As we move into the second of the CA Legislature’s two-year term, there are a number of carry-over bills and a few new ones popping up on the docket that will be interesting to watch over the year, some of which we’ll cover here.  However, there are four big areas that will drive this years trends and will have the biggest effect on the sector.

The Timing: Election 2018 – While 2018 is a midterm election nationally, it’s the equivalent of a general election in state politics, and two of the major powerhouses that have pushed the California clean economy are moving on. As Governor Jerry Brown heads into his legacy year, there is little left on his personal energy agenda beyond regionalization (more on that below) and his swan song, the Global Climate Action Summit in September.  And former Senate leader, Kevin de Leon, is challenging Diane Feinstein from within the Democratic Party for her seat in the US Senate.  With California’s jungle primary system, it’s quite possible that de Leon will be running against DiFi twice – once in the June primary and again head-to-head in general. The governor’s desire for any final crown jewels to be set before GCAS, and de Leon’s need to focus solely on his campaign heading into November, makes it extremely likely that any and all 2018 energy legislation will be pushed over the line before the June recess.

The Crown Jewel: SB100 – SB100 – a requirement for all California utilities to procure 100% of electricity for the state from  renewable sources – got caught up in some last minute (rather ugly) politics in the Assembly just before the end of of the session last September, revolving around bills ostensibly around CASIO expansion and largely stuffed with pork, political payouts, and bad politics.  It is extremely likely that this will happen again this year.  Climate and clean energy advocates who want SB100 will need to fight hard to both push SB100 as a requirement for passage of any regionalization legislation, but simultaneously decouple them enough that SB100 moves to the governors desk even if CAISO expansion negotiations fail. It’s a thin needle to thread, but de Leon and Brown have a lot to gain and much less to lose this time around.

The White Whale: CAISO Regionalization – If there were a state policy equivalent to the complexity and competing stakeholders of the comprehensive immigration national debate, it would be merging the California ISO (CAISO) with the balancing authorities of other western grid states into a cohesive western Regional Transmission Operator (RTO). From labor, utilities, climate change warriors, consumer advocates, financiers, and energy developers, CAISO regionalization involves tradeoffs in multiple areas of the economy, starting with California giving up some of it’s autonomy and authority over its intrastate grid management.  And thus, the debate and legislation is going to be filled with pork, passive-aggressive soundbites, and other standard features of zero-sum politics.  However, over the 4 years the legislature has been grappling with this, there have sprung up competing interests outside of California – the mountain west transmission group (MWT) is looking to join the southwest power pool (SPP) and the need for CAISO to become a reliability coordinator after leaving Peak Reliability next spring –  that make 2018 a fish or cut bait year for this initiative.

The Silent Tsunami: CCAs – Community Choice Aggregation (also known as Community Choice Energy) was enabled in 2002 passage of AB117 as a (politically brilliant) way for the legislature to leave the door open to electricity market deregulation after the electricity crisis of 2000-2001 without ever saying the words “deregulation” again.  It would be over 8 years before the CPUC certified the first CCA implementation plan for Marin Clean Energy in 2010.  However, in the following 8 years, CCAs have started forming at a rapid clip and CPUC staff found that they could be serving 85% of the total load within the next eight. While the CPUC is concerned about this from a regulatory perspective, the politics are getting ugly between the utilities and CCA advocates due to the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA). Utilities contract capacity (generation) to serve their expected load from power producers through PPAs that are typically 25 or 30 years long. If half that load departs to purchase power from a CCA, the utilities are still on the hook for the contracted capacity and payments.  The PCIA is the charge to former utility customers to cover the cost of the contracted payments.  That’s all fine from a financing perspective, but politically, the utilities are well aware that the more CCAs expand, the greater pressure there will be from constituents to not have to pay extra for power they aren’t using. This is why the addition of a 400MW capacity requirement for the IOUs in the regionalization bills was seen as a direct threat to CCAs – those contracts would have been included in the PCIA calculation of new CCAs, making them less competitive or even viable. Capacity requirements, renewable requirements, and the PCIA are all part and parcel to the underlying debate over the future of the state’s electricity market and the role of utilities in it.  This debate isn’t politically public on it’s own (yet), but the battles and skirmishes will be seen in multiple areas of multiple bills over the next few months.

The International Trade Commission has filed its remedy recommendations for the Section 201 case filed by Suniva & SolarWorld. These recommendations will be submitted to President Trump no later than November 13 and the President will make a final decision within 60 days whether to apply, ignore, or change the remedies before committing them to policy. While Trump is the most…erratic…decision maker we’ve had in the White House in recent decades, there are personality tendencies and external factors that can inform us of likely outcomes.

Whether attributed to core psychology or the result of growing up in the cutthroat world of NYC real estate, it is no great secret that Trump indulges the strongman tendencies inherent in his zero-sum, us vs them paradigm of the world. It’s well-documented that he’s not big on details, has a short attention span, and is known to change his mind or statements based on the last conversation he had.

Beyond his own personal tendencies, President Trump has a mix of advisors around him pulling in different directions. Advocating the pro-tariff argument will be the “economic nationalist” folks like Steve Bannon and his protege Steve Miller (don’t make the mistake of thinking that Bannon doesn’t have influence just because he’s left the White House). On the other side, you have free trade “globalists” like NEC Director, Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin. While Cohn and Mnuchin will be making strong arguments aligned with the Heritage coalition in the ITC hearings, Bannon and Miller’s cohort have the direct line to Trump’s die-hard base.

It’s also worth mentioning that – given his appointments of climate deniers to scientific positions – health, environmental, and other quality of life arguments aren’t going to have much weight with this President. Throw into the mix a Secretary of Energy who seems to be ignoring even his own oil & gas posse to push FERC toward subsidizing coal and nuclear power in the name of “baseload reliability,” and it’s unclear how much detail or explanation of the energy economy will resonate with the President either.

On top of all of this, there’s the real wildcard – the President is traveling to Asia November 3-14 including two days of bilateral meetings with Chinese Premiere Xi Jinping. This comes after Xi just successfully executed a power consolidation that significantly strengthened his own position juxtaposed with a progressively weakening US President roiled in scandal and without any moral authority to challenge the Chinese leader’s own strongman maneuvers. Xi has some previous experience with Trump after his earlier visit to the US, which included an explanation of the complicated nature of China’s relationship and influence on North Korea. It’s a safe bet that Xi is going to bring this issue up in his meeting with Trump. The question is how he presents the issue. Unlike the NYC real estate market where cutthroat competition is predicated on the inherent scarcity of the market, the global demand for solar panels is only increasing. China’s domestic demand alone is projected to be 4x that of the US in 2017. Suffice it to say, we need them more than they need us.

So what does this all add up to? Trump has three likely courses of action.

Option 1: Accept the ITC recommendations – This is most likely if (1) the President listens to the Bannon-ites around him and wants to stick it to the Asian manufacturers, (2) finds the nuance, arguments, and multiple upstream and downstream variables of the energy market too complicated and detailed, and (3) on his desk when he returns from Asia, it will be the most recent message in front of him before making a decision. There’s a 40% chance of this decision.

Option 2: Ignore the recommendations – This will be the argument from Cohn and Mnuchin in addition to SEIA and others. As climate, health, and even jobs are likely to have little impact, it’s going to be important to have the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” case made not just from solar advocates or free trade think tanks but also major industries that matter to Trump such as tech, manufacturing, and real estate. It would also be extremely useful to get Secretary Perry to vocally support this option. How Xi manages ‘face’ regarding Trump on his visit could also have a major impact on this result. There’s a 20% chance of this decision.

Option 3: Target China – This option is where the Asia trip wildcard and Trump’s strongman tendencies combine. If the President leaves China feeling weak or losing face to Xi, it’s quite possible he’ll lash out and use solar tariffs to do it. Trade penalties on Chinese solar panels play into his us vs them paradigm; responds with ‘economic nationalism’ language that resonates with his base; allows him to ignore the details of the larger energy economy; and, in some circles, will prove a nice headline distraction for a day or so to the Mueller investigation. Will it also embroil us in an unfair trade case at the WTO? Highly likely. Does the President care? Almost certainly not. The probability of this outcome is 30%, but is heavily dependent on how Xi handles the meeting with Trump and his ego – and one should never underestimate the Chinese sensitivity to ‘face’ in getting what they want.

A  PV-Tech article highlighting a decision by SunPower to sell their stake in yieldco 8point3 Energy added a quick note in the final paragraph on what may be another domino falling in residential solar financing.  It seems in addition to the yieldco sale, SunPower is also looking to sell its portfolio of residential solar leases.  It’s unclear if this signals the end of SunPower’s financing program entirely, but with the aim of returning to profitability by next year, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company jettison the capital intensive product to return to its core solar manufacturing business. With scuttlebutt of troubles for Spruce Financial remaining solvent, OneRoof Energy closing its doors, and the recent bankruptcy of Sungevity, an exit by SunPower would further shrink residential third-party owned solar financing down to four: Tesla, Sunrun, Sunnova, and Vivint Solar.

There’s a common phrase in military strategy that every industry should adopt if they are selling to people…in other words, everyone. “The enemy gets a vote.” Regardless of how well planned, well executed, and well meaning an operation may be, it can all go pear-shaped if the enemy doesn’t react in the way(s) all the brilliant planning anticipated.

While one should never see the customer as an enemy, the same concept applies in just about any situation where a great idea or an amazing opportunity runs into the wall of consumer expectations or, more commonly, customer ambivalence. How many startups, regardless of industry, can one name that had a truly innovative, amazing idea that died due to bad timing, lack of interest, or a customer pool too small to monetize?

In the realm of energy, especially distributed energy, it’s important to remember that from the customer perspective, electricity has always been extremely simple and thus extremely easy to ignore. There is an amazing opportunity over the next decade to take advantage of new technology and data platforms to shift the electricity sector from a supply-driven model to a load-driven market – a shift that will affect industries across the entire economy, not just energy. But while those of us in the industry can see the numerous possibilities of DER aggregation, transactive energy, peer-to-peer power supply, and realtime power rates, none of them will manifest if they aren’t packaged in a way that provides customers with a sense of direct control without requiring a change in their lifestyle. Rooftop solar makes enormous sense for just about anyone in a position to install it (and often for those that aren’t), but in most cases and in most markets even something as simple as solar is still an educational sale – not because solar is particularly complex but because salespeople are fighting something much more powerful than confusion: complacency.

For an industry that hasn’t changed in 100 years, the power of inertia in engaging customers to perceive and act differently about electricity, in the face of extremely entrenched interests, is a pretty large Sisyphus stone. It will take more than marketing, lead generation, and soaring rhetoric. And most importantly, it will take more than grand ideas and shiny objects as products. As the distributed grid goes beyond solar and starts adding storage and platforms and energy management systems, each new widget may increase the capability of the end user but that doesn’t mean they’ll see the value of any of them in isolation or be willing to invest in each piece as part of a larger system.

If distributed energy is truly going to change how electricity is bought, sold, generated, and consumed, it’s going to have to have to guard against drinking it’s own kool-aid of shiny objects and focus heavily on building an entirely new system that saves homeowners money, decreases their carbon footprint, while staying extremely simple and extremely easy to ignore.

I had an interesting exchange w/ Mike Gatto on Twitter this morning regarding the likelihood of the dangers and damage current ‘petro-states’ do to both their own economic development and the international security space writ large, would only be transferred to and repeated by states with significant sources of lithium and other rare-earth elements based on this FT article.  I pointed out that the US and other nations dedicated to international development have lessons learned and influence to help structure and/or direct policies on the extractives industry and those countries internally in order to avoid the “resource curse” – it was just a question of whether or not we would leverage them.  Mike doubted that such leverage would be used.  I didn’t disagree.

The resource curse, for those playing along at home, is an umbrella term for the numerous ways that building a national economy around a single high-demand resource (usually finite and labor intensive) damages the countries economy and civil institutions by flooding a limited group of individuals and companies with an exorbitant amount of money as compared to any other industry in the country.  This often opens the door to massive corruption, vast amounts of income inequality, and autocratic government dedicated to keeping the money flowing from that resource with little interest or investment in diversifying any other economic sector.  Examples of this are not just major oil countries such as Saudi Arabia, pre-2003 Iraq, and Venezuela, but also African nations mining coltan (used in electronics) and other conflict minerals, and, of course, Russia.

Thinking on it later, however, it did occur to me that there is one major distinction to be drawn between oil and lithium – the first is consumed, the other simply utilized.  This may seem to be splitting hairs, but it means there is a much easier path forward that avoids the worst outcomes of a resource curse for any country: recycling.  An economy that runs on oil (or coal or gas) is consuming that resource and must always replace it.  There is always a need for more production.  But a resource that is simply utilized can be re-utilized in another form – such as stacking worn out car batteries into a static battery bank on the electric grid – or recycled and re-processed to be used again – which Europe does with spent nuclear fuel as opposed to shoving it under a mountain like we do in the US.

Of course, as long as there is an ample supply of anything, the likelihood of major investment into recycling and reuse is small. We know this is still true for plastics and paper worldwide. Nor does this possibility negate the need to continue R&D into storage technology that use more common elements to avoid geographic and national dependencies.   However, if we keep avoiding the resource curse in mind, and push storage businesses to develop cradle-to-cradle supply chains from the outset, we’ll have a much easier time avoiding the exchange of one resource curse for another.

I attended the AEE Pathway 2050 conference last week that focuses specifically on California energy policy.

A couple of quick thoughts from the discussions and panels:

• It was an almost unspoken acknowledgement by all participants that the end goal for California should be 100% renewable / zero emissions economy. A panelist from Pattern Energy highlighted this by pointing out that, if we were starting from scratch, 100% renewable is completely feasible. The challenges aren’t technical, they’re a question of market mechanisms and mindsets.
• There is broad agreement that we have hit the point that piecemeal policies and targets could do more harm than good. A number of government, utility, and private sector speakers all highlighted the need for an overall integrated plan for the 21st Century energy market in California.
• The role and importance of including time and location variables for pricing, risks, and opportunities on the grid are much more prevalent than in recent years – especially in distribution grid discussions.
• Questions of data access and customer ownership are going to be extremely tricky as data is the most important commodity for any organization at this point in any industry.  How “Smart” vs “Dumb” energy products and services can be will depend on resolving the tension between privacy & security and data access for (disruptive) innovation and solutions.
• CPUC Chairman Picker’s recent comments on returning to retail energy are following classic political “trial balloon” phases – we’re still in the ‘stirring the pot’ phase.
• There is still very little conversation going on in the advanced energy space about heat.

Upcoming post: “The Customer Gets a Vote”

There will be weekly to biweekly updates to this section on market news in general – primarily focusing on new policy chatter, regulatory discussions, and other public sector information that could have an impact on any or all industries and companies involved in the distributed grid.

In the meantime, if you have questions or thoughts on something you’ve heard in the market and want to understand what it could mean for your company, feel free to reach out!