This is your SolarWakeup for March 10th, 2020

The Market Survey (Click Here). This is your opportunity to participate in a community survey about the current state of solar. While many of us came into Q1 with great anticipation for a record 2020, there have been a few curveballs thrown at us including a global public health crisis that will likely impact us personally in many ways. At the same time we are left with many questions and few answers on what to do. My hope is that we share our individual viewpoints and try to find the best way to move forward. Please share openly so that your industry colleagues can learn and collaborate. Your answers are confidential. Results of the survey will be shared as early as Friday if enough people respond right away, time is of the essence so please take 5 minutes now.

Climate Change Blinders. One of the feelings I’ve been having about coronavirus is that I just want to fast forward and come out with the best possible outcome on the other end. In some ways it reminds me of hurricane preparation, should you put up shutters, buy food and water for two weeks, get a generator, evacuate; and when you are finished with the preparations the hurricane turns and goes another way. With corona it has a similar feeling because what type of preparation should you do, especially when you don’t understand why there is no rice left on the grocery store shelves. Climate change has the opposite problem, we know what to do and what the catastrophic results of inaction could be but we don’t have the ability to grasp the scale of our needed action. The political and personal willpower doesn’t exist today because we assume that the catastrophe is beyond our time span of discretion.

Innovation Among Us. Much like the solar roads project, I like when companies push the envelope into a contrarian perspective. GAF Energy has a thesis that solar will be installed in a BIPV method at the same time as the new roof so that the roofer sells both systems at the same time at a much smaller acquisition cost than solar has today. As an executive in the racking industry, this obviously pushes my thinking in a way that is uncomfortable today. That being said, this is clearly a 20 year transition from one to the other that will get us all to innovate together.

The ISO-NE Queue. 95% of the 21GW in the ISO-NE queue are wind, solar and battery projects. From a grid operation standpoint, it would be crucial to move projects to NTP even if that means putting an operating date out into the future. Developers need time and resources to start construction and ISO-NE needs to get itself acquainted with the process. From my standpoint I would love to see a process that lets developers future bid NTP dates, how great would it be to see a solar plus 8 hours of storage offer (with collateral) for a 2026 placed in service date?

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Opinion

Best, Yann