Solar a Mortal Threat to Utilities

It appears that the public is waking up to the obvious threat that solar is to the status quo energy providers.  We live in an age of accelerating change and disruption.  I wrote last year about how solar will continue to expand rapidly into the general market regardless of what the utilities do to discourage it.  What today's Wall Street Journal piece means to me is that the national dialog will start to become even more rancorous with respect to clean energy issues.

David & Goliath -- Distributed Generation vs Traditional Utilities

Unfortunately, there is some truth to the fact that solar is currently only feasible for the wealthy and that federal tax credits could be seen as a transfer payment from average tax payers who can't afford solar to wealthy ones who can. The consequence of this dialog will be the elimination of federal and state incentives for distributed generation systems. Solar already has unsubsidized grid parity in many markets so growth their will continue to drive down the global costs for installing solar.  Companies like Solar City & Sun Run will have to re-model their current business plans, and I doubt they will weather the storm very well since their profitability is so tied to the current incentives.  New installation company concepts will emerge though and I think more traditional contractors will finally get into the game.

http://greenzu.com/solar-energy-political-cartoon

Utilities may go further and try to ban the connection of solar systems to the grid. Standalone solar with back up systems will be ready for the market by the time this happens though. Essentially this will be the last arrow in the utility's quiver to stop the rising tide of distributed solar. At that point, we'll probably cross the tipping point where they don't have enough rate payers to maintain affordable rates. Then things get really ugly.

While I am advocate for progress and technological innovation, crippled utilities will be a major issue for an already crippled political system to address. Add this difficult situation to the already huge list of complex issues that we don't seem to be able to effectively address (national debt, climate change, social security insolvency, resource depletion, population growth). The brinksmanship games we are playing will take on an entirely new dimension when we start to have daily brown outs and extended power outages.

Change Happens Faster Than You Think

Maybe not the father of solar energy but a tremendously influential and critical thinker .

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

I came across this quote today while watching a TED talk about the speed of change we are now seeing in human biology from both intentional and unintentional sources.  A case can be made that we may be an entirely different species of animal than we are today in only a few generations.  It's a fascinating lecture about evolutionary biology, and it sparked a connection in my brain to the state of solar today.

Solar energy development appears to be following this dictum.  Massive changes are happening in the business almost on a daily basis.  The speed of change is so fast that it makes it difficult to comprehend it or make accurate predictions or plans for the future.  In all probability, we will have an entirely new energy infrastructure in less than a couple of decades.  How this might happen or what shape this new energy system will take is still far from certain.

In the face of uncertainty, don't lose hope--focus on the basics. Work to continually improve your general health and intellect.  Study your industry and market.  Engage with customers and suppliers.  Think about the major issues you face on a daily basis and try new things.  Solar energy will win because it's the energy source that got us to where we are today. It's now the time for us to become more a little more sophisticated about how we harness it and much more intentional about how we apply it.