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Archive for the ‘Sungevity’ Category

SolarCity buys East Coast’s biggest home solar installer

Posted in renewable energy, solar energy, SolarCity, Sungevity on February 17, 2011| 1 Comment »

photo: SolarCity

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

California solar companies are continuing their eastward expansion, with Silicon Valley’s SolarCity on Wednesday acquiring the residential operations of one of the East Coast biggest solar installers, groSolar.

With the acquisition, SolarCity, California’s largest residential solar installer, will move into Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. SolarCity is on something of a spending spree  — in January, the company bought Clean Currents Solar, a Washington, D.C., solar installer, and expanded its operations to the nation’s capital and Maryland.

Meanwhile, Sungevity, an Oakland, Calif., solar installer, raised $15 million from investors in December to expand into six Northeastern states.

“What I see happening in this market is that in order for the solar industry to survive without subsidies, we have to get to economies of scale and build a trusted brand,” Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s chief executive, said in an interview. “I see consolidation continuing with those companies that get economies of scale offering more services.”

Citing California state figures, Rive said the number of solar installers in the Golden State had fallen from 525 in 2007 to 250 by the end of 2010, even as the residential solar market grew by 40 percent a year.

“Most of them just went out of the solar business,” says Rive. “A lot of people who got into solar were electricians, roofers, and the like. They realized it’s a very difficult business, and without scale it’s not competitive.”

The question, of course, is whether California solar companies will find the same success in the not-so-sunny Northeast as they navigate different local incentives for solar and a region that is less culturally green than their home state.

The California market, after all, is a monster: home to nearly 40 million people and a state policy to subsidize a million solar roofs. Not to mention a mandate requiring utilities to obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020 — a policy that is translating into contracts for thousands of megawatts of photovoltaic power.

In some ways, the East Coast market is terra incognita, as no state matches the intensive solar data gathering of California. For instance, SolarCity thinks groSolar is the Northeast’s largest solar installer, based on its 2,500 customers, but doesn’t know for sure.

“I think the East Coast market is the perfect market,” says Rive. “There’s some logistical challenges — there’s more trees and an older housing stock. From a cultural point of view, I think they’d very much like to see the savings and have the benefit of using clean power.”

But the biggest challenge is political, as solar incentives in the Northeast have waxed and waned with over the years.

“When you go into any new state, the biggest pitfall is the volatility in policy,” says Rive.

Still, Rive and his California competitors believe their experience toughing it out in the United States’ biggest solar market gives them a leg up as they head East.

“California is an incredibly competitive market, so it teaches you to be fairly nimble and to keep your product offerings sharp,” Rive says. “As you go into other markets, that learning can be applied.”

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Not just a photo(voltaic) op: Maldives leader goes solar

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, global warming, green policy, renewable energy, solar energy, Sungevity, tagged , on October 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

The president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed (on right in above photo), didn’t just agree to have solar panels installed on the presidential mansion; he helped put them in. Nasheed scrambled up to the roof this week, screwdriver in hand, and joined the crew from California’s Sungevity, which installed the 11.5-kilowatt photovoltaic array.

(Don’t expect to see Barack Obama in a hard hat any time soon, even though his administration just gave the OK to the solarization of the White House.)

The Maldives, of course, is the poster country for global warming. The Indian Ocean archipelago rests, on average, fewer than five feet above sea level and the nation of some 305,000 people would be rendered uninhabitable by rising waters.

“For the Maldives, climate change is a real challenge,” said Nasheed on a conference call Wednesday. “It’s not a problem in the future, it’s a problem we face every day.”

“We have 16 islands that have serious erosion problems,” he added. “We’ve had to relocate people from one island to another. We also have severe saltwater contamination. We have a serious food security issue.”

Sungevity and Bill McKibben’s 350.org were behind the campaign to put solar on the U.S. White House. The Maldives rooftop installation is part of this Sunday’s 10/10/10 “Global Work Party,” another McKibben initiative to get people to take action against climate change.

Nasheed, 43, has shown himself adept at focusing media attention on the impact of global warming on the world’s low-lying island nations — last October, he and his cabinet donned scuba gear to hold an underwater meeting.

But putting solar panels on the presidential home is not so much a PR stunt as part of the nation’s aggressive efforts to wean itself from the imported oil it relies on to generate electricity.

In January, Nasheed pledged to the United Nations that the Maldives would go carbon neutral by 2020. Making good on his pledge won’t turn back the rising tide, but Nasheed said the Maldives can show other island nations that it is possible to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. “If it can work here in the Maldives it can work anywhere with 300,000 people,” he said. “We’re going to see a very big technology shift. There’s going to be another industrial revolution. If you’re not clever enough to embrace the future, you cannot be a world leader.”

According to an official in the president’s office, the Maldives total electricity demand is 200 megawatts.

A Finnish company, WinWind, has proposed building a 25-megawatt wind farm on the Maldives’ Gaaf Alif atoll, while Indian wind turbine maker Suzlon is investigating the feasibility of constructing a 15-megawatt wind farm on the Addu atoll. Japan has provided financial assistance for a project to install a megawatt’s worth of rooftop arrays on schools and government buildings in Male, the country’s capital.

International donors, meanwhile, have promised $30 million for renewable projects. Scotland and the Maldives have signed an agreement to investigate the potential for developing wave and tidal power in the archipelago, according to the president’s office.

To provide electricity when there’s no wind or sun, the Maldives is considering biomass power plants that would run on coconut husks. Outlying islands, however, would probably have to continue burning oil until the price of batteries used to store renewable energy became affordable.

LG, the Korean company, donated the panels for the presidential solar array and the inverters were contributed by the German company Kaco. Sungevity used satellite images and its proprietary software to size and design the solar system at its Oakland, Calif., headquarters, then flew a crew to the Maldives to install it.

“We’re averting about 200 tons of C02 from the system and there’s a 27 percent return on investment,” said Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s co-founder and a former Greenpeace activist, who traveled to the Maldives for the installation. “President Nasheed is demonstrating this is a wise and affordable investment.”

Or as Nasheed put it, “For us, it is an issue of life or death. We have been living in the middle of the Indian Ocean and have a written history that goes back 1,000 years. We cannot relocate.”

“We have to take direct action,” he continued. “As the president, it’s difficult for me to talk like this. This has to involve a fair amount of direct action on the streets.”

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Financiers, enviro justice activists hook up to fight Prop 23

Posted in green policy, Proposition 23, Sungevity on September 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

In The New York Times on Thursday, I write about an unusual alliance between California financiers and environmental justice activists to reach minority voters who they believe will be key in defeating Proposition 23, the ballot measure that would suspend the state’s global warming law:

The fight over Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative that would suspend the state’s landmark global warming law, has spawned some unusual political alliances. Mainstream environmentalists, venture capitalists, labor unions, tech chieftains and even some Republicans have all made common cause to oppose the measure, which is backed by two Texas oil companies.

Now activists who work on behalf of poor communities afflicted by pollution and some of California’s top financiers have come together in an effort to bring minority voters to the polls on Nov. 2.

At a recent fund raiser at the waterfront offices of Sungevity, an Oakland, Calif., solar company, hedge-fund managers and other well-heeled investors sipped cocktails and mingled with inner-city activists in the hope of raising $1.9 million for a turn-out-the-vote campaign that will target nine counties with large populations of African-American, Asian and Latino voters.

“There is something kind of strange but great that there are environmental justice activists mixing with entrepreneurs and financiers who are all committed equally to building this clean economy that can lift all boats,” Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s co-founder and a former Greenpeace activist, told the crowd.

California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, known as A.B. 32, mandates that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions be cut to 1990 levels by 2020. Proposition 23 would suspend the law until the state unemployment rate falls to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, a rare occurrence in recent decades.

“How voters of color vote on Prop 23 will be the margin of victory or defeat on this,” Roger Kim, executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, an Oakland-based group, said at the event. “As little as three percent of the vote may make the difference.” (Mr. Kennedy’s wife, Miya Yoshitani, serves as associate director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network.)

A Field Poll released on Sunday showed Proposition 23 opposed by 45 percent and favored by 34 percent of respondents, with 21 percent still undecided. Latino voters supported the ballot measure 41 percent to 38 percent while African-American and Asian voters opposed it 41 percent to 34 percent. A Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California poll published on Friday found the initiative supported by a slight margin, 40 percent to 38 percent.

“Let’s talk about why people of color especially matter in this campaign,” Thomas F. Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management, a $20 billion San Francisco hedge fund, and co-chairman of the “No on 23” campaign, said in a speech at the fund raiser. “And it is true that the swing vote if you look at it may well be people of color. And that’s definitely important and we need to definitely to win this so I don’t want to downplay that.”

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Berkeley hands out solar checks

Posted in alternative energy, energy, green financing, green policy, renewable energy, solar energy, Sungevity, SunPower, tagged , , , on February 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

solar_and_your_home_header
photo: Sungevity

Berkeley on Friday hands over checks to the first two homeowners who tapped the California city’s pioneering solar financing program to install solar arrays.

The city fronts the cash for rooftop solar panels for any Berkeley business or homeowner, who pays back the cost through a 20-year surcharge on their property tax bill. If a home is sold, the surcharge rolls over to the new owner. The city council created a Sustainable Energy Financing District and launched a $1.5 million pilot program for the Berkeley FIRST Financing Initiative for Renewable and Solar Technology) in November to finance 40 rooftop systems. It took all of nine minutes for those 40 slots to be filled when the online application went live.

Berkeley issued a bond for the programs that was bought by Oakland-based Renewable Funding, which financed the solar arrays and whose president, Francisco DeVries, devised the Berkeley program when he served as Mayor Tom Bates’ chief of staff. Renewable Funding now is taking the program nationwide as cities from Portland to Tuscon consider adopting similar solar financing schemes. Under legislation enacted last year, any California city can implement a Berkeley-style program.

Municipal financing of solar arrays has become even more attractive since October when Congress lifted a $2,000 cap on federal tax credits for residential systems. Homeowners now can claim a tax credit for 30% of the cost of a solar system. When a state rebate is added, the cost of going solar in California has fallen by half.

Municipal financing programs are good news for solar panel makers and installers like SunPower (SPWRA), SunTech (STP), Akeena (AKNS) and First Solar (FSLR), the thin-film solar company that recently jumped into the residential market.

On Friday, Berkeley homeowner Jeanne Pimentel will receive a check from the mayor to hand over Borrego Solar, which installed her solar panels while homeowner Aaron Mann will sign his check over to Sungevity.

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Solar surges in California despite recession

Posted in alternative energy, enviro startups, green policy, PG&E, renewable energy, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, Southern California Edison, Sungevity, Suntech, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

csi-report

The other day I ran into Danny Kennedy, president of solar installation company Sungevity, on the playground as we were picking up our kids at Malcolm X Elementary (we live in Berkeley). I had spent the week chronicling layoffs at various solar and wind companies so it was with a bit of trepidation that Green Wombat asked Danny how business was going at at Sungevity.  “Great,” he replied as I quizzed him about the impact of the recession. “We’re as busy as ever.”

Apparently so. A report released Wednesday by the California Public Utilities Commission shows that residential and commercial rooftop solar installations in the Golden State more than doubled in 2008 from the previous year to 158 megawatts. What’s more, a record-breaking number of applications to participate in California’s $3 billion solar rebate program were filed in December as the drumbeat of bad economic news grew deafening and the state’s unemployment rate hit 9%.

Are Californians being crazily contrarian? While one would think that a $30,000 solar array would be one of those luxuries most people would put on the back burner in bad times, there are some solid economic reasons for the surge. First, rebates for solar systems under the California Solar Initiative get less lucrative in 2009 as incentives fall as the amount of installed solar rises.  Then in October Congress lifted the $2,000 cap on the federal tax credit on solar arrays, allowing homeowners and businesses to take a 30% tax credit on systems installed after Dec. 31.  Add in the state rebate and the cost of a solar system in California suddenly fell by half.

“The surge in applications occurring in the fourth quarter of 2008 is particularly noteworthy given the slowdown in the economy that occurred during the same time period,” the report’s authors noted. “In addition to environmental benefits such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, it appears that solar energy is benefiting California by serving as an economic bright spot in the economy.”

And therein lies some lessons as the U.S. Congress debates how to promote green jobs. Two years into the California Solar Initiative, the taxpayers’ investment of $775 million in solar rebates has yielded $5 billion in private investment in solar projects and rapidly expanded the state’s renewable energy industry, according to the report. That’s helped create strong solar companies like solar cell maker SunPower (SPWRA) and markets for thin-film solar companies such as First Solar (FSLR). The decade-long program is on track to achieve its target of 3,000 megawatts of rooftop solar and in the first two years of the program more solar has been installed in California than in the previous 25 years.

While California regulators expect the pace to continue in 2009, the big unknown is how many homeowners and business owners will drop out of the program and cancel their applications if the economy continues to deteriorate rapidly this year. The current dropout rate is 15%, according to the report.

“We are hopeful that many of those pending projects will move forward,” Molly Tirpak Sterkel, who oversees the California Solar Initiative for the utilities commission, told Green Wombat. “We’re also cognizant of the economy and economic forces that may pose a threat to those installations.”

Demand for solar is far stronger in Northern California than in sunny SoCal. Northern California utility PG&E’s (PCG) customers have installed more than twice the megawatts of solar than Southern California Edison (EIX) customers. And the report notes that while applications for commercial arrays in PG&E’s territory rose 71% between April and December 2008, they fell 23% in Southern California Edison’s area. San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE), which covers a much smaller service area, saw applications triple for residential solar arrays.

Sterkel says it is unclear why Northern Californians are going solar at a much faster rate than their southern counterpart, but it may be due to differences in electricity pricing and more mature solar markets in regions like the San Francisco Bay Area. “There’s just that many more solar companies with experience, installations and sales channels, ” she says.

Solar panels seem to be sprouting from Bay Area rooftops like California poppies after a late winter rain. In Berkeley, the city has launched a program that pays for residential and business solar arrays upfront and let owners pay the cost back over 20 years through an annual assessment on their property taxes.

Which also may explain why I seem to be seeing more of those Sungevity signs around town.

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No happy new year for the solar industry

Posted in alternative energy, climate change, energy, environment, First Solar, global warming, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, Sungevity, SunPower, Suntech, tagged , , , , , , on December 8, 2008| 9 Comments »

solarcells

photo: Southern California Edison

While demand for solar panels is expected to continue to grow by double-digits in the years ahead, 2009 could be a make-or-break year for some companies, according to an analysis from HSBC Global Research.

After grappling with a shortage of polysilicon – the base material of conventional solar cells – for the past couple years, the industry now faces falling prices. The spot market for polysilicon has plummeted 35% since October, writes HSBC alternative energy analyst Christine Wang, who predicts prices will fall 30% next year.

That’s bad news for solar module makers who locked in long-term contracts at higher prices – which looked like a smart move when polysilicon was in short supply and prices rising rapidly. “The winners will likely be the companies with competitive cost structures, scale, good product  quality, strong balance sheets, and strong customer relationships,” according to Wang. “We believe that new entrants and small players will suffer the most as they lack brand recognition.”

The culprits are the usual suspects – the global financial crisis as well as some cutbacks in subsidies from countries like Spain. Solar cell companies that have rapidly ramped up production over the past two years now may be saddled with too many high-priced products.

Wang downgraded Chinese solar giant Suntech (STP) and set a price target of $4.50 – down sharply from HSBC’s earlier target of $55. Suntech was trading at near $10 Monday afternoon but still nearly 90% off its 2008 high.  (SunPower (SPWRA), First Solar (FSLR) and other solar cell makers have also seen their share prices nose-dive.) “High portion of polysilicon based on contract prices will hurt Suntech,” writes Wang, who estimated that 80% of Suntech’s polysilicon supply is locked into contracts “on less favorable fixed prices.”

Falling panel prices is good news for solar system installers like Sungevity and Akeena Solar (AKNS) and their residential and commercial customers. When Green Wombat ran into Akeena CEO Barry Cinnamon in San Francisco at the announcement of Better Place’s Bay Area electric car project, he said he was in no rush to enter into long-term contracts with solar cell suppliers as he expects prices will continue to fall in 2009.

Still, not all the news is gloomy for the industry. Wang expects that the financial crisis won’t derail government support for solar, given climate change pressures and state mandates to increase the use of renewable energy. The move by utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Southern California Edison (EIX) to sign long-term contracts for electricity from photovoltaic power plants will also keep demand high in coming years.

Wang projects solar cell demand will grow 45% between 2008 and 2012. “Developed countries are increasingly focused on environmental protection and curtailing the causes of climate change, and we do not believe this trend will shift just because of a (hopefully) short-term financial crisis,” she wrote.

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Australia the next solar hot spot?

Posted in alternative energy, Australia, energy, environment, GE Energy Financial Services, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Sungevity, SunPower, tagged , , , , , on July 29, 2008| 1 Comment »

In late 2006, there was something of an exodus from Australia as solar startups decamped for California, frustrated by the long-entrenched conservative government’s tepid support for renewable energy. On one Sydney-to-San Francisco flight alone could be found David Mills, co-founder of solar power plant company Ausra, and Danny Kennedy, chief of solar installer startup Sungevity.

Flash forward 18 months and solar energy companies are beating a path back to Australia. Ausra recently opened up operations Down Under, and last week Silicon Valley solar company SunPower (SPWR) acquired an Australian solar installer called Solar Sales. So is Oz the next hot solar market? By all accounts, the sun-baked environmentally conscious country should be. But the move into the South Pacific is another example of how governments’ ever-morphing renewable energy policies are spurring solar companies to move operations around the globe.

“Obviously there’s a lot of sun in Australia but with the recent change in government there’s a policy environment that could be much more favorable for us,” Peter Aschenbrenner, SunPower’s vice president of corporate strategy, told Green Wombat. “We decided to get in now. It was a little opportunistic as the owners of  Solar Sales were looking to monetize their investment. It follows a model of a previous acquisition in Italy where we got in before the market headed north.”

Last November, a left-leaning Labor government took power in Australia, immediately signed the Kyoto Accord and expanded a national subsidy for rooftop solar panels. Meanwhile, individual Australian states, much like their American counterparts, have enacted their own incentives. Three states – Queensland, South Australia and Victoria – have adopted “feed-in-tariffs” that pay homeowners a premium for electricty produced from solar panels – up to four times the prevailing power rates. Solar homeowners that return  more electricity to the grid than they consume can zero out their power bill or even earn cash from their utility.

But the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has shown the same propensity to alter the rules of the game mid-stream as its predecessor, which wreaked havoc on the wind industry several years ago when it abruptly curtailed a renewable energy target. The Rudd government already has changed course on a national solar subsidy – which provides rebates up to $A8,000 for photovoltaic systems – to make it available only to households earning less than $A100,000 – which qualifies as middle middle-class in Australia’s big cities. Some of the states in turn have limited their subsidies. Victoria – Australia’s second-most populous state – will pay premium solar rates to only 100,000 households.

Given that solar is a game that moves as you play and the relatively small size of the Australian market (population: 20 million) Kennedy for one is cautious about doing business in his homeland.

“I think that it’s potentially a good market in the future,” says Kennedy, a former longtime Greenpeace activist who’s close to Australia’s environment minister and other government officials. “But it’s not living up to its potential because there’s a set of mixed signals from the federal and state governments and no certainty from one year to the next.”

Just how quickly the market can change has been illustrated by Spain, a solar hotspot that has attracted SunPower and other solar power plant builders as well as financiers like GE Energy Financial Services (GE)  with its lucrative premium rates for green electricity. But now the Spanish government is considering cutting its feed-in-tariff and limiting it to an annual 300 megawatts of installed solar, 100 megawatts of which must be rooftop photovoltaic systems. By contrast, some 1,100 megawatts of solar were expected to be installed this year. That would dramatically change the economics for solar energy companies that have moved into the Spanish market.

“This is something we’ve been preparing for,” says Aschenbrenner of SunPower, which has focused on building photovoltaic power plants in Spain. “With our global footprint, we are well placed to move allocation around as these markets wax and wane. In Spain, we’ve been working on building a dealer network to focus on the residential and small commercial markets.”

In Australia, SunPower will need to ramp up its new acquisition since Solar Sales operates on the country’s isolated West Coast while most of the country’s population is concentrated on the eastern seaboard. About half of Solar Sales business has been building off-the-grid power systems for Outback communities that rely on diesel generators for power. Aschenbrenner says he expects that business to continue but the focus will switch to residential solar.

photos: Todd Woody

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