This is your SolarWakeup for March 28th, 2024

Guess Who’s Back!!! Stop the presses and get out your purchase orders! Suniva. Is. Back. In partnership with Heliene, a domestic content solution is in the market. On one hand, I guess the tariffs are doing their job as we’ve seen with other suppliers. On the other hand, will the brand survive starting the biggest trade war in solar since SolarWorld? Suniva really never went away, I’ve had multiple Suniva employees/e-mail address stay subscribed to this newsletter for the better part of 10 years. We’ll see how the market responds.

“Energy Pragmatism”. “In fact, in my nearly 50 years in finance, I’ve never seen more demand for energy infrastructure.” That’s Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, in his annual letter to shareholders as he coins the term ‘energy pragmatism’. The term encompasses the dual goals set by Countries around the world which originally started with decarbonization, i.e. energy transition, and now adding energy security. The pragmatism also brings in the additional issue of demand increase of markets due to economic growth in various sectors, Fink sites Germany and Texas as risks to suffer from outages. You can find the letter here

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 27th, 2024

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 26th, 2024

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 25th, 2024

Slower, Faster Or As Expected. Every headline these days is about energy demand, even old statements are recirculating the internet. On a personal level, I am not sure that we are going to be meeting the moment. There is no doubt that power plants are reaching the end of their 3rd or 4th lives, coal plants from the 60s and 70s are still operating. Plants will have to retire and many of them will repower if the economic case can be made for it. That leaves a big hole in the generation side which we absolutely need to make up with all of the solar and wind that can get built. This means more interconnection throughput and faster paths to offtakes across the geographies that need the energy. Demand side changes must also be met with regulatory flexibility, particularly in data centers. As society advances with our ever growing desire to stream everything and how fast the growth in AI will impact everyone’s everyday lives, data centers are the center of that possibility. So here’s the big question for you, do you think the overlap of retirements of generation meeting demand for new power is coming at us slower, faster or as expected in forecasts?

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 22nd, 2024

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This is your SolarWakeup for March 21st, 2023

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This is your SolarWakeup for March 20th, 2023

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This is your SolarWakeup for March 19th, 2023

Reconciling The Obvious. It’s too early to say that we have a problem, but it’s too late to ignore the problem as much as we are. Largely due to two factors, operators, regulators and politicians are not up in arms about the fact that our energy use will be far larger than our energy generation in a much small time frame than expected. First, we’ve never really faced this problem before. Energy consumption went up at the rate of economic growth and in a very predictable fashion. Mornings and nights at home and day time at the office while everyone filled up their cars at the gas station. Second, power plants didn’t retire at the speed as they are going to because we’ve been extending them beyond their useful life and the plateau on energy consumption has been steady for a few decades. Package that with our replacement generation being variable in nature (for the most part), we have an operational challenge ahead for us that must not be ignored. Fixing the interconnection queues, getting more generation built and then adding markets for resilience, especially fast response, is key for keeping the lights on. Just look at the top two headlines, 58GW of retirements and massive AI data center build out, and you’ll see the problem as well.

UK Postcard. The UK just made some market changes that are having a memorable effect on the storage build out in the Country that is something that every storage owner and investor needs to consider for the future. By expanding the market and adding new products, asset owners need to now adjust their preforms and cycle management. How is their state of charge? Are they compliant with the new rules and how will they manage their augmentation? All of that to say, if they don’t have a digital solution in place to make and continue to adapt to those changes, they will either lose out on revenue, underuse their system or augment their site at the wrong time. When these events occur is the right time to reset the proforma internally and adjust the system by switching the EMS or adding additional data analytics capabilities to the system. More to come on this…

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 18th, 2023

Cheap Solar Panels, Winners and Losers. It’s always been the dilemma, cheap solar panels from Asia hurt the domestic manufacturing build out. On the other hand, imagine the lowest scenario, if solar panels were free then consumers and tax payers would benefit from cheaper PPAs (energy cost) and value of tax credits. I don’t know the right answer but the same is true for anything we import really. Imagine Amazon.com only selling domestically manufactured goods or Walmart. Nobody is saying all solar panels should be made here, I would welcome that, but there’s also an economic upside to it as well. I’d love to hear more thoughts on this from you all, how do you reconcile cheap solar panels?

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Yann


This is your SolarWakeup for March 14th, 2023

Sea Of Suits. If there is one legacy left behind from the solar industry, it’s the 3,500 navy blue suits that come together at the Infocast Solar + Wind (And Storage) Conference in Phoenix. For the veterans, this is the old Rancho Bernardo conference. It was great to catch up with so many of you that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing in so long. It’s incredible that our industry drives this level of collaboration and investment, representing the $50billion market that we all created in 2023 and will continue to grow.

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Yann