This is your SolarWakeup for December 20th, 2023
Set It And, Set It Again. I’ve said it here before that storage makes solar more valuable and capable because the asset owner determines the time of delivery not the sunshine. That allows for the marginal value of the electron to be maximized and not commoditized, which is especially important when the grid is overproducing demand. That being said, unlike solar, which has all of its complexities determined prior to day 1, storage has capex on day 1 and works to optimize that investment every day starting on day 2. That’s where your operating system gets important, it will tell you what’s happening, how well your asset is performing and how much money you left on the table because your battery is underutilized. I’m just kidding, that’s what you’re expecting but certainly not getting in 80% of the projects out there. You’re also in for a surprise when regulators start to talk about new compliance and revenue streams that your battery needs to be updated for. That’s the basis of my chat with Andy Colthorpe from Energy-Storage News in today’s top story.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 18th, 2023
Retirements And Growth. Last week, independent of each other, we got a report using underlying FERC data that shows nearly double the expected growth in the next five years. This is growth higher than we expected just last year. This is not inconsistent with what we’re hearing in ERCOT, data centers, electrification of the home/business and transportation. At the same time, NERC’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) is highlighting what NRECA calls a “grim picture” of the reliability for consumers. NREC highlights 83GW of planned retirements and 9 states that had capacity shortfalls causing rolling blackouts. They are placing MISO into a high risk for shortfalls [during normal peak] category with pretty much the rest of the Country in an elevated risk category. This is going to create some short term action that doesn’t make much sense for long term reliability or consumers but it’s clear what is needed. Maybe short term actions need to be taken, like California’s rush to add batteries, but also a view on long term policies that match where capital investment is going, i.e. energy transition and consumer pushing behavior.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 14th, 2023
Quick Question. Read today’s top article and ask yourself this, what happens if the load forecast is right?
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 13th, 2023
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 12th, 2023
A COP Deal, Means To Me. COPs have this sensation to me of being so global and meaning to solve such a big issue with a deal that I can’t wrap my mind around what a deal actually looks like and how I feel about it happening or not happening. From Kyoto to Copenhagen and Paris, it’s meant to drive the world towards a cleaner and more viable planet but did the deal itself do more than manifest a goal? Is it the ‘what gets measured’ portion of the saying? And before I ask you, who decides that the goal this year is to create a deal to phase out fossil fuels and how does that narrative get out there. Because if anything is spectacular is the media discipline of that message, it came out of nowhere and had every major opponent of it scrambling to counterpunch. So how do you think of a COP deal? If at all…
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 11th, 2023
The Battery Cost Curve. Great news for the energy storage asset owners and the grid which will benefit from the growth of flexibility. These charts remind me of the early days of solar, when we tracked the cost of silicon and solar cells. Today, nobody asks who made the cell in the module. In reality, buying batteries is far more complicated and delicate than solar panels. What you buy, when you buy and how you contract is a dance of quality, price and timing. Then you have to make sure you get what you want and what your partners expect. All that to say, battery cell pricing is going down, DC block pricing is going down slower and the knowledge needed to get the right product specified for your project is the most important thing. (Originally posted on Linkedin)
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 8th, 2023
Is It All Behind For Resi? Suppliers into the resi solar market have been on a PR circuit to talk about margins, inventories and demand. From that point of view, it’s all coming to an end for resi and demand will pick back up in Q1. The problem is that the market has fallen behind on policy spend and focus with major losses racking up. The largest suppliers are barely coming up with the funds to join the trade associations that do this work, so of course the associations can only do so much. Solar got big and it looked easy to make a buck for outside investors that weren’t here when the fights to create net metering were happening so they don’t think regulators would hurt something that’s obviously good for the economy. I’ve spent nearly half my career in solar talking to solar installers and while it’s not my day job at the moment, I still talk to many. The reality is that while the market is hard for suppliers, especially those that are or want to be public companies, the companies are spending too much time complaining about the market and not enough time taking market share from each other by investing in the installer relationships. I know what I’d be doing if I was running any of these companies and blaming market sentiment wouldn’t be at the top of that list.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 7th, 2023
Modeling Demand Increase. LCOE has been solar’s favorite metric ever since it was the lowest of all LCOEs but let’s talk about it amongst our echo chamber. The solar LCOE is ignored because, like it or not, it’s also the LCOE with the least amount of leverage. And when I say least, I mean zero. Let me explain. The marginal cost of solar product is essentially zero. It’s the first kWh that costs all of the capex and related return expectation but after you’ve made the installation and turned the site on, all you have is the contract that buys your energy. That doesn’t mean that the production is worthless, we’re just in a crappy negotiating position in case the counterparty wants to hose you. On top of that, solar farms can’t provide the kind of grid services that sometimes get more revenue than the generation itself. Sometimes buying negative rate energy is more valuable than the 3 cent PPA. But that’s all about to change with the massive expansion of storage. Solar doesn’t just get to produce energy, it gets to control energy delivery and even absorb excess production when the pricing signals say it makes financial sense. So let’s look at the global market LCOEs and you’ll find that solar plus storage and a grid with a lot of solar and storage will have a stable and low cost of energy environment for consumers.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 6th, 2023
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 5th, 2023
Inverters Up To Par. NERC continues to be concerned about solar farms and their inverters’ ability to handle grid issues without tripping off. Losing GW of power generation is troublesome for a grid that would then potentially trip off other generation in a zipper effect like has happened in the past. Ultimately there’s a mismatch around specifications and controls being unimportant to developers compared to the value that they represent to the grid operators and asset owners especially as they are asked to keep up with new generation. Will existing solar assets have to find ways to comply with these revised standards and will new projects follow them, meaning will the capital markets require this of new builds.
Managing Installer Cash Flow. Interest rates are the highest in 22 years, increasing solar financing costs and softening consumer demand for loan products. Businesses are feeling the pain of strained cash flows, labor costs and profitability pressures. Palmetto, a B2B technology company accelerating the adoption of clean energy, has announced a new partnership offering for solar installers to help stabilize cash flows and grow faster in today’s market. Built on top of Palmetto’s Clean Energy Operating Platform, this is a comprehensive suite of tools and services enabling installers to streamline operations, optimize performance, and increase profitability. Visit https://www.palmetto.com/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
News
Opinions:
Have a great day!
Yann