This is your SolarWakeup for July 20th, 2021

Energy Transition Jobs. There are two converging talking points that are coming out of the contentious and dysfunction DC infrastructure talks. While they look like they are falling apart, ignore the sausage making for now and keep pushing your representatives on the key issue of long term tax credit extension. Biden is making the case that capitalism is shifting energy generation into renewables and that we must provide for a solid transition to new energy jobs for those that powered the Country for decades. Senator Barrasso is finding mining jobs in the energy transition as well, making the connection for the raw materials needed in clean energy generation.

Battery Storage Supply Chain. Energy storage is a growing market and the supply chain is increasing manufacturing capacity as well. Unlike solar which great in a somewhat linear path across some markets over the past 20 years, storage is growing exponentially everywhere around the world at the same time. This is the value of integration work companies like FlexGen (my day job) provide to the market, by bringing together the hardware and software capability and consolidating opportunity to OEMs, we enable more robust access to product that would otherwise not be available to individual buyers or only available at higher costs. While the headline says 2022 projects are largely not possible, feel free to send those inquiries our way and we’ll see how we can help.

The 24/7 VPPA. It’s great to see Microsoft announcing their full-time renewables data center plan. The 24/7 renewable energy process means that the hyperscale data center operator will buy generation where they use electricity when they use it.

Financing EV Charging. Learn how to effectively model, finance and sell solar EV charging projects using SCF’s free software, the SCF Suite. On July 28th, at 10am PST, Sustainable Capital Finance (SCF) will host the next webinar in its 2021 webinar series, providing an in-depth breakdown of SCF’s new EV charging finance solution, how to use the SCF Suite to price projects and sell more EVC finance projects to C&I and non-profit customers. This webinar is recommended for solar developers and installers interested in increasing their range of offerings to include electric vehicle charging solutions, as well as combined solar+storage+EVC offerings. Click here to register for this exciting, free webinar.


Opinion

Best, Yann