This is your SolarWakeup for July 13th, 2023
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 12th, 2023
Texas Breaks Records. Hard to fathom that ERCOT is forecasting peak demand of over 82GW several times in the next week. Not just for this individual moment with less than 10% capacity reserve margin but for what that means in the future. This week I wrote about the global temperatures causing family members across Europe to install air conditioners in their homes, when they never had to in the past. Along the electrification that consumers are going through with appliances and electric vehicles, the grid has the added strain of the real energy transition. As a society we will use more and more energy, that's the natural course of progress. The energy transition is electrification, shifting more of the energy from molecules to electrons and the grid has to be resilient and therefore intelligent enough to let the lights stay on every time the consumer wants or more critical applications like hospitals require. (originally posted on my Linkedin)
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 11th, 2023
Cheaper EVs Driven By Choice And Supply. At last count there are around 60 EV options available to US consumers, more if you count hybrids and more if you expand the global market. In any supply and demand market more choice will create some increased demand and comfort by being a follower, i.e. not an early adopter. But if that demand doesn’t outpace supply, there will be excess inventory that should drive down the price or create additional incentives for consumers to buy the cars (free charging perhaps?). With EVs there’s also the additional layer of charging complexity that follows. First, car dealers still don’t know how to sell EVs and make consumers comfortable owning this new to them technology. Second, more EVs on the road means that charging networks need to keep up, no more 2 or 4 charging pods at Whole Foods, we need an entire row of chargers. I say this noting that the three closest grocery stores to me in Florida have zero combined charging stations in their parking lot. But price elasticity will build more tolerance to the secondary objections that the consumer may have, who doesn’t want a cheaper car that also comes with a massive tax credit. This should build up the EV portfolio on the road AND on the grid.
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 10th, 2023
Can’t Stand The Heat. I returned this weekend from a trip. This took me to a location that is not heavily air conditioned, sitting at 46 degrees latitude (similar to Toronto), and the water is about 10 degrees cooler than the South Florida ocean I’m used to. It was however close to 90 degrees, including at night, which made for interesting nights hoping for a breeze to come through. Cities that have never considered air conditioners have to reimagine their needs and even their building codes. Homes in my hometown of Hamburg, Germany, are valued lower if their electricity consumption is high so builders and owners don’t install ACs but is that really livable? Grids that are built for the weak link of cold/icy environments are having some of the biggest issues with strenuous, ongoing heat events like we’re having now. Winter peaks, summer peaks, EV peaks, power plant redundancies, rising cooling liquids for generators globally, are all impacts that a grid operator did not really imagine 10 years ago.
The Piecemeal Approach. We need more deployment for grid infrastructure and we need to take a more strategic approach to it. The massive backlogs are not creating investment certainty for developers, owners, service providers that enable the grids to gain the investments they need in order to keep the lights on. Is there a single point to look at to fix this? No, and that could be a major pain point that may make this hard to solve but I don’t know what the grid will look like in 10 years if we don’t deploy, deploy, deploy.
Support ORKA. I want to introduce you to a new supporter of this newsletter. ORKA Finance is solving a massive need in the commercial solar financing market and you should consider giving them a look if you’re working on helping the largest users of electricity go solar.
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 7th, 2023
Biden Goes On Tour. Yesterday, Biden went to South Carolina. Specifically the 2nd district of South Carolina where Flex has a manufacturing facility that will be bringing another 600 jobs into the factory to build Enphase microinverters. This is one of three manufacturing lines that Enphase has discussed. Biden next heads to Georgia for another factory groundbreaking in his effort to tout the Bidenomics including bringing new factories to the US especially those for the clean energy economy.
The Winning Districts. So many of these factories happen to go to districts represented by some of the most fervent opponents of the Inflation Reduction Act. The Enphase line at Flex is in Joe Wilson’s district and the Georgia tour is in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s. By going directly to the factories, Biden is asking voters to look beyond the talking points and see that solar manufacturing is good for them, their families and everyone putting solar on their homes, businesses and land. The reality is that if the IRA had not passed, these jobs would not have been created.
Triple Crown of CHiPS, BIL and IRA. You’re seeing the administration going full speed on deploying the investments and highlighting the hundreds of billions that companies are investing for factories in tech, industrials and clean energy. The bipartisan infrastructure law is also building the tools to enable more deployment, a favorite word within the department of energy.
Oceans Need Cooling…Water Runoff. Japan will be releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima plant after approval by international regulators. I don’t expect anyone to want to dump solar panels into the ocean though.
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 6th, 2023
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This is your SolarWakeup for July 5th, 2023
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This is your SolarWakeup for June 28th, 2023
Intersecting Auto And Grid Markets. Why didn’t any auto manufacturers ever get into the business of owning gas stations? For 100 years. OEMs made cars, utilities generated and delivered electricity and oil majors drilled for oil, refined it and delivered it to you via local gas stations. Today, EVs are propping up new manufacturers, OEMs are getting into charging networks and generating electricity, oil majors are making major investments into charging networks and so are utilities. Meanwhile, can you really distinguish one provider from another except for one very important customer requirement, does the station work when I arrive at the charger? We’ve seen the massive transition to the Tesla network in recent weeks, you can almost consider the charging standard won by the Tesla NACS plug at this point. This gets even more interesting when you look at the storage market intersecting with grid and charging infrastructure.
How Georgia Leads Cleantech Factories. Seems like Georgia is taking win after win with new factory announcements for clean energy as the Secretary of Energy heads to the land of peaches to take a victory lap stemming from the IRA. But how did this happen? It wasn’t because the elected officials in the State or those that the State sends to DC were ardent supporters of the policies that make this happen, so what other requirements made companies excited to invest billions?
Note About Inverters. Lots to digest on the inverter article but keep a lookout on more regulatory requirements for solar inverters, power plants controls and storage EMS applications. NERC and other regulators are unhappy with how little ride through and resilience that solar inverters have had recently especially with so much capacity coming online. The requirements for cybersecurity are also expanding across agencies looking at the topic of industrial controls.
Programming Note. We’ll be off for an extended Fourth of July weekend. Today is the last edition of the week and we’ll pick back up next Wednesday.
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This is your SolarWakeup for June 27th, 2023
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This is your SolarWakeup for June 26th, 2023
Solar Shifts Grid’s Weak Point. No way around it, it’s hot out there. We can’t see what the grid pressures are in Florida but in Texas the grid has been on the verge of major issues, reaching nearly 80GW of demand for over a week. There have been outages, calls for voluntary demand side management and major price spikes. Billions of dollars will exchange hands and hopefully customers don’t have unfixed rate schedules. Because this is a heat wave related spike, solar has been a mainstay in the daytime production, releasing generation side pressures that the grid operators would see without solar. That means that solar’s shoulder times has been the pressure point for the grid. There’s no doubt that ERCOT, and most other ISOs, need nearly 1x peak demand in resilience with dispatchable assets or generation.
Era Of Factory Growth. Another major factory win, two phases this time, with Vikram solar. The first phase is a solar module factory worthy of $250mm of investments but the second phase brings over $1bb for an ingot/wafer/cell factory. All of this in Colorado!
The Lender You Can Depend On. In a market that is full of uncertainty, you can rely on Dividend Finance to bring you white glove service to help you reach your long-term goals. Apply Here
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