SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the US, employs a grid engineering team to integrate its systems and evaluate the impact on the grid. The company decided this week to publish the team’s findings in a white paper titled: “A Pathway to the Distributed Grid”. Expand Expanding Close
Two homeowners with rooftop-solar systems initiated a class action lawsuit in Clark County District Court against Nevada Power, a utility part of Warren Buffet’s NV Energy, over the recent net metering rate changes approved by the Public Utilities Commission. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity announced yesterday that it will cease sales and installations in Nevada after the state’s Public Utilities Commission approved a 75% reduction of the price electric utilities pay for electricity generated from rooftop solar. The new rule makes net-metering uneconomical and “effectively shut down” the homeowner and 3rd party-owned rooftop solar industry in Nevada, giving a monopoly to utility-owned systems. Expand Expanding Close
Several solar companies saw double digits stock price increases on Monday. The surge can be partly attributed to the Paris agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but it was mainly due to reports of negotiation for the renewal of the federal tax credit for solar energy.
Democrats are said to be willing to agree to a lift on the 40-year ban on US crude oil exports, if the bill includes a long-term extension of the wind and solar tax credits. The deal isn’t done, but as the industry is getting closer to the phasing out of the tax credits, which are set to fall from 30% to 10% in 2017, the industry is warning politicians about the impact of inaction. Expand Expanding Close
During the past few months, rooftop solar installer SolarCity has been watching its stock price plummet, along with most of the solar industry. During the past week, Chairman Elon Musk bought 3 blocks of shares between $25.20 and $26.45 to add over 500,000 shares to his now total of 21.3 million shares or about 21% of the company.
Now just a few days after the disclosure of the stock purchase, we learn through a press release from Silver Lake Kraftwerk that Musk invested an additional $10 million in the company through convertible senior notes along with $100 million from Silver Lake and $3 million from SolarCity CEO and Musk’s cousin, Lyndon Rive. Expand Expanding Close
On Thursday, Off Grid Electric announced that it had raised US$25 million in a series C round led by the venture capital firm DBL Partners. Previous investors in the company SolarCity, Microsoft co-Founder Paul Allen and eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund Omidyar Network joined DBL in the financing round. Off Grid Electric, which also advertises under its M-Power brand, offers solar energy as a service in Africa, starting with Tanzania and recently in Rwanda. Expand Expanding Close
Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity – three companies influenced by Elon Musk – are currently on a massive hiring spree around the US. They already have a combined headcount of over 32,000 employees and the total is set to increase significantly in the coming months. We learned that Musk’s companies are holding joined private recruiting events, the latest of which held last weekend at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Recruiters from each company select students recommended through university programs and invite them to the relatively secretive events to interview with SolarCity, SpaceX or Tesla. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity, the biggest solar installer in the U.S., will attempt to hire 500 new employees in a single day on October 21. The company already employs over 14,000 workers in the U.S. and is adding more than 500 per month on average.
PR stunt? Maybe, but nonetheless the move is highlighting the importance of the solar industry in the U.S. job market. Expand Expanding Close
Media organisations will be disappointed to learn that Tesla CEO Elon Musk plans on cutting back on media appearances. In the past week, Musk mentioned on two occasions, on the Marketplace report and at the New Establishment Summit, that he wishes to reduce time spent on “press stuff” from “2 or 3 percent” of his time to only 1%.
We did the math. 1% of 24 hours is roughly 15 minutes a day or 100 minutes a week – assuming Musk includes sleep in his time.
The CEO says that he already spends most of his time on engineering and design, but he plans to use the time freed up by making less media appearances to focus even more on the products. Expand Expanding Close
Yale University announced the purchase of a 4,400-solar panel installation from SolarCity for its West Campus. The panels are spread on the rooftop of a 350,000 square feet warehouse. Expand Expanding Close
Jim Chanos is a famed billionaire hedge fund manager known for short selling companies. He is also a regular market commentator for CNBC and Bloomberg. Chanos recently disclosed having a short position on solar installer SolarCity (SCTY) and although he refused to disclose his position on Tesla Motors (TSLA), he doesn’t have good things to say about the company.
During an interview with Bloomberg on Monday morning, Chanos explained why he thinks both companies are overvalued, but the “facts” he used to support his opinion are misleading. Expand Expanding Close
Earlier this month SolarCity announced details of a new high-efficiency solar panel it plans on producing at its 1 GW module factory under-construction in Buffalo, NY. The company claimed that the module’s 22.04% efficiency was enough to make it the “most efficient rooftop solar module” ever made. The claim apparently sparked a “war” of high-efficiency solar panels because in the week following the announcement two other solar panel makers claimed to have surpassed SolarCity’s record. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity announced today that it has built the most efficient rooftop solar module with 22% efficiency according to a third party tester: Renewable Energy Test Center. Until now, SunPower’s X-Series panel was considered the most efficient rooftop panel with 21.5% efficiency.
SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive says that the new modules will produce between 350 to 360-watt compared to the company’s current 260-watt panels. Expand Expanding Close
Recent pictures of SolarCity’s ‘Gigafactory’ show that the solar panel plant is, at least from the outside, looking close to be ready for production. The Buffalo News managed to get a bird eyes view of the plant and compared the progress with pictures from a year ago. Expand Expanding Close
Tesla (and Space X CEO, Solar City Chairman) CEO Elon Musk made some important remarks yesterday at the “Business for Tomorrow” summit at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy yesterday. While the translations and the moderation/questions at the end are frustrating, Musk’s comments at the beginning are poignant.
On Refugees:
“Today’s refugee problem is perhaps a small indication of what the future will be like if we do not take action with respect to climate change. Today, the challenge is in terms of millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is, the problem will be in the hundreds of millions and much more severe.”
On taking action:
I think it’s very important that we take action today to recognize that we are making a very significant change to the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. One that is almost impossible to reverse…
And where you could really feel some emotion:
If you go 20, 30, 50 years in the future, what do you say to your kids or your grandkids? It’s almost, like, scientists have all said that these bad things are going to happen, it’s, like 97 percent… So, to say to your kids or grandkids, like, ‘Did nobody tell you?’
No, everyone was telling us. ‘
So why didn’t you do anything?’ What’s the answer?
…I think it’s very important that we do something.
SolarCity, the biggest solar installer in the US, announced a new program to install solar for affordable housing communities. Under the new program, SolarCity will finance and install solar arrays for affordable housing developers, and then the company will distribute the energy produced by the solar panels to individual housing units. Expand Expanding Close
Energy retailer Viridian announced today a partnership with solar provider Sungevity to offer solar energy though its network of associates. The arrangement is not new for Viridian which had a similar deal with SolarCity. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity announced today that the company signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Kaua’i electric utility (KIUC). SolarCity already built a 12-megawatt solar array for KUIC which went into operation in September 2014 and now supplies 5% of the island’s electricity, but under the new deal, the California-based solar installer will develop a new solar array and a massive 52 MWh energy storage system to provide electricity when the sun is down. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity announced today the closing of a new fund to finance $400 million in solar projects. The company, which recently acquired Mexico-based solar installer ILIOSS, has been perfecting the art of raising money for solar installations and now says it has raised enough funds to finance more than $9 billion in solar projects. Expand Expanding Close
Yesterday SolarCity released a SEC filing listing the milestones its co-founders need to achieve to vest tranches of shares of their new performance-based compensation plan. The milestones reveal some ambitious goals for the solar installer.
For example, the first milestone is to achieve a cost of production of $0.50/Watt for solar modules with at least 20% efficiency. Expand Expanding Close
The global stock market had a horrible day. Even Wall Street darlings like Google and Apple saw billions of dollars trimmed off their market capitalizations. A surprising exception, SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the US, managed to go against the grain and closed the day with an impressive 7% gain thanks to its Chairman and major shareholder Elon Musk who bought another $5 million worth of shares during the stock’s price fall to add to his holding in the company now worth over $900 million of SolarCity’s total market cap of just over $4 billion. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity made its first international move today when it announced the acquisition of ILIOSS, one of the largest commercial and industrial solar developers in Mexico. Until today, SolarCity operated in 17 states in the US and they focused their efforts where electricity rates and government incentives are favorable to solar. Mexicans pay expensive rates for their electricity and they have plenty of sunshine, making Mexico an attractive market for the solar company. Expand Expanding Close
SolarCity is the largest installer of residential solar so looking at their market performance is a useful indicator for the solar industry as a whole. This week, the company released their financial results for the second quarter of the year (April to June) and they achieved record bookings and installations.
Even though the company missed Wall Street’s expectations, they impressed the industry with 189 MW of solar power installed in just 3 months. I’m not overstating anything when I say this is impressive. For comparison, SolarCity installed more distributed solar power on rooftops than the capacity of a large solar power farm like the Centinela Solar Energy Project in California. Expand Expanding Close
Manage push notifications
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
You are subscribed to notifications
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
