Inflecting and Overtaking, SunPower, Waymo
No. 09 | September 9, 2024
A busy, travel-filled summer threw me off my writing rhythm. Here’s hoping I can remedy that lapse with some meaningful reflections on the summer, driven by energy data.
Inflecting and overtaking
Analysts look for moments in time, or perhaps more accurately, moments in their time series, that indicate where a change might become a trend, or a trend might become expectation.
Two come to mind from a summer’s data feeds. The first is from European power markets. In the trailing 12 months through August 2024, the EU generated more power from wind and solar than from fossil fuels. Of course there are seasons, and seasonality, but the trend is clear. European power is greening, and continues to green. Zoom out slightly, and fossil fuel power generation looks event-driven; wind and solar power look much more like a function.
China provides another moment. At the start of 2020, electric vehicle sales in the world’s largest auto market were a rounding error. By mid-summer of this year, pure electric and plug-in hybrids were more than half of all passenger vehicle sales.
Worth noting is the robustness of the PHEV market (in China and elsewhere) and the persistence - or re-emergence - of hybrid passenger cars in key markets. I have long viewed PHEVs as an evolutionary branch, a relict, perhaps, of a time when there was still greater expertise and capital in the world’s internal combustion engine property plant equipment and expertise, and batteries were only half-formed as an industry, and imperfect in powertrains. Or, as an analyst once put it to me, PHEVs were a bit of the worst of both worlds. Neither condition is now true, but plug-in hybrids are thriving. And in the process, PHEVs have become very affordable in China. As Glenn Luk describes it, “21st century Fordism, indeed”.
A venerable sun sets in California
SunPower has gone bankrupt.
Any solar industry participant, and indeed any industry observer, of my vintage remembers the company well: the highest-efficiency modules in the lab and on the market, a successful move into developing utility-scale projects, a large investment from French oil major Total, and many strategic moves and pivots over decades. Others can tell the history better, and I recommend reading Eric Wesoff’s memoriam here and Sheldon Kimber’s thoughtful note on what the company meant, and still means, here.
From me, an anecdote. I attended one of the early Solar Power International conferences, and on the last day walked past SunPower’s industry booth during its disassembly. One staff member was carrying a module and bumped it into something else; another staff member said “be careful - that’s worth $1,000”.†
The math checks out: A high-efficiency module, especially state of the art such as SunPower, was in vicinity of $4 a Watt in 2008, and 250 Watts was a normal size for a larger module. SunPower’s Nellis Air Force Base project, built in 2007, used 72,000 panels in its 14 megawatt configuration.
As of last week, the industry standard bifacial PERC module spot price is $0.095 per Watt. To put it another way, a dollar buys 42 times more solar generation capacity on a per-Watt basis than it did not even two decades ago.
And autonomy rises there too
I spent several weeks in San Francisco in mid-summer. On my second day, I registered for Waymo’s paid service, which had recently opened up to the general public. My first-ever Waymo ride picked me up a few hundred feet from where my first-even Uber ride dropped me off in 2011.
I took it nearly every day, early in the morning and late at night. I found it to be a superior experience to a human driver, for a few key reasons. First, it was entirely predictable for ingress and egress. I adjusted myself quickly to its learned behaviors of where and when to stop, rather than forcing a driver to adapt or react to me. Secondly, while it was somewhat slower (sometimes) than a human driver, it was also more comfortable and more predictable. I rode more at ease knowing that it would not stomp to make a light, or try to squeeze past a garbage truck on Geary Street. My daughter, a frequent rider in all manner of public conveyances, had only one question about her first Waymo ride:
”Will it play music?”
I said that not only will it play music, it will play our music if we like.
She brought a sketchbook on our second Waymo ride; something she’s never done in a human-helmed ride-hail. The stability and predictability in ride 1 were sufficient to inflect her behavior by ride 2.
Two other observations, both somewhat predictable in retrospect. The first was finding a previous passenger’s empty wine bottles in one ride. The other was having my/our picture taken while driving about, though the photographing was about the vehicle, not us.
The data on Waymo’s paid service are worth noting. In August 2023, Waymo operated 12,617 paid trips in California. In May 2024, it ran 143,621. As of last month, the service had 100,000 rides a week.
Other writing
“Abstract understanding requires concrete information, of course, and systematizing and harmonizing it — and making it approachable and queryable for the purposes of decarbonization — is Halcyon’s prime goal today. But in doing so, we need to have our own abstract understanding of how information is organized. And so, we have developed something familiar to any consultant or strategist: a simple two by two”
Two by Two at Halcyon.
“Another way to think of assets is not as a set of values, but rather as a collection of attributes. Attributes are what give an asset a specific value to owners, buyers, sellers, developers, and financiers. They are more granular, and also more individualized.”
Assets and Attributes at Halcyon.
I mentioned this anecdote to a veteran solar analyst who replied,
I suspect these days the exhibition modules are thrown out.
Who would want a used module with the possibility of cracks and flaws?
