This is your SolarWakeup for August 17th, 2023

Opinion

Best, Yann

This is your SolarWakeup for August 15th, 2023

Opinion

Best, 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.

Opinion

Best, 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!

Opinion

Best, Yann