This is your SolarWakeup for October 16th, 2019

Why Not 1%? What would it take for you to allocate 1% of your revenue to policy spend, either internal FTE or supporting trade groups? I’ve given this some thought and think that most of it has to do that the business didn’t have the spend automatically ingrained in the business plan. The funny upside is that everyone’s revenue would grow by more than 1% if we all did it but nobody wants to be the only one doing it. Maybe 1% isn’t the right number but what if it was 0.5%? Can a $1million business afford $5k? Can a $100,000,000 afford $500k? 

Getting Pricing Signals. Pricing signals are naturally imperfect until the market adapts to the inputs that drive the signal. If the market driving that pricing is large enough, than the value would be high enough to drive the market scale, just look at any SREC market. Limit the demand and have too much supply, the pricing would be too low to make a difference. For energy storage there is even more value, you don’t need to create a legislative demand. All we need is for the power markets to value things like speed, stability and flexibility and operators will be able to monetize. This is especially important for the solar market because it allows solar farms to pop up without off takers, just through the time flexibility provided by storage with the right signals.

Educating Consumers. I want to know how your sales pitches went in the past week. How much demand did you get for batteries and what did you say? Did your close rate go up or down? What amount of information did they give that showed misinformation and what was the biggest misunderstanding?

 Opinion

Best, Yann