This is your SolarWakeup for December 15th, 2016

Join me, Mr. Musk. Elon Musk has joined the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, chaired by Blackson CEO Stephen Schwarzman. This comes after the tech meeting with President Elect Trump that included most of the who’s who from Silicon Valley. Musk runs companies that have taken State help and have contracts with the Federal government. It would have been ill-advised to draw the Twire (Twitter Ire) of the President Elect.

In Texas we see our future. Though intellectually it lacks some stimulation, some pundits were pointing out today that Rick Perry was somewhat open minded on renewables. Essentially leaving the ERCOT market to figure itself out and in some cases helping the wind sector get set up. Many utility CEOs got their internal start in wind or are deploying billions into the segment. Solar is also doing well with the open market approach in Texas, in all segments, so let’s have some faith.

Reaction to the data.  As the press covered the positive high level results from Q3, they did dig into some of the issues we highlighted yesterday. SEIA’s Interim President, Tom Kimbis, came out with some positivity and reasons why there may have been a blip in residential. Unrelatedly, I continue to be really impressed with the work that Tom is doing at SEIA. He jumped into the role and has given SEIA a voice and brand it has not had before. I don’t know if he will be selected as the next CEO on a full time basis but he’s definitely giving the search group a lot of reasons to pick him.

EIA-EI-O, no we did it again, wrong. GTM took a single paragraph to absolutely demolish the data on 3rd party solar from the EIA. And it didn’t even require fancy analytics or research, just some reading. It goes to the point that EIA not only collects data poorly, it has trouble publishing data that can be considered reliable. We need EIA data to be available for our businesses in a way that it can be referenced, so that investments follow accurate market conditions.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann