One of our favorite new newsletters on Substack is David Robert’s Volts. David writes about the intersection of clean energy, climate change and politics in a way that makes a complicated subject accessible to the reader. Face it, most people don’t think much about the electricity system. They flip the light switch and if the lights come on, they are happy. David often goes deep into the technical side of the power system and new technologies. Take, for example, David’s writing earlier this year on transmission where he gets into the weeds about why it’s so difficult to build new transmission infrastructure and why it’s so necessary for the energy transition. If you’re into electricity policy, Volts is definitely worth your time.

The Solar Foundation released its annual National Solar Jobs Census report this week, projecting the solar industry will need to add 900,000 workers to meet President Joe Biden's 2035 clean energy goals.

Despite the effects of the pandemic on the U.S. economy, the solar industry’s strong start in 2020 through February and ability to adapt to market demands yielded more success than anticipated from a year plagued by supply issues and economic uncertainty. While the 231,474 workers employed by the solar industry is down 6.7 percent from the year prior, competition in 2020 produced higher labor productivity, increased diversity in the industry, generated greater consumer interest after a year of stay-at-home orders and manufactured a record 19.2 GWdc installations. Despite the positives, the report projects the industry will grow to only 400,000 jobs by 2030, leaving a gap of 500,000 additional jobs needed if President Biden’s policy to decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035 is to be successful.

The biggest barriers to expanding clean solar energy production for New Yorkers are regulatory barriers and the need to increase compensation for distributed solar generation, according to a report released this month by the New York Solar Energy Industries Association (NYSEIA).

Our friends over at the Conservative Energy Network (CEN) have launched UtilityPlaybook.com to track the ways monopoly utilities use their influence and power to block competition and maintain outdated fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. The new website also includes some of the great work being done at the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute to track corruption and dirty tricks by incumbent utilities – moves that are slowing the transition to a clean energy future while charging ratepayers full freight for dirty energy.

The folks over at Clean Virginia created a great video to explain how monopoly utilities like Dominion harm competition and ratepayers. The video is called “Beyond the Vampire Squid.”

A review of publicly available data by the nonprofit The Energy and Policy Institute finds that investor utilities are failing to align their businesses with the Paris climate agreement goals and investors’ expectations, according to a new scorecard of major emitting companies. The Climate Action 100+ Net-Zero Company Benchmark assesses the climate plans and performance of 159 large companies.

By all accounts, the recent winter storms that resulted in an energy crisis for millions of people across Texas is an indication, not the exception, of future weather events that have the ability to endanger power systems.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a new report entitled Electricity Grid Resilience and testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on its findings.

“New technologies provide utilities with additional options for meeting demand and providing reliable service. These options include variable energy resources, smart grid technologies, and energy storage,” the report explains. “Many of these options are relatively inexpensive and fast to deploy, especially compared with constructing large, conventional power plants. In addition, new technologies within the system are increasingly available for use by customers and can enable more flexible operations.”

That flexibility can be provided through Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), which can refer to both physical and virtual assets integrated into an electric grid and used individually or in aggregate to provide supplementary power to the grid, individual customers, or both. DERs have frustrated incumbent utilities that believe they present management issues, but the opposite is actually true —these resources can make the difference in a crisis.

The value of rooftop solar played out in real-time during last month’s winter storm. Houston homeowners who had invested in rooftop solar were able to enjoy uninterrupted power, despite the shutdown of the region’s power system.

We’ve already talked previously about all the things the Wall Street Journal and others got wrong about the blackouts in Texas, but Josiah Neeley over at R Street did a useful deep dive into the WSJ’s assessment that deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities and that retail choice customers paid $19.2 billion more from 2010 through 2019 than they would have if they’d stuck with their incumbent utility.

Neeley points to the peer-reviewed 2018 report from the Baker Institute which found that electricity rates in competitive market states have generally fallen in recent years, while rates in monopoly utility states tended to increase or remain flat. Texas, which has the most liberalized power market in the country, in particular has seen significant declines.

The new edition of the factbook details how clean energy faired during the COVID-19 Pandemic last year, and the results showed the U.S. clean energy sector to be resilient, even in the face of the nationwide closures and economic downturn.

A few of the top-line findings from the factbook include the 7.8 percent drop in U.S. primary energy use, which was the highest year-on-year decline in U.S. energy consumption in at least 30 years. The massive energy decline came as the entire U.S. economy contracted 3.5 percent in 2020.

According to PV Magazine, over 50 million single-family homeowners in the United States want to install solar panels. That number has increased by 13 percent since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. The good news is that the cost of installing solar panels has dropped by 89 percent over the past 10 years. The bad news is that all the other costs – customer acquisition, permitting, inspection, connecting to the grid, installation, taxation, and system financing – have not.

These “soft costs” are an unnecessary impediment to consumers and solar companies. Solar panels are just 10 percent of the cost of a residential solar system. Yet, buyers pay significantly more than homeowners in other parts of the world due to the "soft costs" of permitting. In Australia, for example, where one in five homes has a solar energy component, consumers pay between $1.10 and $1.20 a watt, and it takes just one to three weeks to get that system installed.

The solar industry has long opposed efforts to impose tariffs on imported solar panels and hoped the incoming Biden administration would reverse a Trump-era decision that increased tariffs on solar panels and rescinded an exclusion for two-side solar panels. That hope took a hit this week when the Justice Department (DOJ) called for the U.S. Court of International Trade to dismiss an industry complaint against the October Trump proclamation.

DOJ wrote in its filing to the court that the solar industry’s argument “fails to set forth a plausible showing that [President Trump’s] determination involves a clear misconstruction of the governing statute, a significant procedural violation, or action outside delegated authority.”

This whole pandemic thing has been a bummer. But one bright spot has been discovering podcasts that really let you go deep on a subject. And, of course, the subject we like the most here at the Energy Choice Coalition is electricity. A couple of our most recent discoveries are Building Local Power from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, Local Energy Rules, and The Freeing Energy Podcast by Bill Nussey and Sam Easterby.

ICYMI: Great discussion over the weekend on the POLITICO Energy/Global Translations podcast about different approaches to workforce training and re-skilling programs around the world. The Politico episode kicks off with an interview with Allison Dempsey who parlayed her time in a construction training program run by West Virginia Women Work into a new career managing rooftop solar installation with the company Solar Holler.

The Energy Choice Coalition applauds The Columbus Dispatch for recognizing the benefits of solar energy. Ohio should complete the reorganization of its power market to allow full retail competition. Consumers deserve a greater voice in choosing their energy supplier.