Tag Archives: Daily Rundown

This is your SolarWakeup for June 21st, 2023

The Solar Summit. Busy travel week for me but will get you the commentary as possible. Make sure to catch up with me at the Solar & Storage Summit in San Francisco on Thursday morning if you are at the conference. We’ll be talking about the incredible impact that the IRA has had on new factory announcements and the expansion of available technologies in the marketplace.

<ERCOT’s Need. You’ve seen the ERCOT price maps undoubtedly which means that the market needs more infrastructure to be built. This is another reminder that the storage pipeline in Texas is ready to be built out in order to build the resilient grid that consumers deserve.

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This is your SolarWakeup for June 20th, 2023

The Grid We Have. It’s hot in Texas and across the Southeast but ERCOT is likely to break records over the next few days and nearly hit 80GW of demand yesterday with less than 10% capacity reserves. Resilience is earned through robust price signals within the market that enable investments to be made in order to ensure the lights turn on when you hit that switch. During Winter Storm Uri, demand hovered in the 60GW range. It came down to the reliability of the generation that remained available plus decreased access to energy for consumers.  Back to today, 5GW of reserve isn’t going to make a reliable grid. Going forward we need more price signals from regulators in order to turn up the reserve as the demand grows and grow it will. I’ll make a bet that we see a 100GW demand within 5 years.

What Could Be Possible. The easiest thing for any grid operator would be to expand the price signals, i.e. markets, for technologies that exist in the 21st century. Let’s start with energy storage, these technologies can do much more than what the current markets ask an asset to do. For example, short term grid resilience dispatches to power plants are much better served by storage. Storage can also turn solar plants much more intelligent, imagine if offtakers allows solar PPA generators to add an amendment to make the solar generation dispatchable. The second powerful tool for grid reliability would be to create a real market for dispatching home demand and smart home devices. This will be more of a must have when cars become EVs in every driveway. If a real virtual power plant market were priced by operators, real flexibility would become available.

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This is your SolarWakeup for June 16th, 2023

What’s Your Security Plan? If you’re not listening to folks in DC and grid operators, I can assure you that the security of your solar and storage plants will need to be taken into account. That will include bringing your cybersecurity and data plans up to par, elevating your asset management standard and possibly bringing your industrial controls package into compliance. This is no small thing, solar can make our break a grid resiliency and as an operator/owner of those plants, you’ll be asked to ensure compliance.

Jobs To Build Homes For Jobs. It’s not just solar jobs that’s booming, but also the jobs to build the factories that will support solar supply chain.

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This is your SolarWakeup for June 15th, 2023

More Guidance Arrives. The big one is here, guidance on the ITC transferability and direct pay provisions including who is eligible for the direct pay. Amongst those eligible for the direct pay provision are governments, tax exempt entities (including many cooperative utilities), the TVA and Native American tribal governments. Transferability will open up the market for buyers (and brokers) that will start bidding on your tax equity to resell to their eligible investors. We’ll be interested to see how close credits get to 100% as demand increases for a somewhat limited supply.

Relatable Congress. When it comes to climate change Congress has been questioning scientists for decades, and I don’t mean when someone asked Senator Kerry about his political science degree. But more often than not, members of the House do not have much real life experience around climate change so it’s great when a member has learned experiences. We need more of that, hopefully a Wakeup reader will run and win!

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Best, Yann