Key events: California will now be without nuclear power. Basically, the end of base load which signals the end of the California grid as we know it. This also lifts any curtailment of solar during peak. Floodgates have been essentially open to renewables to take over.
The End of the Era of Baseload Power Plants
Second, California iso now is allowed to aggregate rooftop solar.
Folsom’s California ISO leading push for distributed energy resources
Solarcity can now get certified to aggregate 500kw worth of rooftops to sell power l on the whole sale market.
Solarcity currently has 100mwh of solar+storage under management and I feel the big announcement coming is they will be the first to offer these services anywhere in the world.
This is big big news as calISO is quoted as saying the first DER aggregation will happen early 2017. This is estimated(along with other grid services) is a $50 bln market and Solarcity is first mover on it.
Now how can this current offer valuation be considered anything but theft is beyond me.
There has been great solar panel market news coming, and there will continue to be, but it will always be sweatheart deals, as every PG&E deal ever has been, even cashing out the Enron thieves to the tunes of billions of dollars. There's simply too much favoritism volatility to know the outcome for a particular solar panel company. I'd have to see solid documentation that any particular solar panel company actually has the competitive advantage in the future (which of course is impossible) to overcome a huge debt question, if any, and there's a debt question for SCTY (so double layer bad). Since solar panels are still a developing and researching and competitive marketplace (and thank god for that for that is what is making this all possible), then there's automatically a risk of product obsolescence and any particular entities tied to those product lines, and I would call this a success in the further saving of the world and good clean original sunlight energy "production/generation" (conversion, really), because almost every product failure due to competitive advantage of another product line means better products and a better world for all concerned. Yes, there's huge great news for solar panels in the rather anti-environmental decision to close down nuclear power plants (which before windmills and solar panels became competitive were the only way to get ourselves out of the dirty energy and dirty morals power problems with fossil fuels, and I still and always will maintain that we should have gone full-on nuclear power, but since solar and wind harvesting have improved, now that is no longer true). The politics that follow that decision are nothing short of fantastic: politicians could have signed on the dotted line for a bunch more coal and oil plants, but instead, they said they will replace it 100% with doublespeak for fresh clean energy (they called it "renewable"*, but in fact, renewable is generally dirty, so I find their wording bad). This is fantastic. But, like I said, that doesn't mean that that fantasticness reaches all the way into the particular pockets of a particular entity (in this discussion for example, SCTY).
* Like Elon talking about "physics first" principles, I like to use "logic and math first" principles, and fossil fuels are renewed: they were harvested by plants and animals, and we dig them up and renew them using them again, which is very dirty. But solar panels get their energy from original celestial fusion, and aren't renewed at all: they are the direct byproduct of light energy already coming to warm the earth up anyway, so any heat output we perform with that light is OK (I'd like to see the science on this, since I know it can't be 100% right). I hate it when doublespeak is used to contort topics I'm interested in, so I continue to try to fix the use of this word (abandoning it is the easiest fix; I like to call the respective energy sources "clean energy" vs. "dirty energy").
edit: p.s.: almost all of USA's nuclear power plants produced recyclable energy sources, that can be reprocessed to use again and again; the amount of actual nuclear waste in such a marketplace would be very nearly zero. Only the damn commies who did all of the "GreenPeace" movements about nuclear caused very valuable energy sources to be labeled incorrectly as "waste", and turned into a huge political football. They ruined whole generations of success in our country because of it, so they succeeded. But, now we have solar panels, windmills, and batteries, so for expedience, we can let the death of nuclear power be both sad and move on to stuff we can actually politically install.
edit 2: Conclusions:
So, this brings me to some conclusions. First of all, every product line is a risk, and while I liked packaging product lines into companies separate from other companies they can bring down, there may be an opposite approach of creating an entity that has enough product lines under its umbrella that not a single product failure can bring down the whole company (look at movie companies (which make endless duds along with their blockbusters and so-so successes) and drug companies for some examples, and I'm sure there's zillions of other examples). Is SCTY such an approach? They are only building one factory with one product line in it. Furthermore, their financing is very heavy in one approach. If SCTY had ongoing R&D, a war chest to buy other R&D outfits and intelligence, and factories ready to come to action for new product lines, as well as a healthy mix of financing methods, then this would go a long way to the big umbrella theory. But, putting SCTY into TSLA is more of a diversification than a big umbrella; it's more like a falling apart cheap umbrella that's about to fold over in the wind, and you hope you can hold onto the flaps and failing beams to make the fabric do anything. And meanwhile you get soaked. Hey, if you hold onto the cheap umbrella JUST RIGHT, maybe it works out. I really want SCTY to go gangbusters. But there's a huge huge risk. That's my main question.
