This is your SolarWakeup for September 17th, 2019

Are You Carbon Neutral? Aside working in solar, what do you do to reduce or eliminate your carbon footprint? I thought about this question a lot yesterday and realized that the little I do, is not enough. Tell me your biggest tricks and habits you use to lower your footprint and how you calculate it. 

Would You? Ikea is a retailer that does solar in a big way. On every roof and as an investment. Here’s a question for you and them, if they calculated the carbon cost of each product and imposed their own carbon tax, would you pay for it? This is the thought behind my carbon adjusted margin analysis. More to come. 

Tesla’s C&I Offer. On the heels of the residential solar rental, Tesla is releasing their offer for C& I sites. Fixing commercial solar is my Achilles heel and this is about as close to what I would have liked to do as possible. The offer is either cash or ‘subscription’ (PPA) with the PPA only available in PGE and SDG& E-service areas. Three standard sizes are offered with 240kW on the large end, definitely skewing to the lower size spectrum than you would expect from C&I installers. 

What It Solves. It’s cheap, 240kW for under $1.50 or 9.9cents per kWh with caveats for a standard install. That’s lower than most installers would propose. Let’s focus on the PPA though. First, no term, you can cancel anytime with a removal fee. Second, it doesn’t appear to have credit criteria (thank you!). Last and most importantly, it makes it super simple, building owners are consistently frustrated with their solar process.

Obvious Issues. I’d like to see the contracts to understand what they are really doing. There is an obvious concern for tax equity on the PPA, what happens if the cancellation happens in the first 5 years? What is the company going to do with the modules that get returned, clearly this will happen as customers look to upgrade some time down the road but within 10 years?

Opinion

 

 

Best, Yann