This is your SolarWakeup for May 6th, 2020

Get Your Survey On. A great response yesterday from many of you, let’s get one more push for the tracking survey to see how far from the bottom we have bounced back from. Please contribute to the survey before we close this tomorrow.

New Pod and Live! Last week I interviewed the CEO and President from Palmetto Clean Technology. As a mostly digital and remote solar company that supports residential solar execution, I wanted to see how the pandemic was impacting their operation and what their perspective was going forward. We also talk about their launch of a working capital solution. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the podcast. You can also join me live! to talk about digitizing your business operations on Thursday morning pacific time, register here.

Impact Of COVID. I am starting to gather my thoughts on the market piece by piece which I will share more in the next week. This week we have earnings calls from solar companies including Enphase and Solaredge which give us a really good indication of where we are. Yesterday Enphase talked about Q1 which was stronger than Wall Street expected and guided to a COVID impacted Q2. During the call they mentioned what we at SolarWakeup have seen in the survey, we’ve hit the bottom and rebuilding the pipeline, backlog and getting back to work. More to come on this.

A New Loan Player. It’s the most obvious move in solar that you may be surprised to hear it. SunPower raised $1billion to finance loans and leases originated by their top of class dealer network. Partnering with Tech Credit Union, a long time solar player, SunPower will be lowering their financing costs and possibly see upside in any potential securitizations down the line. I will be interested to see how much of the financing efficiency flows down to the dealers when compared to traditional loan providers.

Electricity As The Indicator. Italy is seeing an uptick in energy consumption, a reminder that overall consumption is an economic indicator and unfortunately also a precursor to increase in pollution. How much goes back to the same old ways versus a new normal?

What Does Local Mean? Joel Makower from GreenBiz talks about an interesting topic that has personally spent a lot of time in my mind. I moved to the Bay Area almost two years ago to be close to the center of solar, being local to many of you. Now we’re close but I may as well be sitting in Paris. The opposite is also true, traveling to see family in Florida was easy 2 months ago and something we did often. Will I get on another airplane this year? Will you? At the end of the day, the most local of things in my life has been this newsletter, the relationships have no withered and actually grew in the past 2 months. Today is a big day as yesterday we reached 5,000 subscribers and I don’t take it for granted that every day a huge auditorium full of dedicated solar professionals reads these words. 

Opinion

Best, Yann