This is your SolarWakeup for October 21st, 2019

A Give Back Evening. Last Friday I spent a few hours with my friends from the California solar industry at the CALSSA annual dinner. I personally try to attend as many of these as I can in both my SolarWakeup and Quick Mount capacity to support the important work of the State trade association. On Friday I was excited to see the generosity of members, raising over $100k for CALSSA, with major donations coming throughout the evening. Companies showed up for the $15billion market that pays their bills and creates their jobs but think of that, CALSSA operates on an annual budget that is about 0.01% of the total market. As I was leaving I realized some notable companies that make a ton of revenue in California were missing. Where were they? Where were you? This has been bothering me all weekend, why isn’t every company giving at least a few thousand to CALSSA and State chapters? PG&E has 100 regulatory staffers and CALSSA has a $1.6million budget. Thanks to all that gave and those that didn’t, you should ask yourself why and try to defend that decision especially if you made a profit in the California market.

Is Solar Divided? Something is brewing in the solar industry (in reality it’s been there for a decade) but it’s getting worse. Utility scale solar and distributed solar are at odds in regulatory proceedings as well as trade group boards including SEIA. Right now it’s just healthy debate but it scares me that we don’t see the benefit of each other’s position. Solar is a market in totality, residential solar likes the headlines of solar being the cheapest form of electricity and utility scale likes the headline of 2million homes with solar and amazing public support. Let’s be realistic about one point and I say this to my friends in utility scale solar that are always missing from State chapter events. Your market will tank and the likelihood of legislative victories will disappear if the people that you need for support can’t put solar on their homes. Utility scale solar needs net metering, ITC and interconnection rules and fights so that there is a market for large scale solar. There is no large scale solar market without the regulatory environment that has the support of voters. If a homeowner cannot put solar on their home or net metering doesn’t exist, the perception will be that solar doesn’t work or is too expensive. I’m happy to debate this with any of the large scale voices in private or public and in the meantime challenge you to send a $5k check to a State chapter near you.

A Decade Of Incompetence. The CEO of PG&E was out on Friday stating that utility driven blackouts could last for the next decade. Now ask yourself what would happen if you were asked by your CEO or board to fix an enormous problem, a problem you may or may not know the answer to, and your response is that it would take you ten years to fix it. Every CEO I know would either terminate you or give that problem to someone else. I can’t believe that the CEO of a major monopoly utility in control of all of the assets in the system could say that a problem like the blackouts would exist for the next decade. What happened to the ‘responsibility to serve’?

Our Work With Ag. I’m a loyal listener to Kara Swisher’s various podcasts and she’s been highlighting tech’s work in agriculture. Solar and farmers have had a nice relationship over the past 5-10 years renting land to solar farms but I wonder what else is possible. Farmers play such a vital role in American society and this story needs to be told with more vigor. I’d love to have conversations with farmers around the Country to understand their view of the industry and what else they’d like to see.

A New DOE Secretary. Go ahead and Google Dan Brouillette, your likely next Secretary of Energy. A longtime hill staffer with some ties to the auto industry but a nuclear scientist he is not. Fun note, Brouillette was part of the legislative team that drafted the bill that gave us the loan guarantee program which made money for taxpayers. 

 Opinion

Best, Yann