 down financing and a 12% or more tax-like credit for their systems. Now, more than ever, solar can help nonprofits save on their critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer, this is a great solution for you to sell more solar and ignite more deals with nonprofits. Click here to learn more about working with CollectiveSun.

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 9th, 2020

A Feel Good Story. The CEO of a Los Angeles based installer has the story that we want to hear in solar. Kenneth Wells didn’t have it easy growing up and after 6 years in the criminal system found himself entering the solar workforce through a program at Grid Alternatives. That training led to more solar jobs before ending up at Sunrun as a construction manager. Today he’s his own boss running O&M Solar Services. There isn’t enough funding for solar groups like Grid Alternatives and training centers, and stories like Kenneth’s help tell the solar success story.

Solar Is Misunderstood. The headline pulled me in, I wanted to read more analysis on what folks thought about Sunrun’s acquisition of Vivint Solar. Reading the article, I was shocked by the confusion. In short, the author says that Sunrun bought Vivint Solar because more homeowners are buying solar instead of leasing it and Sunrun wanted to more share of the “shrinking slice of the pie.” Cash, loans and leases are democratized. Most installers have access to all three financial products today and this deal isn’t about leases.


PacifiCorp Responds To Solar. Two days in a row for the Northwest utility on SolarWakeup. The 58th largest utility in America filed their IRP and is readying an RFP for 1.8GW of solar and 595MW of energy storage to be installed in the next 3 years. Not too shabby.

Capital Dynamics Wants It All. When MISO releases their recent interconnection data, we will likely see record applications that may reach over 2GW in applications, maybe much more. Capital Dynamics, the asset manager with a record of execution, is now partnering with Tenaska on a portfolio of 24 projects coming online by 2023. The total capacity is estimated to be 4.8GW.

Nonprofits Want Solar Too. My friends at CollectiveSun can help you sell more solar to nonprofits. By working with CollectiveSun your nonprofit prospects get easy $0 down financing and a 12% or more tax-like credit for their systems. Now, more than ever, solar can help nonprofits save on their critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer, this is a great solution for you to sell more solar and ignite more deals with nonprofits. Click here to learn more about working with CollectiveSun.

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for July 8th, 2020

Forwarded. If one of our amazing readers forward this email to you, you can subscribe for free here.

59th Largest IOU. The combination of Sunrun and Vivint Solar, from hereon out called Sunrun will have over 500,000 residential customers. According to EIA, that makes Sunrun the 59th largest investor owned ‘utility’ nestled between Duke Energy South Carolina and Pacificorp. For reference, it is 1/7th the size of PG&E and 1/9th Florida Power & Light which sits at 4.3million customers. At the point of IPO, Sunrun had 80,000 customers and adds about 40,000 customers per year. In comparison, many of you residential solar installers are considering yourself huge when you reach 1,000 installs per year, something less than 50 companies in the US can say.

Installer Trivia. Sunrun will be the largest by far followed by other public companies, Tesla and SunPower. Can you name the next largest installer measured by number of permits pulled?

Management Talking Points. The companies hosted a conference call yesterday morning led by Lynn Jurich (CEO), Ed Fenster (Executive Chairman) and Tom vonReichbauer (recently new CFO of Sunrun) joined by CEO of Vivint Solar, David Bywater. The call started with highlights of the synergies and complementary nature of combining the companies. Sunrun is adding direct to home sales engine and the combination will save $90million in overhead. Wall Street analysts are focused on the $90million in cost synergies which was frustrating for me on the call because it misses the larger point. The combination is 500,000 customers and while the company isn’t focused on the ability to add storage to those customers, it remains an asset. Behind the scenes analysts tend to view the deal in a positive light. The optimism comes in the form of short-term, refinancing the debt of the entire portfolio, and longer term partnering with low cost of capital, pension fund type, investors to create a competitive edge. The real value and reason for scale is that the residual income that the general partner (Sunrun) can create from these portfolios could be enough to fund the overhead of the platform. That would bring Sunrun into the public company glory land of positive earnings per share. More to come on this, particularly from financial analysts.

The Nodal Impact. Most regulatory risk will talk about antitrust approvals, I don’t worry about that especially since Sunrun and every solar installer compete against electric utilities which are you know, monopolies. Also not a risk, but interesting to talk about is what happens when Sunrun and solar companies in general control energy storage all over the residential grid. Imagine Sunrun with 500k storage units across the Country, will utilities ask regulators to oversee that control? Nationally it’s diverse enough but think about it at a nodal level.

IPO To Quasi-Merger. In 2014, Vivint Solar went public with my writeup on the S-1 and in June of 2015, Sunrun filed its S-1. A month later, Sunedison entered into terms with Vivint Solar to acquire the company for $2.2Billion. It has taken exactly 5 years from that moment for the Utah based company to enter into a new agreement. This all-stock acquisition feels a bit more like a merger to me but now you have the fruits of over a decade of labor. Someone could and should write a book about Sunrun from the early days of resi solar, lots of fun stories involving startups, SolarCity, race cars, rocket ships and of course American Idol. This feels like a summit of sorts, but we know that much more work is to be done by the industry.

Pipelines And Politics. A lot of talk about pipelines this week and how the potential Biden presidency impacts the development of those. That logic is flawed. Pipelines are financial investments that span decades, you need a consistency of policy not a momentary positive followed by a negative. Even if the next decade only feature republican presidents, would pipelines continue to be built? The trend on this is the direction away from the fossil fuels in oil and gas pipelines and towards transmission, especially HVDC. The trend line is more important than the election.

Nonprofits Want Solar Too. My friends at CollectiveSun can help you sell more solar to nonprofits. By working with CollectiveSun your nonprofit prospects get easy $0 down financing and a 12% or more tax-like credit for their systems. Now, more than ever, solar can help nonprofits save on their critical operating expenses. If you are a solar installer or developer, this is a great solution for you to sell more solar and ignite more deals with nonprofits. Click here to learn more about working with CollectiveSun.

Opinion

Best, Yann