This is your SolarWakeup for July 14th, 2020

Happy Birthday. Today is my oldest child’s 10th birthday. That seems insane to me but in the hopes he one day comes back and reads every newsletter, happy birthday E! Not to worry, we’ll be at 100% clean energy by the time you graduate college.

Talking To Congress. This week 650 companies in the solar industry made their voice heard in Congress. This is a bipartisan call for action on policies like refund ability of the ITC, inclusion of storage and more. Over the past 3 months the solar industry has shown its resilience, not only in bouncing back with jobs and market but also with public company performance. Public solar companies have done better than other companies. The industry is also there to pull the rest of the economy up with it as we expand.

A Big Announcement. Reporting from Bloomberg has it that Joe Biden will announce his plan to build back the economy later today which will include a call for 100% clean energy by 2035. That’s 14 years away and quite the initiative, one I support for financial, moral and environmental reasons. The saying goes, if we’re right about climate change we will have done something about it but if we’re wrong about climate change we will have created jobs and economic growth. There is no downside to actually implementing this and a clear distinction of the political race we’re in.

A Decade Of Action. I want you to think about what it means to get to 100% and the steps you have to undertake in order for us to achieve that. It won’t be easy but it is readily achievable. It sure that we will need more of everything but like all things that solar undertakes we have to also figure out how to do it better. That’s why tonight the latest SolarWakeup podcast talks about sustainability inside solar companies. I talk with TJ Kanczuzewski from Inovateus. They recently published their sustainability report and talk about zero waste construction for their EPC projects. We need more solar but unlike the oil and gas wells that are left behind creating environmental disasters, solar will do better.

Industrial Electrification. What would a truck look like that has a battery in the bed of it that goes to a construction site and charges electric caterpillar machinery? Seriously, I have no idea of the scale of the truck it takes to achieve that. Today, trucks carrying diesel go to the sites but if we electrify machinery that truck gets replaced by something else. Maybe utilities will have mobile stations that get connected to temporary power instead but for the electrical engineer readers, I’m interested to learn. 

Opinion

Best, Yann