If there is one repeating theme that kept coming up in my mind at RE+ this year, it’s that the industry has made truly stunning advances, but we are far from mature. We are having the conversations we need to, with the people we need in the room, but we must keep working on and investing in the challenges we face.
We know we need U.S. manufacturing across the supply chain, but we don’t have enough of it; we know we need better community engagement, but we can’t get a social license to operate; we know we need more pervasive and modernized communications, but we are still in a building mode. We know we must improve diversity to be a fully equitable source of opportunity for all Americans, but we are not there yet.
With apologies to all the other great stuff that happened that may be equally or more significant, here are the five things that I took away from RE+. I’d love to see your top 5. There is much more to be said on all of this.
#1 Manufacturing, Manufacturing and more Manufacturing
Companies have become sophisticated about ways to qualify projects for the domestic adders in the Inflation Reduction Act. My client OMCO Solar issued two releases, one with Heliene on distributed solar projects, and one with Create Energy, providing trackers for utility scale and commercial and industrial markets. These will enable solar firms to buy packaged panels, racking, trackers and other parts of the supply chain to get an additional investment tax credit for domestic products.
There are still significant questions about domesticating upstream supply chains, including ingots, wafers and enough polysilicon. I was disappointed, but not surprised that Adani “paused” plans to build a 10GW polysilicon plant here. Feels like time has stood still on these nettlesome issues, and it still is unclear that China-U.S. relations will improve to the point where free and fair trade will ever be a thing again.
#2 Follow the Money
There were a lot of attendees who had end-to-end meetings spanning the week. More than a few people told me they hardly left meeting rooms. And industry insiders who know told me that there is so much capital available and not enough projects getting built. The urgency to build projects was palpable among many at RE+, and I think some of it is because companies need a volume of projects to make enough money. There also are many people in this industry who are genuinely concerned that if we don’t act faster, we will not do what we need to do to fight climate change.
#3 – More Women?
I thought there were more women at this show than ever before. I’d like to think there is more diversity writ large, but I don’t know. I’d be interested in seeing data on demographics of attendees.
Among other areas, I give SEIA CEO Abby Hopper a ton of credit for her emphasis on being more inclusive. Diverse panels are not negotiable. She has been emphatic about making the industry more equitable across all demographics in the customer base, in leadership and in the workforce and she forcefully nixed booth babes and almost personally dragged mermaids out of the fountains one year.
We are not there yet on diversity. We cannot be celebrating, but the conversations are better, the challenges are discussed more frankly and constructively, and the atmosphere in every venue is more enjoyable when you have all kinds of people there.
#4 – More sophisticated communications, especially among rising companies
There are always going to be grumblings about the need for better or more communications and I could write a book on the topic, but there was one theme I was following. Industry’s meteoric growth has left a lot of companies looking at using modern communications tools to gain brand recognition and make more money, plain and simple.
Smaller companies on the rise are now investing in their brand and the communications world is changing as fast as the solar world. Check out some of the videos from the show, notice some of the advertising tactics they are using, think about the way they are targeting their messages to their specific audiences. The industry is starting to get it, but there is much more to come.
#5 The Social License to Operate- Getting Projects Sited.
Where are we on this? Another example of folks doing great work, but we don’t know how to solve the siting problem yet. There was a lot of conversation about agrivoltaics, which I think is awesome. It can be great for the soil and prevent erosion; if maintained, native plants can reintroduce bug, butterfly and bird species to local communities; and among the benefits of sheep grazing, you may not have to pay for a lot of dirty, disruptive lawn mowing.
But there are grave issues. SEIA’s public opinion survey released this week found 51% of those polled said they would not support construction of a utility scale solar project near their community. That’s too many. I believe that addressing this land use access problem will require a campaign costing somewhere between $50 million and $100 million a year. If that feels like an absurd amount of money, we probably have not yet arrived.
Hoping to see you all next year, if not before, maybe with a bigger Athanor Public Affairs team to help companies address these challenges head on. Holler at me at Danwhitten@athanorpublicaffairs, if I can help