Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for October 15th, 2018

Climate Change Shift. Climate change isn’t a topic that is too exciting to write about because it has been politicized as a topic. While I don’t understand how anyone can ignore it, I understand why political parties have taken the sides that they have. This week there was a shift however, IPCC started off with a dire warning and the President amplified it by not saying very much about it. At the same time, Hurricane Matthew ravaged the Florida panhandle. Matthew was originally expected to be a Tropical Storm but grew to a category 4 in the same waters that strengthened Hurricane Katrina. I see a society today that no longer wants to debate climate change, but maybe discuss what can be done about it. Spinning it to be a problem that is too big is bad, last year The Guardian wrote about the 100 companies that cause 70% of the global emissions. That type of viewpoint downplays the value of a 10kW home solar system or changing a single LED lightbulb. Both of this things are incredibly important and valuable to the energy economy.

17 F-22s. According to Lara Seligman of Foreign Policy, as many as 17 F-22 fighter jets may have been damaged or destroyed at Tyndall AFB in Florida. Each F-22 costs north of $300million and a single storm may have reduced the US inventory of F-22s by almost 10% at a cost of $5billion in addition to the cost of national security. This is a single line item in the cost of climate change, global warming and changing environmental landscapes. I did reach out to Coronal Energy, which operates a solar farm at Eglin AFB in Florida and they report a functioning solar farm on site with little to no damage.

Rubio Is Wrong. The IPCC report was big news on the Sunday shows and Marco Marco Rubio was asked about climate change and what he plans to do about it. “we’re going to have to do something about the impact on low-level coast areas…but I’m also not going to destroy our economy.” That is where Rubio gets it wrong because he is only hearing from the Koch side of the table. I hope that the folks at NextEra reading this make the call to Rubio to advise him on the financial benefits of solar and energy storage. Tell him where the future is for your billion dollar company, is it in coal, gas or renewables? This also shows the exact messaging we need to adapt for republican politicians. If we can’t argue the science or warnings, we need to argue the financial upside. The opportunity for bankers, lawyers, hedge fund managers and everyone else in the economy to make money saving the planet one solar panel at a time.

Orsted Joins Club. The Danish firm has been on a buying spree and taking its lessons learned across the globe. Being a clean energy major was originally coined by former Sunedison CEO, Ahmad Chatila, and GTM is bringing it back for their story on Orsted. They may be right, most of the other oil firms have dabbled but have yet to embrace the opportunity of the renewable future. It is more than a hedge on the core business units, its a full on replacement.

Coming Up. Thank you to everyone that joined me at the CALSSA dinner, it was a pleasure to see so many of you there. If you raised your hand to help raise money for the trade association that keeps the California market moving, thank you again! Next week I hope to see many of you at Vote Solar’s Equinox DC. As usual, if you spend more than $2,000 in tickets or sponsorships, you get to send me a paragraph to publish on this platform. Two weeks later, a big group of you has already registered to attend SolarWakeup Live! in Jersey City. The agenda is outstanding and the market is moving at breakneck speeds right now with new dockets starting almost every week. Solar is going to transition in NJ and if you want to learn how to make the appropriate changes, come and meet with us!

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann

 

This is your SolarWakeup for October 12th, 2018

We are entering the end of the year quarter and while we shoot to hit our numbers, we have to worry about what is coming up next. Based on seeing the first responses of the Solar Sentiment Survey makes me think that while you are optimistic, you need to be looking at what’s next. New Jersey is on track to replace the SREC program with something new while adding energy storage, innovating PJM markets and piloting community solar. That’s why we are heading the Jersey City next for SolarWakeup Live! the most influential event in solar. If you haven’t been to one yet, the event is a day of 1 on 1 interviews with the folks that drive the market. I do all of the interviews and get to the bottom of the issues that are important to your business. Head to SolarWakeuplive.com to get your ticket. Today only, you can get 20% off using code SWL20.

CALSSA Annual Dinner. See you there tonight! Make sure to place your bids for the auction products!

SolarEdge Buys Batteries, I Hate It. Yesterday, SolarEdge has acquired a high tech battery company called Kokam for about $88million. The premise I presume is that batteries will become as normal on a solar installation as the inverter meaning that another box will sit near the inverter with energy storage normalized into the system. That premise however creates a commodity out of the energy storage system which makes owning the battery manufacturing a bad place in my opinion. SolarEdge should have focused on acquiring a system integration and playing the commodity of the battery market to ride the cost curve down. We are in the very early stages of energy storage and I’m betting on the price declines of battery cells being very steep.

SRA > NRA. This isn’t a political post. This is a post about the funding mechanism for the NRA and the perception of the power that the NRA uses in political arenas. Everytime someone buys a gun, they join the NRA. They get a sticker and then they are on the NRA mailing list to continue supporting the association. In solar we don’t currently have a similar mechanism where every solar installation has a built in funding mechanism, until now (once you participate of course). The Solar Rights Alliance is looking to join every solar customer into an alliance and activate them during moments of advocacy across the Country. Check out the great program by seeing more about the information released in the CleanTechnica post.

NY Is In A Rush. Another $40 million from the New York State Government to spur C&I solar and storage in the State. While the money is appreciated, it would be great to see the VDER program fixed so that solar can work without the peaks and valleys created by incentive programs. VDER is too complicated today and doesn’t fully stack the value generated by generation. Moreover, the simplicity of a community solar type program could go a big way within the VDER framework. There are some signs that programs are getting more renewables in place, my friend Katie Ullman just went to work at Drift which works on the market side of greening consumers’ energy needs.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann

 

This is your SolarWakeup for October 11th, 2018

Don’t Ignore The Argument. Op-eds from across the spectrum appear in publications that have the intention of turning the readers against solar. In politics the decision is often to shift off an issue instead of making an argument for the position. In solar the decision to shape an argument is helped by the fact that the reader has an 80% chance of being pro-solar. To be more specific, a Koch funded argument appeared in The Hill a few days ago attacking net metering. Today you have the response from Vote Solar’s Zadie Oleksiw rightly taking on the argument. 

Distributed Solar Consolidation. Another acquisition yesterday on the development platform side, this time by Constellation. The East Coast based utility has purchased PFMG Solar from Spear Point Energy. The Southern California developer has been actively developing on the West Coast for many years. Interestingly side note, I signed in to a meeting at PFMG Solar, circa 2011,  and as I walked in, the Constellation team was walking out. Now the name on the door will change, congrats to all involved. 

Google Continues Their Plan. It’s been over a year since my conversation with then Google’s Sam Aarons who is now with Lyft. Back then the search giant had announced it had reached 100% renewable energy with two follow on goals. First, match the energy needs with renewable energy within the same geography and lastly, match the geography and the need with renewable energy at time of day. The post highlighted here shows the goal outlined a year ago and the ability to execute on it in certain locations in the near future. 

Storage In Carolinas. Doesn’t look like Duke will be the driver to get to scale doing storage in the Carolinas. $500 million may sound good on a press release but over 15 years it’s borderline offensive. Energy storage will be tens of billions in scale all across the Country in a few years and one filing from a utility shows how out of tune the incumbents are with the energy market of the 21st century. 

To Dos. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to fill out the Solar Sentiment Survey for Q3. Also, check out the agenda for SolarWakeup Live! Jersey City, not only a great event to learn about the market movements but also get some deals done. All the top folks in the market will be there.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann

 

This is your SolarWakeup for October 10th, 2018

NJ Utilities Commission. There are a lot of solar and storage topics on the docket in NJ. Recently the community solar rules for the pilot program came out. Coming up are the rules for the replacement to the SREC program and of course the studies on the energy storage implementation. That’s just on the solar front, there are topics regarding PSE&G’s proposals plus the offshore wind vision for New Jersey. This is a long way to say that the discussion with NJ BPU President Fiordaliso will be great. I look forward to getting the point of view from him about the clean energy future. 

Solar Jobs Survey. The annual survey to count the solar jobs, it’s a big number, is available to be filled out. Make sure to take your time and pass it along to your human resource department so that we can get an accurate count. The link to the survey is in the post below. 

Watch FERC. Montana may not be the hotbed for PURPA contracts but when it comes to FERC ruling on solar and storage with PURPA, this may be ground zero. PURPA has arguably been the best policy written decades ago with no assumption that it would help solar. Nonetheless it has been used in States across the Country to lower the cost of electricity for consumers and help utilities add a lot of solar with little friction. 

SEIA Install White Paper. I see a lot of solar installations and most of them are well done. Of course that is a function of my work at Quick Mount PV but I also have seen some terrible installations that great installers have to fix for homeowners. Solar does have a small subset of ‘get rich quick’ installers. These are folks that could care less about the industry and are simply trying to cut corners and take money from homeowners. Our job as an industry is to make sure that competition elevates quality and does not race the quality to the bottom dollar. SEIA’s white paper on best practices for installations is a great start. It highlights the documentation that each party in the process should provide to the homeowner and it complements the education of homeowners and code officials. Send me more of your great pictures and solar wall of shame contestants, we need to highlight the good and bad!

Sentiment Survey. Don’t forget to take the SolarWakeup Solar Market Sentiment Survey. 30 seconds from start to finish and results will be released at solarwakeuplive.com

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann