The GTM Solar Summit has become one of the most informative conferences on the circuit. The folks at Greentech Media put together a compelling program, combining market trend updates, topical panels, thought-provoking keynotes, and valuable networking opportunities. And for someone like me thawing out from the Midwestern winter, a strong dose of Arizona sunshine is an added bonus.
My key takeaways from this year’s GTMSS centered on the commercial and industrial (C&I) and utility solar markets. On the C&I front, I learned that more mandates within corporations, which are similar to renewable portfolio standards (RPS), are starting to appear in some states. While companies like Procter and Gamble have already put in place aggressive internal sustainability goals to reach 30% renewable energy by 2020, an increasing number of Fortune 1000 firms are starting to set similar targets. This trend should help enliven the bumpy C&I sector.
One reason we are seeing this trend, according to the GTMSS speakers, is that corporations want more control over their own assets—including energy. They want more predictability over their projected energy costs during the next 20-30 years, something very difficult to achieve when buying power from the local utility. Yet even with this trend, there remains a lack of understanding of the solar market from the outside, which often scares away potential customers and investors from installing solar. The opportunity is ripe for educating these customers about the benefits of solar.
On the utility side, another good panel for me focused on the future of U.S. utility solar procurement. Executives from the Southern Company and the Arkansas Public Service Commission offered their impressions of the U.S. Clean Power Plan (CPP), providing insights I found valuable as Inovateus evolves its own utility sector strategy.
The CPP will require utilities to lower their emissions and adopt cleaner energy generation strategies. The plan is already shaping their future, and they see it as one of a range of risks they are facing. The utilities view the plan as a cost risk and say it will have a large impact on both their companies and their customers. Each state will have different goals and regulations as a result of the CPP. This concerns utilities that operate in multiple states, so they are asking for more clarity, but the states are not required to have a final plan in place for a few more years.
Increasingly, solar is becoming a resource to many utilities as a planning option—an idea that is spreading throughout the sector, the panelists noted. Many utilities are trying to optimize the energy future and installing solar is a way for them to do this. Solar is also a low-hanging fruit for utilities, and they are starting to install solar of their own free will because it makes economic and political sense. We are seeing this in states like Georgia that don’t have an RPS in place but where the utility has an aggressive plan to add hundreds of megawatts of solar in the coming years.
Utilities will need to choose a combination of solar, natural gas and other clean energy sources if they want to meet the goals of the Clean Power Plan. Utilities are becoming more familiar with solar and in turn are becoming more comfortable with it. We will see a healthy amount of utility-solar deployment in most of the 50 states over the next several years, and if the CPP is effective, that number could grow even more.
What was the best GTMSS takeaway of all? The U.S. solar market and an increasing number of global markets are alive and well and primed for exponential growth. We can expect continued multi-gigawatt-level annual deployments in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, thanks to the extension of the federal investment tax credit (ITC) and an increasing appreciation of solar economics in the residential, C&I, and utility sectors. The emergence of the energy storage market and the no-brainer pairing of solar plus batteries—also topics of animated discussion at the conference—add even more opportunities for expansion of the already thriving space.
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By Nathan Vogel, Director of Strategic Research, Inovateus Solar
