This is your SolarWakeup for August 5th

Minimum Import Price? The section 232 on poly looks to be coming soon, at least it seems so by some companies’ stock price pops. With a likely MIP (minimum import price) on modules, the question comes on how it will drive domestic factories and does it need a 45x extension bill in order to really drive that. At what MIP will the market slow in a way that is painful or can the off taker market manage it, those are the questions I am hearing right now.

Base Power. A residential storage company is raising $1billion at a whopping valuation of $13billion and you may not have heard of it. They don’t really sell anything to the solar market but they provide storage as a service to consumers, somewhere around 600MWh or more touting a daily build rate of 100 units. With this raise the company is also building their own 40kWh storage unit and owning the vertical supply chain. At $13b, Base is worth nearly 3x Enphase but that’s a bit apples and oranges given the infrastructure play that Base is but begs to question whether Enphase should raise a couple billion dollars and own the assets too. Of course, with 8.6GW of solar and 4.3GWh of storage, at a value of $2.3billion, Sunrun may feel some resentment.

Opinion

Energy Storage News: Load smoothing, cold-start backup and speed-to-power – Fluence maps the battery storage opportunity for Australian data centres

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 4th

The LFP Scale Up. Samsung is building out their domestic LFP production and already highlights that demand will outpace their capacity which is a reasonable start to take. There is an overlap of the demand between the auto and energy sectors and finding the volumes that will drive pricing and cost structures. The trade cases will also come to the storage market, which will surely take some time to find a rationalization as well.

FCC Part 1 of Many. Hard to consider the FCC rule that defines everything. I’ve spoken to several executives that feel fine with what was issued from their side but when I speak to asset owners, they’re a bit more worried about replacements, firmware updates etc. My highlight is that this is likely to extend to storage and those software components in the EMS and BMS. Both of which would well to be expected to be included in the near future. On the market altering side, Some developers are wondering how the interconnection procedures will adapt to the rule and how it will be enforced at that level.

PE To Infra Pipeline. No shortage of dealmaking happening. Early PE is selling platforms with healthy pipelines and operating assets, look at the Aypa Power to Brookfield sale. Valuations appear to be in the billion per GW range. Then the Shell, Total, KKR deal shows that infrastructure capital is deploying in a big way but also taking on that late stage