By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent What Happened: A report by Vote Solar and the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that if DTE Energy, a Detroit-area utility, implemented a renewable/energy efficiency portfolio instead of a $1 billion, 1,100 MW natural gas plant Would provide more than 10-times the number of construction jobs. Add slightly less than 4-times the number of permanent jobs. Would generate $213.5 million in local and state taxes and $41.1 million in federal taxes. SolarWakeup’s View: I love Vote Solar. The work they do to advocate for the industry almost flies under the radar unless you’re paying close attention, but … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent What Happened: Quartz Media reports that as distributed generation continues to peel off customers from utilities, they are increasingly turning to electric vehicles (EVs) as their business-model savior, and are designing incentives to get their current customers to purchase them. SolarWakeup’s View: The charts below are striking fear into the hearts of utilities everywhere – electricity demand is flatter than Interstate 70 through Kansas. So if you’re a regulated utility that has realized new generation will be hard to justify going forward, where do you turn to keep growing the ratebase? For many utilities, that life extension … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent What Happened: Our own Yann Brandt, the proprietor of this place, interviewed Josh Prueher, CEO of FlexGen, about the concept of DC-coupled energy storage and what it could mean for the solar industry. What are the major advantages of DC versus AC coupled energy storage for solar? How does solar start integrating storage in its projects? SolarWakeup’s View: As the race to unlock the solar+storage market heats up, the idea of DC-coupled storage is an intriguing one. In such a system, the storage devices are placed between the solar modules and the inverter, instead of the traditional … Read More →