Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

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.

Opinion

Best, 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.

Opinion

Best, 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.

Opinion

Best, 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.

Opinion

Best, Yann