This is your SolarWakeup for August 18th, 2023
Market For Resilience. Grid operators are starting to ponder what the tradeoff for resilience may have to be because urgency without the will to act or create new markets. The issue isn’t just around resilience but also the need for more generation. As I type this, ERCOT just peaked out at 84.9GW of demand. If you recall, it broke the 80GW demand just a few weeks ago. Therein sits the predicament around interconnection queues and robust markets with infrastructure that needs updating. If consumers want and need more energy, that resource must come from somewhere and most likely that somewhere is solar and wind. At the same time the grid needs to enhance its capabilities to manage the ebbs and flows to match generation with demand as well as where the energy needs to flow. These are big problems that can be solved with action and willingness to create markets.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 17th, 2023
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 15th, 2023
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 14th, 2023
Time To Collaborate. Service and commodity businesses serving the residential solar market are both profitable and having a moment of struggle as NEM 3.0 reset and high interest rates slow new consumer adoption. I’ve seen the residential solar market from many angles and have spoken personally to more than a 1,000 of owners of various sizes. Tinkering with the Buyer’s Group concept a few years ago and running QuickMountPV, I realize that bringing installers together make a lot of sense for stability and profitability of the installer. It would take 50+ installers to commit to group purchasing but the lowest hanging fruit of racking and financing could shave 25+ cents per watt off the total cost.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 11th, 2023
Major Grid Resilience. Wisconsin is taking a major leap with Alliant’s leadership, adding nearly 1GWh of energy storage to be installed in the near future. The two sites will collocate energy storage at newly built PV plant, exemplifying how storage is creating more value for solar pipelines and letting us use solar energy at night. I would be too modest not to mention that FlexGen is the partner on these projects, highlighting the important work that we’ve been doing for a decade plus and more recently having focused on turning batteries on faster and keeping them on with industry leading availability through our HybridOS EMS. We’ll be at RE+ and have some exciting product release announcements in the coming weeks.
So Common So Amazing. Another day and two major factory announcements. We can’t be numb to this norm, First Solar announced a 5th factory in Louisiana and Maxeon a 3GW plant in New Mexico.
Thoughts? Every now and then a story breaks and I find out because I get 50+ texts and emails from SolarWakeup readers. Yesterday that was the ‘leak’ that Esdec (aka PanelClaw, Ironridge, Ecofasten, QuickMount) was trying to go public for over $5billion. Obviously, I have some history here while also not having been involved in a few years. We’ll see what my role is to provide comments and thoughts to you all so I’ll wait to think how much behind the scenes is appropriate. We haven’t seen the S-1 but I will say this, if this is worth $5billion, we all may be forming SolarWakeup racking co in the near future!
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 10th, 2023
The Storage ITC Is Here. Years of talk, years of advocacy and one giant piece of legislation leads to this, a successful portfolio raise for tax equity on a stand-along storage project. In this case, SMT Energy is showcasing their raise in a way to show that a good project with bankable & capable partners developed by an experienced team can put the money to work. I’ve known the SMT team for many years and super happy to see them get this done.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 9th, 2023
Possibility Doesn’t Pay The Bills. GM will follow Ford in marketing that the vehicles are capable of vehicle to grid (V2G). The theoretical use case of V2G, especially in aggregate, is really interesting. The actuality of getting vehicles to discharge the right amount (so that drivers can get home) is much more complicated. But this is all in the name of nothing at all if grid operators don’t start actually paying for the resources even on a standby basis. Some of the most expensive power plants in the Country run less than 10 times per year while solar has been saving the grid during this last run of heat waves without getting paid for the resilience.
Shortsighted Economics of Innovation. I’m saddened to see Proterra file for bankruptcy protection. It is my hope that the company will be acquired or recapitalized, logically by an OEM. Proterra is the national interest for large vehicle electrification, maybe a few years early. I had the pleasure of meeting former CEO, Ryan Popple, and interviewing him for the SolarWakeup podcast prior to his untimely passing. Let’s all root for the next chapter in Proterra’s future.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 8th, 2023
The Physics Of Funnels. Fill a funnel too fast and it all ends up on your face. Make the funnel too wide and you have too much momentum in the receiving reservoir. You have to pour it at the right pace for the type of ratio from big to small or you have to have the right ratio for the speed of the pour. The same is going to be true for large points of interconnection from offshore wind farms. The larger the farm and the more specific the interconnection point needs to be designed for or it risks disrupting the grid stability on the receiving end.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 7th, 2023
Sometimes, It Feels Hopeless. More drilling, less clean energy. What a sentence, and yet completely believable when it comes to politics. But what does drilling and clean energy really have to do with each other? Oil and electricity have no overlap. Gas does, but is there a shortage of gas supply? Are utilities having a hard time building gas plants? Let’s be clear, this is a market dynamic that has little to do with politics. Oil and coal plants won’t be built again and the auto sector is electrifying. On the other hand, what is the reason for the anti-clean energy stance from a republican standpoint? I see plenty of free market activity and job creation every day from this industry and continue to see the opportunity for the solar and storage markets to be completely bipartisan.
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Yann
This is your SolarWakeup for August 4th, 2023
Play By Play Corporate Commenting. You’ve probably never heard of this company, Azelio, which filed for bankruptcy recently. It’s a hardware technology company based in Sweden and covered in today’s top story. The only reason I am somewhat familiar with this is because at every step of the way, the company sent not just the press releases but updates to industry media email address in which my SolarWakeup email was included. From their quarterly announcements to their delays in filings and changes to their board and executives. Every update was chronicled via email to the media in a way that I’ve never seen before, so I wanted to share that with you given that it’s being covered by the industry reporters when in reality, it likely would have just disappeared had it not been so public about the demise.
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Yann