Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for March 20th, 2023

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for March 19th, 2023

Reconciling The Obvious. It’s too early to say that we have a problem, but it’s too late to ignore the problem as much as we are. Largely due to two factors, operators, regulators and politicians are not up in arms about the fact that our energy use will be far larger than our energy generation in a much small time frame than expected. First, we’ve never really faced this problem before. Energy consumption went up at the rate of economic growth and in a very predictable fashion. Mornings and nights at home and day time at the office while everyone filled up their cars at the gas station. Second, power plants didn’t retire at the speed as they are going to because we’ve been extending them beyond their useful life and the plateau on energy consumption has been steady for a few decades. Package that with our replacement generation being variable in nature (for the most part), we have an operational challenge ahead for us that must not be ignored. Fixing the interconnection queues, getting more generation built and then adding markets for resilience, especially fast response, is key for keeping the lights on. Just look at the top two headlines, 58GW of retirements and massive AI data center build out, and you’ll see the problem as well.

UK Postcard. The UK just made some market changes that are having a memorable effect on the storage build out in the Country that is something that every storage owner and investor needs to consider for the future. By expanding the market and adding new products, asset owners need to now adjust their preforms and cycle management. How is their state of charge? Are they compliant with the new rules and how will they manage their augmentation? All of that to say, if they don’t have a digital solution in place to make and continue to adapt to those changes, they will either lose out on revenue, underuse their system or augment their site at the wrong time. When these events occur is the right time to reset the proforma internally and adjust the system by switching the EMS or adding additional data analytics capabilities to the system. More to come on this…

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for March 18th, 2023

Cheap Solar Panels, Winners and Losers. It’s always been the dilemma, cheap solar panels from Asia hurt the domestic manufacturing build out. On the other hand, imagine the lowest scenario, if solar panels were free then consumers and tax payers would benefit from cheaper PPAs (energy cost) and value of tax credits. I don’t know the right answer but the same is true for anything we import really. Imagine Amazon.com only selling domestically manufactured goods or Walmart. Nobody is saying all solar panels should be made here, I would welcome that, but there’s also an economic upside to it as well. I’d love to hear more thoughts on this from you all, how do you reconcile cheap solar panels?

Pay It Forward. As many of you know, before coming to FlexGen, I worked in residential solar in the Bay Area. I had the pleasure of working with some amazing people that helped create one of the fastest growing companies over the years that we worked together. Of course, residential solar is having a bit of a reset and some of these folks are impacted by cuts. So here’s my ask to you, starting with two people that were amazing employees for me, are you looking for a marketing associate and sales manager? If so, let me know so that I can connect you to them.

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for March 14th, 2023

Sea Of Suits. If there is one legacy left behind from the solar industry, it’s the 3,500 navy blue suits that come together at the Infocast Solar + Wind (And Storage) Conference in Phoenix. For the veterans, this is the old Rancho Bernardo conference. It was great to catch up with so many of you that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing in so long. It’s incredible that our industry drives this level of collaboration and investment, representing the $50billion market that we all created in 2023 and will continue to grow.

Opinion

Best, Yann