Greetings from 37,000 feet. I am on my way to New Jersey for SolarWakeup Live! in Jersey City. Big thanks to the sponsors and the attendees that have registered. I look forward to a week of meetings in New York following the biggest Wakeup event to date.
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Incentives Not Taxes. Over time, the headlines go away and reality sets in. Shortly have the solar 201 tariff was implemented, a few factories were announced. Factories that would open in the US and caused the public to show support for the assessment. However, as the year has gone by, more tariffs on Chinese imports have been implemented and the overall support for doing manufacturing appears to have left the solar game.
Build A Community, Part 2. A month ago Facebook announced a solar farm for their data center in New Mexico, this month the data center is in Alabama and so is the solar farm. Alabama doesn’t have policies that enable Facebook users to go solar with limited or no access to net metering and high fees by some utilities.
Is Florida Really? Just south of the Alabama border is Florida, a State that is very similar politically. The headlines last week spoke clearly about the market growth which was largely talking about the recent utility owned solar farms that were approved. So in short, Florida is growing massively and has a ton of upside. Most importantly, Florida has strong building departments that will fight against some of the dodgy solar engineering that happens across the Country. You can’t just build things in Florida that look pretty but don’t meet the building code.
Election Week, Climate Change Edition. This week I hope everyone heads to the polls. A lot of the issues on the ballot are centered around what is happening in States. Regardless of your political persuasion, solar is still not a defining issue on the ballot for politicians which means you still have the ability to choose elected officials that are very much different on the issue. One will support net metering, one will not. One will fight for solar interconnection streamlining, one will not.
Standing Up In Congress. Over the past 2 years, as climate change becomes a more important topic politically, members of Congress have joined the climate change caucus. The caucus sounds good but it has failed to adequately provide political cover mostly because climate change issue hasn’t come to the forefront yet. Don’t be surprised if that changes soon though.
- Reuters: Trump’s latest tariffs undercut his first trade salvo in solar
- Bloomberg: Facebook Alabama Data Center to Get Power From Two Solar Farms
- Scientific American: Solar Power Is About to Boom in the Sunshine State
- Greentech Media: New York and California Lead the Charge Against Climate Rule Rollbacks
- Think Progress: Things aren’t looking good for climate change content on the EPA’s website
- Washington Post: The hottest fight in American politics? Arizona’s smackdown over solar power.
- GreenBiz: Behind Uber’s electric designs on London
Opinion
Have a great day!
Yann