ORIGINAL REPORTING: Solar at the crossroads: Is utility-scale, distributed or both the way to go?
Solar at the crossroads: Is utility-scale, distributed or both the way to go? Sunrun’s CEO sees a “war on solar” but others say changes can bring big opportunities
Herman K. Trabish, May 3, 2018 (Utility Dive)
Editor’s note: Rooftop solar’s internal struggle about how to cope with the industry’s changing incentive has become more significant since this story ran.
Sunrun ranks with SolarCity-Tesla and Vivint among top national installers. Its new opinion paper argues the time and money going to reinvent the bulk U.S. power system should instead be invested in distributed resources. Founded in 2007, Sunrun was the originator of the third-party ownership (TPO) financing that drove the rooftop solar boom after 2009. More recently, Sunrun became one of the first national installers to offer TPO financing for solar-plus-storage systems. CEO/Founder Lynn Jurich has strong ideas about solar’s next steps. “We are at a crossroads: We can choose a path of building a more affordable, clean, reliable energy system,” Jurich wrote. “Or, continue down a path of centralized, fossil fuel-based electricity production, building power plants and power lines that will be redundant in 10 years, while pushing consumers to go it alone.”
There is a “war on solar,” Jurich argued. It includes an “attack” on net energy metering (NEM), which “has proven to be a simple, effective system to make it possible for Americans to go solar,” she wrote. The attack also undervalues distributed solar in comparison to utility-scale solar. Caroline Choi is senior vice-president for regulatory affairs with Southern California Edison (SCE), which was named first among 400 U.S. utilities in energy storage and second in providing solar to customers by the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA). There is an “either-or” quality to the paper that seems to overlook utility-scale solar in favor of distributed solar, Choi told Utility Dive. But Choi and Jurich agree that battery energy storage is central to solar’s future… click here for more
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