This is your SolarWakeup for August 19th, 2020

Trump Tweets Energy. “In California, Democrats have intentionally implemented rolling blackouts — forcing Americans in the dark. Democrats are unable to keep up with energy demand…”

Part 2. “…Meanwhile, I gave America energy independence in fact, so much energy we could never use it all. The Bernie/Biden/AOC Green New Deal plan would take California’s failed policies to every American!”

At 7pm. Friday night at 7pm it’s hard to understand how it’s solar’s fault that the grid had a shortfall in generation. The grid also generated 26GW of gas, much more than previous years on a similar Friday evening (h/t Julie Blunden for the research). The pushback from fossil folks is that regulators have been kicking out fossil generation in favor of renewables and not doing enough to shore up reliability, something that I got caught up in with on Twitter with a GA PSC commissioner pushing nukes. The reality is that unless our team gets to make the decisions on how to design the best grid, the solar industry can’t be blamed. Even in this situation, the solution is incredibly obvious with today’s technology. That’s why my frustrations have been vocal recently around taking away local resource adequacy purchasing from local CCAs and giving it to PG&E. Or ask the large scale solar operators how many times they’ve offered to add storage to existing solar plants are ridiculously low prices that would have allowed the shift to occur and cover the 7pm hour. Utilities could also contract with companies like OhmConnect to sign up millions of manual demand response participants. In short, unless we’re in charge, we can’t be blamed. That fault remains firmly with regulators for now.

Solar In Congress. In April 2019, Congressman Charlie Crist filed the Sunshine Forever Act, a bill to extend the ITC to 2029. I first met Charlie when he was the Governor of Florida and as a republican got the golden meter award from Vote Solar for an outstanding net metering policy he pushed for almost 15 years ago. That same policy is in effect today driving the second largest solar market in the Country. Tomorrow at 5pm, it would be my pleasure to have you join me as I talk about clean energy with Congressman Crist. For $20 (or more if you can) donation to Clean Energy for Biden you can be part of the discussion as well. Charlie has been a supporter of our industry for a long time and it would be great to make the event a big success.

Buyer’s Group Update. For the second week in a row the buyer’s group has doubled in size. This is a program for installers by leveraging the aggregate scale in volume which levels the playing field while returning margin to installers across the Country. Through transparent pricing that we are actively negotiating with supply chain, you can not only see the trend line but actually lower your COGS. Join today at solarwakeup.com/pricing

Opinion

Best, Yann