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Economy

Another Bad Day for the Renewables Industry

The bad news keeps piling up.

Broken solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s another bad day for the renewable energy business.

The ill tidings started early Friday morning with SolarEdge, a company that primarily sells inverters, which convert the electricity produced by a solar panel into the kind that can be used in homes.

In an unexpected announcement, SolarEdge’s chief executive Zvi Lando said that, in the third quarter, the company had “experienced substantial unexpected cancellations and pushouts of existing backlog from our European distributors.” Many of its core financial metrics, including revenue and operating income, would fall below the low end of the range it had projected earlier, SolarEdge warned. The company also said it expected “significantly lower revenues in the fourth quarter.” (SolarEdge is based in Israel but the company said that the Hamas-Israel war was not related to their financial troubles.)

Investors promptly panicked, selling off the stock and sending it down 27% in trading Friday afternoon.

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  • Other solar stocks were also down. Enphase, another solar services and inverter company, tumbled 14%. Sunrun, a residential solar systems company (which means it actually installs panels), was down 6%. Shares in SunPower, a competitor to Sunrun, were down around 9%.

    With today’s trading, SolarEdge has fallen more than 70% in the past year. And those other companies aren’t too far behind — they’re all down around 50% to 67% on the year.

    The worry is that the problems SolarEdge identified are not unique to the company itself or even the inverter business, but to the solar industry as a whole.

    The company said that its European business had both a pileup of inventory and “slower than expected installation rates,” specifically “at the end of the summer and in September where traditionally there is a rise in installation rates.”

    In a note to clients earlier this week, Citi analyst Vikram Bagri noted that downloads of solar apps in Europe, which can be used as a proxy for sales, “declined sequentially … in September, we typically observe sequential acceleration in downloads exiting the seasonally slower August period.”

    But Friday’s troubles were not restricted to solar.

    In New York, the offshore wind business took another hit from the state government. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, vetoed a bill passed this summer which would have kickstarted the regulatory process necessary to connect a transmission cable from the planned Empire Wind 2 project on the south shore of Long Island to a substation in Island Park, which is just slightly inland.

    In her veto message, Hochul said that the onus was on Empire Wind 2’s developer, Equinor, and other companies in the offshore wind business “to cultivate and maintain strong ties to their host communities throughout the planning, siting, and operation of all large-scale projects,” adding that the Long Beach city council did not support using the beach for the project.

    Wind projects are no stranger to local opposition — hostility to such projects on land actually increased between 2000 and 2016. Proponents of offshore wind thought that they could avoid this type of local opposition because the planned projects are out to sea, typically out of sight from residents, but the infrastructure necessary to bring the power generated offshore to homes and businesses still requires building transmission cables and substations on land.

    The planned Empire Wind 2 would have 1,260 megawatts of capacity to serve downstate New York, the most populous region of the state and one that depends largely on fossil fuels for electricity generation. State law mandates that New York as a whole generate 70 percent of its electricity by 2030, but that goal will be imperiled if renewable energy projects aren’t built to serve the New York City area.

    “The veto of ‘The Planned Offshore Wind Transmission Act’ undermines New York’s commitment to the energy transition and the role offshore wind must play in achieving the state’s renewable energy mandates. This decision sends another troubling signal to renewable energy developers following last week’s action by the New York State Public Service Commission,” Molly Morris, the president of Equinor Renewables America, told me in an emailed statement.

    Hochul’s veto came a week after the state’s utility regulator refused to adjust contracts for renewable projects, including four offshore wind projects, after companies saw much higher costs than expected.

    And those higher costs aren’t just in offshore wind. The entire renewables sector is in trouble, at least for now.

    Read more about the climate industry:

    Climate Tech Hits a Bit of Turbulence

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    Adaptation

    The ‘Buffer’ That Can Protect a Town from Wildfires

    Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.

    Homes as a wildfire buffer.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.

    More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.

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    How the Tax Bill Is Empowering Anti-Renewables Activists

    A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.

    Massachusetts and solar panels.
    Heatmap Illustration/Library of Congress, Getty Images

    A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.

    Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”

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    The Midwest Is Becoming Even Tougher for Solar Projects

    And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.

    The United States.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.

    • Late last week, this county was teed up to potentially advance a new restrictive solar ordinance that would’ve cut off zoning access for large-scale facilities. That’s obviously bad for developers. But it would’ve still allowed solar facilities up to 50 acres and grandfathered in projects that had previously signed agreements with local officials.
    • However, solar opponents swamped the county Area Planning Commission meeting to decide on the ordinance, turning it into an over four-hour display in which many requested in public comments to outright ban solar projects entirely without a grandfathering clause.
    • It’s clear part of the opposition is inflamed over the EDF Paddlefish Solar project, which we ranked last year as one of the nation’s top imperiled renewables facilities in progress. The project has already resulted in a moratorium in another county, Huntington.
    • Although the Paddlefish project is not unique in its risks, it is what we view as a bellwether for the future of solar development in farming communities, as the Fort Wayne-adjacent county is a picturesque display of many areas across the United States. Pro-renewables advocates have sought to tamp down opposition with tactics such as a direct text messaging campaign, which I previously scooped last week.
    • Yet despite the counter-communications, momentum is heading in the other direction. At the meeting, officials ultimately decided to punt a decision to next month so they could edit their draft ordinance to assuage aggrieved residents.
    • Also worth noting: anyone could see from Heatmap Pro data that this county would be an incredibly difficult fight for a solar developer. Despite a slim majority of local support for renewable energy, the county has a nearly 100% opposition risk rating, due in no small part to its large agricultural workforce and MAGA leanings.

    2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.

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