This is your SolarWakeup for August 24th, 2018

Have a great weekend! See you next week.

Round And Round For Coal. It’s been 6 years writing this column and the story of training coal workers to go solar has lasted about the same time. Unfortunately for them, Trump became President and promised to bring back coal. Now as we all know, coal’s future is non-existent. Just ask any utility CEO or even coal CEO, the future of coal was decided when utilities across the Country replaced their power generation with natural gas. If everyone accepted this as truth, then we could turn out focus on finding new jobs, including solar jobs, for folks in the coal economy. It is not their fault that this happened but they also need to be part of the change by telling their leaders that ‘bring back coal’ should be replaced by ‘give us solar jobs.’

Tip A Hat For Policy. Coming from the private sector, the author of this post is the Manager of Climate Change and Renewable Energy for WWF. The headline is true and each of you know it to be as well. Policy is the root of our work, it enables the rules that allow your customers to benefit from solar. That is why we need to continue to discuss the possibility of having every solar worker spend an hour per month educating or lobbying politicians about the work we are doing.

Big Solar Market Market Share. There are data points that catch my eye and seeing 5 solar module companies moving 20GW in the first half of the year was one of them. Funny enough, I would be guessing if you asked me who they were given that the US is a bit over 25% annualized in that total. Solar is a big market, let’s take some joy in that.

Opinion

Have a great day!

Yann