Your Views for August 15

What’s next for solar PV?

To say the solar industry on our island is experiencing some challenges is like saying someone with a serious, if not life-threatening, illness is dealing with some health problems.

After enjoying the peaks of the solar-coaster 2012-14, depending on the island, we’re now in a place where the tracks are leveling out to a point where we in the industry are crawling along at an anxiety-producing rate.

The numbers for the first half of this year, compared with the same period last year, are downright scary, especially in light of 2016 sales being the worst since my staff and I began crunching the data starting in 2010.

In June, the Hawaii County building department issued 78 permits for photovoltaic systems compared with 135 PV permits issued in June 2016, a drop of 42 percent.

Throughout the first six months of this year, the county issued 354 PV permits compared with 703 during that same period in 2016, a drop of 50 percent.

There’s a lot bubbling in the hearty energy stew in our state these days.

Base rate increases for HELCO and HECO are before the state Public Utilities Commission. The PUC recently approved Hawaiian Electric’s proposed power supply improvement plan, albeit with notable caveats, bringing to a close a three-year odyssey of multiple iterations and rejections. Battery storage has become the newest Holy Grail in our quest to achieve 100 percent renewable energy power generation. And the commission and multiple energy stakeholders grapple with what comes next on the critically important distributed energy resources docket.

The parties to this docket have been working diligently on the next steps for new interconnect models for renewable energy systems connecting to the grid. The commission asked the parties come up with consensus stipulations this month.

In those discussions, there’s no shortage of really smart people who are looking at how smart grids, smart inverters, smart meters, smart export and smart monitoring can all work oh-so-smartly together.

There doesn’t seem to be any doubt among Hawaii energy stakeholders that more rooftop solar PV deployed is a good thing. But then, smart people all agreeing on doing smart things with smart hardware and smart software doesn’t necessarily lead to timely action.

As a PV business owner who’s been here in these trenches since the 1980s, I have to wonder whether we’re now entering into some new normal as sales drop precipitously and a growing number of major players disappear or see their revenues drop off the diving cliff.

During the boom times in this industry, there was no shortage of individuals getting into the field from other professions.

I considered those people opportunists rather than true believers.

Now, virtually all those opportunists are gone, leaving us true believers back where we started as we work to keep our industry alive and maintain profit-sustaining sales revenue.

Marco Mangelsdorf

President, ProVision Solar