This is your SolarWakeup for December 13th, 2021

Devastation By Tornado. Tornadoes have this terrible ability of destruction with very little notice that scares me whenever I see it happen. It’s so powerful that from an infrastructure point, as an engineer, I don’t even know if you can design to prevent the damage or outright destruction especially from an energy perspective. Our thoughts go out to the communities affected by the storms this weekend, if there is a rebuilding effort you are aware of, please pass it along.

Will It, When? What will happen with Build Back Better going into the holidays? Lindsey Graham seems to be ramping up his defense against it which means that there could be some traction on the Senate side to get it through, a cheery holiday advantage for the solar industry that could use the stability of a ten year ITC extension under the supply chain challenges poised by layers of tariffs and complicated logistics. So will it pass? If so, when? This is the last week of the year…

Forecasting Is Hard, And Conservative. Solar forecasts have always been wrong, sometimes by factors but when it comes to energy storage, the forecasts will be shown to be off by multiples of that. The reality is that there is a business case to make for storage from every angle, at every level. But in so many ways, it’s hard to come out with forecasts given that storage is like 2010 solar in many ways, more to come…

Freeing Energy. Bill Nussey, host of the Freeing Energy Podcast has released his latest book centered around why distributed resources will play a major role in the grid and grow much faster than anyone predicts. You can get his book on Amazon and learn more about it here.

Opinion

Best, Yann