Strategic Reduction In China’s Solar Market? China’s solar market is in for a shocking halt after an announcement by the governing body last week. Most of the publicly traded solar companies had a bad day yesterday after being downgraded on the change in subsidy policies that kept that capacity flowing at a massive pace. Let’s see how that affects the market pricing in the US, the oversupply could create competition that will center around pricing for the domestic projects. BUT I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t an impact that tries to stop the oversupply from coming this way given the 201 and AD/CVD tariffs are all percentage based charges.
Big EV Infra. I was amiss in speaking about this when it happened over the weekend but multiple regulatory bodies in CA and NY approved over $1billion in EV charging infrastructure to be built by the utilities. This is a massive upside for utilities that not only get to rate base the infrastructure, something I support, but also benefit from the increased load this will create from the EV adoption curve that this will cause since consumers will no longer worry about range. The conversation with regulators should be that any increased demand should be supplied with solar and storage and not rate based power generation.
Will The Consumers See This? The Trump coal and nuclear bailouts are going to cost money but the cost isn’t bourne by taxpayers but it may cause a two stage impact. The first level is similar to steel and aluminum tariffs with manufacturers and will affect the retail energy companies. Some may not have a way to pass the additional cost to the consumers while they are under contract and consumers that are about to renew will be in for a shocking price increase. Not only will consumers pay the actual increase but there will be a regulatory risk premium that otherwise would not have been there in a rational market. The price of the unknown is sometimes bigger than the actual price increase especially when a risk committee has to think about crazy possibilities.
Settling In North Carolina. Environmental and solar groups settled with Duke on their grid modernization efforts which were originally slated for greater than $7billion and settled at $2.5billion with some pro renewables policies attached. This comes in parallel with some leading indicators that Duke may be trying to stop energy storage to be added to solar projects, more on that to come.
Climate Change Financing Risk. Do you look at the climate change risk of a property that you are looking to fund a deal on? How do you do it and have you lost a deal because of it?
- SolarWakeup: Chinese Solar Market Suffers Severe Setback As Government Slashes Subsidies, Projects
- GreenBiz: A wave of electric vehicle charging investment is here
- New York Times: Bailing Out the Coal Industry Will Hurt Consumers
- Greentech Media: Duke Energy Finds Support for Smaller NC Grid Improvement Plan
- Scientific American: Run or Hide? Forecasters Struggle with Warnings as Disasters Change
- SolarWakeup: Wisconsin Utilities Agree To Add 300 MW Of Solar To Portfolios
- Motley Fool: Big Oil Is Investing Billions in Renewable Energy. Here’s Where and How.
- Reuters: Vietnam sets out green ambitions with bold targets for solar, rare earth
Opinion
Have a great day!
Yann