This is your SolarWakeup for January 13th, 2020

Proterra SPAC. The electric bus manufacturer is going public via SPAC, the Arclight SPAC and taking additional capital from Chamath Palihapitiya. The total deal represents a $1.6B value for Proterra. Proterra has a foundational company, as a manufacturer and system provider for other OEMs. What Proterra hasn’t figured out yet is a lesson learned by the solar industry, it’s not about the hardware but the capital used to deploy it. One of Arclight SPAC’s board members is Audrey Lee, formerly the head of grid services at Sunrun. I’m not saying that Proterra is a non-stationary energy storage company but I’m not saying they couldn’t be either.

Impeachment, Inauguration and Climate Change. The election was early November, electoral college voted on December 11th, Congress passed a omnibus spending bill in late December and on January 6th Congress certified the election. Of course we know what happened next on the day when all things fell apart and in a world where we don’t want bad news, America kept moving forward. Today, the House is preparing to start voting on impeachment which will have a record bipartisan support. That means that the Senate will start a trial on the day Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are sworn into office, a trial to convict then former President Trump. I say all of this because Schumer will be the majority leader on January 21st and Congress has an ambitious agenda ahead including climate change. Schumer says Congress can walk and chew gum at the same time, wait and see.

Will Storage Save C&I? C&I solar has struggled for as long as I can remember with low electricity prices. It’s not that commercial properties pay less on their electric bills, their bill tends to be more skewed to the demand charges that until now were not reachable by distributed generation like solar. The difference today and tomorrow is that energy storage is getting cheaper than ever, a level that makes demand charge reduction possible and desirable. In reality it’s what got Stem the valuation it got in their SPAC. This optimism is voiced in the op-ed from our friends and fellow CALSSA board member at Energy Toolbase.

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Opinion

Best, Yann