Cinnamon’s Law: Why Solar Companies Break When They Get Too Big

I'm still wrapping my mind around myself around, should we have incentives in the solar industry? Now that the ITC is gone, if you had a magic wand, do you want to have it back? Or are you more in the camp of like, well, without government incentives, you wouldn't have those variations.

Remember how like you open different businesses multiple times because incentives changed? If there's no incentive, it would be a more steady market.

Maybe a smaller market, but at least a steady one to run a business on.

So if I gave you a magic wand, would you want to have the ITC back or not?

You have to have the ITC back.

There was one big financing company whose CEO at one point says exactly what you suggested, which is the solar industry shouldn't have incentives.

You ordered from, I think, SunPower right now, right? No, it wasn't SunPower.

It was another one that started with an S. I'm not going to say who it is.

But the CEO was like, we don't need incentives in this industry.

And basically, the industry shouted him down.

And this individual subsequently built a pretty big financing company, one of the very biggest ones.

But when the incentives went away, they went bankrupt.

That's

it.

Full stop.

It's very, very, very, very tough for them to kind of survive.

So you need the incentives.

It really helps to have an economic advantage over the oil and gas companies who also have a big economic advantage.

And you need that also, especially when you've got a poorly regulated utility market like we have in California.

You really need to help the homes and the businesses and the installers as much as you possibly can with incentives because the deck is so heavily, heavily stacked against electricity users.

And we're seeing that in California right now.

I mean, they managed to eliminate net metering.

They call it the net billing tariff.

You get two cents.

It's de minimis.