This is your SolarWakeup for November 20th, 2017

Short Week. I will be off for Thanksgiving and the Wednesday edition is up in the air depending on if there are enough articles to send your way. Enjoy your holiday and make sure to do something that we can all be thankful for – starting with the 1st item on the rundown.

Your Comment? Have you taken a few minutes to send comments to the trade representative ahead of the December 6th hearing? You can use this script from SEIA and send the comments on this page. Make sure to have your entire office do this as well.

Tesla’s Rig and Roadster. No doubt, Elon puts on a show. Electrification of transportation is the leap we need for climate change. At 500 miles per charge, I am also interested in the impact to the grid for the electrification of freight. With an 8-pin charger (and a dose of real-life needs), some engineers are theorizing that the “mega-charger” could be up to 1.6MW of power to charge the semi in 30 minutes. Power density times massive scale (3.5 million trucks in America) means having to re-rethink the energy grid, mostly around our highway system. Best of all, this will get financed through non-dilutive funding from 1,000 rich people that want to go fast – placing $250k payments for the new roadster. If the money were in my account, it would no longer be there either because this thing is sick.

Public Manufacturers. As JA Solar goes private with its manufacturing, I wonder how long it will take for all of them to be off the public markets. In relation to Renesola, taking the manufacturing private while keeping the public vehicle to focus on owning assets, it comes across as an internal reverse merger. This strategy makes sense to me, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is replicated again.

Another Great Speaker. I’m excited to have Amy Harder from Axios join us at SolarWakeup Live! DC. Amy has been covering energy for years and was in Bonn for COP23 last week. Axios has an incredible insight to the DC ecosystem and  was the publication that brought us Trump’s “I want tariffs, bring me tariffs.” I look forward to speaking with Amy about the news of energy. Get your tickets here.

Presented by MMA Energy Capital. At MMA Energy Capital, we partner with developers, EPC contractors, and system owners to provide project capital necessary to develop, build, and operate world-class renewable energy systems. We are currently hiring at our growing company.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann