Plans and Clues

From Seeking Alpha editors today, quote:

“Solar stocks (TAN -6.2%) are under notable pressure today, possibly due to disappointment over the U.S. stimulus bill which failed to contain any specific help for the renewable energy industry.

While solar companies can apply for loans just like any other business, the bill does not include the tax credit extensions and direct pay provisions sought by the industry. Solar names trade sharply lower: RUN -16.5%, SPWR -13.6%, JKS -13%, CSIQ -10%, ENPH -7.3%, VSLR -7.2%, SEDG -5.9%, FSLR -2.3%.

New reports from Morgan Stanley, Wood Mackenzie and Rystad Energy foresee sharp cutbacks for wind, solar and battery growth in the U.S. and beyond this year as cities impose lockdowns and economies stagnate. Rystad expects global growth of wind and solar will be wiped out this year as the dollar rises and other currencies fall amid the pandemic, driving up project costs. Morgan Stanley projects American residential solar volumes may plunge 48% Y/Y in Q2, followed by respective declines of 28% and 17% in Q3 and Q4. Wood Mackenzie trims its forecast for behind-the-meter batteries to be installed in the U.S. during 2020 by 31% to 436 MW from 632 MW previously, though the figure is still above the 272 MW installed last year.”

Grist put together a really good side-by-side of the two remaining plausible Dem candidates and their climate positions

Closing paragraph quote, “That idealism, which is easy to denigrate as naivete, may be Sanders’ biggest weakness heading into Sunday’s debate. Meanwhile, Biden’s biggest weakness is a different kind of idealism — the hope that technology and market-based solutions, without major changes to the fossil fuel industry, will be enough to confront the scale of the climate crisis. (Both candidates have called it an “existential crisis.”) In a speech Sanders gave on Wednesday about his decision to stay in the race, he said he plans to confront Biden about his energy and climate plans at Sunday’s debate and specifically press him on developing science-based targets. With no one else on stage to interrupt them, will the candidates dare push past their tried-and-true talking points and get more specific about what, exactly, they want to do to prevent catastrophic climate change, and how they plan to do it? We’ll have to tune in to find out.”

A new research report is out that concludes, quote: “By combing through a public dataset of over 1,000 species and 64 habitats in British Columbia, they were able to compare the surrogacy value of each species — a numerical score based on the association of two species through their use of shared habitats. They found that a mixture of five to 10 game and non-game species offered the best value as surrogates for biodiversity conservation.”

And a bit more, “We discovered what we called an ‘all-star’ team of species for each of the province’s nine wildlife management units, as well as an all-star team for the province as a whole,” says Sarah Falconer, graduate student at Laurentian University and study co-author. “Our findings suggest that if we commit to preserving these collections of species rather than just the charismatic megafauna, we’re likely to achieve much better conservation outcomes.”

This makes sense on so many fronts. I can easily think of a scenario where the change to an ecosystem would impact different species at different times and if the ‘canary’ was not one of the earliest impacted, the signal will be late … as well as the overall interdependence of the different species.