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.
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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.
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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.
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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/
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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.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 4th, 2023
California Woes. There’s no time wasted to 1-2 punch the residential solar market. Changing to NEM 3.0 took major air out of an important market that has kept the grid up and running, creating tens of thousands of jobs. Now, just as resi companies are also struggling with interest rates, but adjusting to a solar plus storage reality, the CPUC is coming after the homeowners with higher fees. Basically what homeowners are told by regulators is, don’t go solar but if you do, then you’ll pay us more anyways and if we need your power which we will, then you won’t get paid for it. I was actually expecting the Newsom/Desantis debate to bring solar up given the way that California has gone versus Florida and how silent Newsom has been on the issue.
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.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for December 1st, 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/finance or contact capital@palmetto.com for more.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for November 30th, 2023
If You Mustache, You Must Give. Several of my colleagues at FlexGen have been participating in Movember this month (Zoom calls have been invaded by less than appealing mustaches). Movember is the leading charity changing the face of men’s health and works to tackle the biggest health issues faced by men – prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health and suicide prevention. Since 2003, Movember has funded more than 1,250 men’s health projects. Please consider supporting the FlexGen Movember Team.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for November 29th, 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/
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for November 28th, 2023
Real Estate, From A Bird’s POV. Parking Lots, rooftops and flexible substations. These are the simple steps to a grid taking advantage of the technologies that drive us forward. We even have the technology to put solar farms on the land without having to tear the land up in terrain following trackers. 250,000 rooftops in DC is a fourth of the original million rooftop goal set in California but in an area more similar to a Sacramento than the 5th largest economy in the world.
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.
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Yann