Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for February 5th, 2023

Local Trackers. The 45X credits are making a real impact to the supply chain in trackers, importantly partnering innovating tracker manufacturers with existing steel companies and allowing them to expand. This is allowing an even landscape between large incumbents and new entrants with innovative tech to benefit at the same level without massive capex disadvantages. Trackers have been on a 20 year innovation curve and it seems like it’s just beginning to gain hold.

The Oil Conundrum. How does a president that signed the largest clean energy infrastructure investment bill in history square the reality with the electorate that the United States is producing more oil than ever before. It seems that in this political era, you can’t do both things because you’re supposed to be all in on one side and against the other.

Pricing Reliability. I can tell you how many days I lost power during each hurricane but I can’t tell you how many days it’s been since I’ve last lost power. The point is that utilities obsess about reliability because that’s what causes the biggest headache for regulators, politicians and executives. We all know that the grid is changing with new forms of generations and new type of consumer and aging infrastructure but apparently now market operators are catching up and looking to send signals for additional reliability. Much more to be done but a start is a start…

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This is your SolarWakeup for February 2nd, 2023

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This is your SolarWakeup for February 1st, 2023

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This is your SolarWakeup for January 31st, 2023

Get What We Expect. My frustration with policy is that it rarely states the intention or goal of the legal words that go into the bill. The reason for that is some version of diplomacy or political nature of not wanting to offend anyone. This leads to investments being made to meet customer demand with the expectation of some underlying support and yes, I’m talking about domestic supply chains. Europe’s manufacturers need support from governments because local content isn’t finding enough demand in the market. Of course, as projects get built, demand is going to balance price, quality and other factors. While the individuals may desire to support domestic content, the price also has to be there which causes the rub between trade policies and/or local support of domestic content. Solar panels and batteries have some similarities in that respect but also some large differences. Solar panels will not degrade at nearly the same pace of battery containers, which are largely made to order. At the same time, battery containers weigh over 70 thousand pounds and shipping them is it’s own major challenge, giving local supply a built in benefit. We’ll see how markets evolve, but in the meantime if Europe wants any domestic supply chain, they’ll have to decide if that goal is worth building policies around. 

Opinion

Best, Yann