Stephen Lacey: This is The Interchange from Greentech Media. I'm Stephen Lacey, the Editor-in-Chief of GTM, sitting down here with Shayle Kann, my usual co-host, who's our Senior VP of GTM Research. Hey Shayle.
Shayle Kann: Hey Stephen.
Stephen Lacey: What does 95 percent growth in solar look like? Or more appropriately for the podcast audience, what does 95 percent sound like? Here, I'll give you a little preview.
We can't help but use that old "solar coaster" cliché. Shayle's team at GTM Research has been meticulously compiling data here in the U.S. and the numbers are out. The American solar market grew 95 percent over 2015 but that growth was uneven and may not last because this year we are likely to see a dip in installations. So today, we're going to go sector by sector through the U.S. solar market to give you a preview of GTM Research's upcoming Solar Market Insight report. Shayle, what is the big headline from that report?
Shayle Kann: Yes, the headline is basically what you said, which is that the U.S. solar market in 2016 grew 95 percent over 2015 and 2015 had been a record year prior to that. So, it almost doubled relative to the previous record that we had ever seen. In gigawatt terms, that was 14.6 gigawatts DC of solar that was installed in the U.S. We now have 1.3 million individual solar installations operating in the U.S. and importantly, solar was, for the first time, the single largest source of new electricity generating capacity of any type in the U.S. So we installed more solar in capacity terms than we did in natural gas, than we did wind, than we did coal, anything else. It was by any measure a banner year for solar which was to be expected but there were some things within that I think are interesting and somewhat surprising.
Stephen Lacey: Before we get to those, let me just ask you where you weigh in on the capacity debate, because inevitably when a big number like that gets dropped, people say you're not focusing on generation, you're focusing on capacity and those who may not understand the difference think that solar is actually beating natural gas. How much do we celebrate that milestone?
Shayle Kann: It's a good question. I think it is somewhat important and we do try to clarify there. So, what we're measuring when we're talking about how much new solar is built is generating capacity measured in DC terms in particular. Obviously the grid is in AC, so if you want to compare solar to another technology first, you have to derate from DC to AC and that gives you something like a 13 percent hit on the total number. So, for apples to apples comparison you have to discount it a little bit which we do when we are making that apples to apples comparison.
Then you've got a second layer question which is where sometimes we get pushback when we talk about solar being the largest or one of the largest new sources of capacity, which is that solar has a relatively low capacity factor, meaning if the capacity of a solar installation is 1 megawatt, you might only see 300 kilowatt hours at any given time, in other words a 30 percent capacity factor. In fact, that would be high for solar. It's not operating all the time. As we know, the sun is not out all the time. And that lies in contrast to some other generating sources where if you have a baseload plant, it might be operating 80 or 90 percent of the time if we're talking about coal. Coal historically, but nuclear probably today or even gas depending on the use case. You can see certainly upwards of a 50 percent capacity factor.
Even if you install more solar capacity in one given year than, say, gas capacity, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get more electricity out of that solar than out of that gas. I think it's an important contextualization. That doesn't mean that it's meaningless. Total capacity solar does sometimes operate close to capacity and in particular now, when it does tend to coincide with peak periods, it matters what the total amount of solar that could be generated is at any given time. So you can have a debate about the number and they're both important, but I do think it's probably going to become increasingly important as time goes on to separate out how much solar capacity do we have and how much solar generation do we have, which is one of the numbers I think we'll talk about in a little bit.
Stephen Lacey: One more question -- and this is regarding EIA numbers, because about a month ago, EIA came out with their capacity figures showing solar had surpassed wind and natural gas and other forms of generation, and they have notoriously been bad at tracking behind-the-meter installations. Basically, anything below utility-scale. And they still, through their limited tracking, show that solar surpassed other resources. How do your numbers differ compared to theirs?
Shayle Kann: Right. The EIA has got a lot better as time has gone on. It used to be that EIA was basically only tracking utility-scale solar, as you were mentioning. They missed pretty much all residential and commercial solar in the total figures. They fixed that. Now they are tracking all segments but there are limitations on the data that they're tracking. There are a couple things.
One is that they aren't necessarily accurately gauging when specific utility-scale projects come online. This is a really painstaking process that we go through every single quarter, and when I say "we," I don't mean me. I'm going to give a shout-out to Collin Smith, who has to do most of this work. He's literally going project by project of every utility-scale project to see whether it actually came online, began operation in that quarter so the EIA sometimes gets those wrong. That's not that big a deal.
The bigger deal is that they're missing some segments of the quarter. What EIA is doing, by no fault of their own, the data that they're gathering on the smaller-scale installations is net metering data. They're getting utilities telling them how much net metering capacity came online in any given quarter. They then report that as the total residential or commercial market. The reality is that there is an increasingly large segment of the market that is not net-metered. There are some small feed-in tariff programs in some markets. There are self-consumption projects. You see this in California, projects that actually don't get net metered at all. These would be large commercial. There are just a bunch of these little individual segments. You have to go state by state to figure out what projects the EIA is missing.
The result is that our numbers pretty much always end up being higher than the EIA's because we end up picking up all these little segments that EIA is missing. That said, for an order of magnitude, if you're just looking for the top-level numbers, EIA is actually not bad anymore.
Stephen Lacey: Those numbers add up to a dramatic variation.
Shayle Kann: A surprisingly big one.
Stephen Lacey: I didn't realize. This seems like a good place to go sector by sector, and let's start with utility-scale solar. Utility-scale solar accounted for nearly three quarters of the market last year, 72 percent. That is a record high for that sector. People have talked about the demise of DG and the rise of utility-scale solar. Is this a one-year thing or is this representative of a broader trend in the U.S. that utility-scale solar will just continue to dominate?
Shayle Kann: Historically speaking, utility-scale has always been the largest market segment. It's accounted for over half of all the solar capacity that comes online every single year since 2012. 2016 was definitely a notable year because it was 71 percent of all the installations. So why was 2016 such a banner year? Why did the market double? It was utility-scale. The residential market grew 19 percent. The non-residential market grew 49 percent. The utility-scale market grew 145 percent. It's a huge boom and anybody who's tracking the solar market knows why that was. It was a combination of the fact that utility-scale solar has gotten pretty cost-competitive, but just as importantly, specifically for 2016 was that the expectation was the ITC was going to expire at the end of 2016. In 2014 and 2015, every single utility-scale project developer and most utilities who were looking to procure signed a bunch of contracts with a commercial operation day of 2016. Many of them were in December 2016, basically saying we need to qualify for the ITC. Let's get this thing online.
Then the ITC gets extended so obviously your preference is probably to wait. Prices continue to fall. The economics are going to get better as time goes on, but for many of these projects there are contractual obligations that wouldn't let them delay. We still saw this huge boom that was kind of a hangover effect from this ITC expiration. As a result, over 10 gigawatts of utility-scale solar alone in 2016 and more to come in 2017 because while not all of those projects could push out into 2017, actually a fair number of them could. There's 4 to 5 gigawatts of spillover we're going to continue to see in 2017.
It was obviously a banner year in 2016 for utility-scale. Now, the question you're asking is a good one -- does it say something about the future of U.S. solar? Is utility-scale going to be dominating forever? I don't know if we have the answer to that. Our prediction is that utility-scale will continue to remain the largest market segment in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. I think it's clear that residential solar in particular is in for more incremental growth moving forward than it has seen historically. Utility-scale is going to have a down year this year and then, in our view, start to recover and build back up, but again somewhat incrementally. Will we get back to 10 gigawatts in a year again? Yes, but maybe not until the end of the decade. I would be cautious to draw too many conclusions from the 2016 because it was such a relic of a policy driven temporary phenomenon that ultimately was alleviated.
Stephen Lacey: Hence what I'm referring to when I talk about the solar coaster.
Shayle Kann: Yes, exactly.
Stephen Lacey: Now how much of your analysis is based on the prospects of projects getting signed under PURPA contracts, which are increasingly important for utility-scale solar and have been the reason why states like Utah have opened up as significant markets? Also, we see states like Montana, North Carolina and others trying to change the avoided-cost rates for these solar power plants, so they're less competitive with conventional power plants. Basically this is a 1978 law that forces utilities to sign contracts for renewable energy power plants at the avoided cost of an equivalent fossil fuel plant. More and more utility-scale projects are getting signed under PURPA. As we discussed with Collin earlier this year or late last year, the question is whether rate changes in states forced by utilities will really hinder future project development.
Shayle Kann: Right.
Stephen Lacey: Or FERC. Changes at the federal level which could be even more significant and impact every state.
Shayle Kann: Congress, I mean PURPA is federally legislated so if you wanted to do something drastic to PURPA, you'd have to do it through Congress not necessarily just through FERC which is something that I think gets lost in some of these conversations. Just taking a step back, as I said we have over ten gigawatts of utility-scale solar last year. More than half of that came from one of two sources.
The first is California's RPS. The renewal portfolio standard in California remains by far the largest driver of solar in this country full stop. Gigawatts of that came online just because of the California RPS, some of that actually not in California right? It's important to note that some of the projects in places like Nevada actually are selling power into California for California's RPS. That RPS is exciting and great but the reality is that the California utilities have largely met their obligations for the next few years so I don't think many people see that as being a massive driver of new procurement over the next couple years.
Second to the California RPS is what you mentioned, PURPA. PURPA has become a major driver of utility-scale. Solar growth started in North Carolina more than anywhere else, and it remains the biggest PURPA market, but as you said, it's expanded to a bunch of other states. Here's a stat that I didn't expect to be saying a couple of years ago: Utah installed a gigawatt of solar in 2016 -- because of PURPA for the most part, but there is some voluntary procurement there too. That's an issue because you've said PURPA is somewhat under siege or at least the way it's been used is somewhat under siege in a bunch of states and potentially at FERC. We haven't seen any action that's real meaningful yet from Congress, but this is something to watch in the new administration given the makeup of FERC and everything. If you were to sort of remove PURPA overnight, you would shred the utility-scale solar market right now. I don't think anyone expects that to happen, but you can have lots of little lesser cuts.
You can change the avoided cost rate which you mentioned which is a complex calculation. It's at the state level so every state can determine it on it's own. You can shorten contract length. What happens when you go from a ten year contract to a three year contract of fifteen to eight or whatever. The shorter the contract length, the riskier the project and the harder it is to finance. The riskiest thing to me about utility-scale solar in the U.S. right now is that if you pull California's RPS and PURPA out of the equation, you lose half that market. What we really need is for utility-scale solar to start winning more and more voluntary procurement from utilities -- that's technology agnostic that they're winning on their merits. You see some of that happening already, but it's not enough to make up for the big demand drivers. Then you need to start to see more and more of this corporate procurement. The Apples and Googles of the world signing these big contracts. You need community choice aggregation. These are all other things that go to support large projects.
Stephen Lacey: So I'll just give my limited read on the politics of this. My sense is that the politics will be driven at the state level and that you'll see changes to the avoided cost rate. We don't really know what will happen at FERC because we have three open seats thus far and there are a lot of names being tossed around. So that is kind of an open question. When it comes to congressional politics, the solar industry has enough power now that I think there is enough pressure on lawmakers to not do something extraordinary with PURPA like some sweeping change. I just don't see it happening.
Shayle Kann: What do you think is more likely? That Congress makes a big sweeping change to PURPA or that Congress repeals the ITC early?
Stephen Lacey: I think Congress repealing the ITC would be much more likely because of talk about a tax reform package.
Shayle Kann: Ah, interesting.
Stephen Lacey: Like they need to find ways to lower the corporate tax rate, and major tax credits are potentially a way to do that very quickly.
Shayle Kann: Right, whereas for PURPA, the cost it's incurring is hard to define and it's really at the state level anyway.
Stephen Lacey: Yes, and it's harder to argue for, right? I think you could paint it as more explicitly anti-renewables whereas you could get away with an argument of repealing the ITC and say, "Hey we needed this tax reform package as good for business and for American consumers and we needed to find ways to pay for it" and we have this political horse trading. You can spin it in a way that's less anti-solar and anti-renewable whereas repealing PURPA doesn't have an immediate financial advantage in any way. It's just a way to dismantle a law that you think benefits renewables.
Shayle Kann: The way I think about it in part with both California's RPS and PURPA, these are sort of bridge solutions. It's hard to imagine that if you expect to see a pretty big utility-scale solar market in the mid 2020s, I don't think that most of that new solar is going to be built because of California's RPS of because of PURPA. These things aren't going to last forever as big demand drivers. What they are is a mechanism to continue getting down the learning curve, continuing to reduce the cost of solar to get to the point where contract prices are sufficient, that solar is winning in the same way that other technologies would be. Otherwise, to the point where you can finance merchant solar, whatever it takes to get to the next stage of maturity.
Stephen Lacey: Well, the other side of this coin is what's happening in residential solar, and remarkably, the biggest residential solar market in the U.S., California, only grew by 5 percent. Within that growth number what you're seeing is that the smaller installers are taking up a greater market share, which is what we're seeing around the U.S. So there are a couple of interesting things going on in California that I want to talk about, and meanwhile Texas saw pretty extraordinary growth off a very limited base. It more than doubled there and then Pennsylvania grew by 5 times. Why did we see less growth in residential nationwide first than we did in utility-scale solar?
Shayle Kann: I think that the debate around what's happening in residential solar right now is super interesting. Residential solar was growing 50-plus percent per year for four straight years. Meanwhile, the only successful solar IPOs that occurred in the past five years came from residential solar companies. You had SolarCity, then Vivint, then Sunrun. It looked like residential solar was this rocket ship of growth. Then of course, the shit starts to hit the fan and everybody starts to struggle a little bit. SolarCity dials back on its growth ambitions. Vivint goes through this painful process of trying to get acquired by SunEdison that ultimately fails. Sunrun comes out somewhat unscathed but suffers a little bit from what's happening to everybody else.
What ended up happening in residential solar in 2016 was that growth slowed a lot. We went from, like I said, a market that was growing over 50 percent a year to one that grew 19 percent in 2016 and probably will not grow more than 19 percent and in fact, in all likelihood will grow less than 19 percent in 2017. Some people say if they're sort of in the mode that this market could still be a rocket ship of growth, they would tell you that look, SolarCity, Sunrun, and Vivint together accounted for over half of the residential solar market. When these companies for exogenous reasons have a need to suddenly get cash flow positive and thus are dialing back their growth ambitions, that obviously means the market is going to slow growth.
What's happening here is deliberate and driven by those companies as opposed to being forced upon them. Now that's one case to make. There is another case to make which is that no, they are a function of what's happening in the market. In places like California in particular, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, states that had been meaningful growth centers for various reasons, there just isn't that much growth to be had anymore. Their customer acquisition cost went up as a result, so they had to dial back their growth ambitions. The fact that these companies are suffering tells you something about the state of residential solar as opposed to the other way around.
Stephen Lacey: You highlight this debate and I think you've articulated both sides of that debate over what's happening in residential solar. It seems to me that this is not binary, that both of those factors are playing somewhat equal roles.
Shayle Kann: Yes, what's the driver and what's the result? Then you've got two other kind of trends that people are monitoring and trying to make sense of. One being the one that you mentioned, which is that if you look at the growth rate of the largest installers, it's slower. If you look at the growth rate of the smaller local installers, it's closer to historical norms. Those smaller local installers are stealing market share back while the past few years had been mostly the big installers stealing share.
You have a group of people that will tell you this is the natural order of things. We're going to get back down to a market that grows at a reasonable rate, maybe 20-30 percent a year. Where the small local installers drive the whole thing and you'll never see a big national installer successful again. You have other people saying the big guys, a couple of them, had unique problems of their own largely to do with the public markets and the pendulum might swing back in the other direction. So you've got this big versus small question.
Then, you've got the state question which is kind of where we started and where the data to me is really interesting. California still represents half of all residential solar in the country. California is an incredibly important market for residential solar. In late 2015, everybody cheered in the solar industry because California went through its decision about net metering 2.0 and basically retained full retail net metering with a couple little tweaks. One would've thought that then the California market could continue to grow apace and it didn't, right? Instead, the California market grew by 5 percent in 2016 in part because of this looming change to net metering 2.0 and time-of-use rates. It gummed up the works, complicated the sales process. It's an interesting lesson of what happens in a major market when you impose something that's supposed to be built for the long term but certainly isn't as simple as net metering had been historically.
Stephen Lacey: Right, and that gets us to the broader question of whether rate reform will slow solar permanently or whether we're just going through this few-year period where solar installers are trying to figure out how to finance and sell this stuff around new rate designs, and that eventually we'll get to a place where solar is cost-competitive enough and the rates are stable enough that solar will continue to grow at a healthy but more moderate rate.
Shayle Kann: Yes, I think that the latter is my opinion, which is the fact that California sort of slowed down as it was transitioning to net metering 2.0. It has clearly proven to be a little bit more difficult to figure out how to sell in a market where you're basing the economics on time-of-use rates or an export tariff or even locational valuation, which is something we're talking about in New York. That's a harder sell, and it's a little harder to find the right customer. Those are all challenges that the market will face. I think in the long term, it's all more sustainable so you're not going to go through these boom and bust cycles that are driven by regulation policy, and also there's a way to get around that. You just have to reconstitute your sales and marketing and targeting practices and so on, and financing.
That's sort of what's going on in California, but I did want to point out what you said before, which is that if you're looking for signs of hope for residential solar that this market can continue to grow at a pretty meaningful pace and that it's not in some kind of existential crisis, what you're looking for is California not to drive half the market anymore. The thing that's happened historically is that other states will pick up, this is fine. Massachusetts will have a big residential solar market. Arizona or Colorado or some other state. The problem is that those states are small. You can only get so much out of those states.
Meanwhile, there are a few states that are just big states, lots of homeowners that if they started to show meaningful signs of life in the sense that solar is economic for customers, there are options for those customers to get it installed and financed and you start to see real growth there. There's a long runway there where you can make a case that the low hanging fruit in California has been picked. The low hanging fruit in Texas has not been picked. The low hanging fruit in Pennsylvania has not been picked. The low-hanging fruit in Florida has not been picked, right?
In 2016 there are some real signs from some of those states that there is growth to be had. You mentioned two big ones. Texas installed over 80 megawatts of residential solar in 2016 up from a previous high of about 30 megawatts. That's nothing compared to California's 1 gigawatt, less than a tenth, but Texas' market is just as big as California's in theory. Pennsylvania is another one that I mentioned grew 5x. Pennsylvania actually went through a period where it was a big solar market way back in the day but it was driven by SREC. The SREC prices crashed, never really recovered and the market never recovered. Now it's turning out that the economics are getting there without SRECs.
When you start to see stuff like that, I think you should be looking at that as a sign of long-term growth for residential solar barring major policy changes.
Stephen Lacey: Well, no surprise, I suppose, given what we know about the difficulties in commercial solar, but we saw less than a gigawatt in small commercial in 2016, and this is because of the difficulty in obtaining credit scores for small business owners and high transaction cost relative to bigger projects. This is just not an easy market and I think it's safe to say that no one's quite cracked the code yet.
Shayle Kann: I know, I feel like I'm a broken record saying no one's cracked the code on small commercial solar. What keeps happening is we keep saying it and then someone comes out with some big announcement saying, "I've cracked the code on small commercial solar" and then the data never supports it. Like you said, less than a gigawatt in total. And we're defining small commercial as less than a megawatt, so projects that are under a megawatt. Total addressable market is huge. Tons and tons of small businesses that could go solar and many for whom the economics look pretty good if you could just figure out a way to get the cost to install down and the financing available. We're still under a gigawatt of that. Last year the market didn't grow a whole lot. The reason why the non-residential solar market did grow 49 percent last year was a combination of some larger projects in California that were rushing to meet a deadline and then the growth of community solar which is sort of a new segment within that market, but small commercial solar didn't really have an impact.
You've had a bunch of different companies try different solutions to scale small commercial solar. SolarCity made a big announcement, I don't know if you remember a little while back, where they said they had cracked the code. It was like a combination of a hardware solution, a customer acquisition solution, and a financing solution. They were going to mount the system using this new Zep Solar roof mounting thing. They had partnered up with I think it was Renovate America or somebody else. It was on a PACE financing solution so they thought they had a combination of we can get the install cost down and we can finance it using PACE and that's going to make this market move. It just hasn't yet.
Then you've had other companies that have tried to do marketplaces for financing. None of those have totally scaled. It's just a really tough business. Somebody has got to get it right at some point but not yet.
Stephen Lacey: And you've also seen a number of utilities or third-party energy management companies try to factor in solar in this bundle of energy services and energy procurement, billing management, analytics and solar. Mostly, it's just been a bunch of talk. This year we saw GE's Current undergo a pretty major restructuring after it just couldn't make those bundles work because largely they had been riding this hype wave and no one has figured out a way to sell solar within that broader energy management package yet.
Shayle Kann: Or you know some of them have. It's not that they're doing zero business. I don't know about Current. They may be doing very little business. There are others that are trying to do that combined package offering like Edison Energy is doing a bunch of that through SoCore. I think they've had some success. The problem is they're very one off. If your problem to start was that small commercial solar is very one-off then you have high transaction cost because every single time you're going to have to negotiate a different contract and design the system individually and all that kind of stuff.
Imagine every time you do that also having to sell energy management services and energy efficiency and demand response and then storage and whatever else you're doing for that customer. It may be a solution to extract enough value from that customer to make it worth your while. It's not necessarily a solution to scaling small commercial solar.
Stephen Lacey: Lets be honest with ourselves. We are talking about a huge year for solar, but we're still talking about just a couple of percentage points of the electricity generation in this country. Where are we at exactly with solar generation?
Shayle Kann: I think that's the fundamental dichotomy of solar today, which is that we're putting up all these big, splashy numbers of new capacity and it's beating out other technologies and new capacity additions. On the other hand, probably solar is approaching 2 percent of all electricity generation in the U.S. We can run those numbers pretty soon and have an exact total but it's in the ballpark of 2 percent. It passed 1 percent last year. That's growing fast but solar is still a negligible share of the total electricity mix in the U.S. There is a long way to go before solar really takes a dent out of electricity or emissions, which is something people are really focused on for climate change. Even within solar, we'll tell you we're not really moving the needle there yet.
Stephen Lacey: But it's important to distinguish national electricity production from the impact on load growth in certain high-growth states. There are a number of utilities that have seen a precipitous drop in load growth because of the amount of solar that is coming online.
Shayle Kann: Right, but now you get into what's going to become a conversation we're going to have to have a lot moving forward which is what is solar's contribution to peak capacity reduction. On one hand you can say solar cuts load growth so utilities, like you said, they were already experiencing very little load growth for the past couple of decades. Add distributed solar and maybe they're experiencing zero load growth and maybe they don't need to build a whole lot of new capacity of other stuff you like fossil fuels. Most of the electricity system is built to peak, so the question is, is solar reducing that peak? If it's not reducing that peak, you may not get that much savings in terms of CO2 savings from other sources of generation. Solar has a pretty good relationship with peak capacity especially with low penetration. The more solar you put on the grid, the more distant that relationship becomes which is why we have this conversation about energy storage or natural gas and things like that. I think that's what's ultimately going to dictate whether solar's impact on load translates to an impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Stephen Lacey: That is a conversation for another day because we will certainly get wonk-tastic on that subject. Final question for you, this might be a little involved for the last question of this discussion. You gave a presentation at one of our solar conferences about a year and a half ago looking at what would it take to get solar from 25 gigawatts to 250 gigawatts, to roughly 10 percent of generation. I wonder, given what we know about the slowdown in residential solar and the tapering off of utility-scale solar and the struggles in commercial solar, are we on a path to exponential growth?
Shayle Kann: Well first, I don't think we're on a path to exponential growth. We're at 40-plus gigawatts now. We were at 25 at the time that I wrote that piece. Now we've installed another 15. Keep building that forward. If we can average 15-20 gigawatts a year, we get there midway through next decade. It's not crazy at all and it doesn't require exponential growth. It requires continued meaningful growth. I do think that we're going to get there. Stepping back, the fundamental reason why solar will continue to grow over time remains that the cost of solar continues to fall and there's very little indication that it's going to level off, let alone increase again anytime in the near future. Our systems and technologies team at GTM Research looks into this in great detail line by line. There's clear opportunity for continued cost reduction. They're somewhat incremental but they exist. Cost for solar will continue to fall. Meanwhile, the cost of electricity, broadly speaking, continues to rise. Even in a relatively low natural gas price environment, the cost of electricity overall is on an upward trajectory. Those two lines continue to cross each other in many different venues and many different ways. As they do, there are just more opportunities for solar.
Add on to that, retirements of coal which will continue to happen regardless of what the Trump administration tries to do to stop it. Potentially retirements of nuclear, which you can debate whether that's a good thing or not, but it seems to be happening. There's a need for new capacity to replace that stuff. Solar is going to take up a pretty big share of that.
Stephen Lacey: Well, our listeners are lucky because we're giving them a preview of the report before it even comes out in full. When are we dropping the U.S. Solar Market Insight report?
Shayle Kann: We just released the final 2016 data last week, and the actual report which is going to contain all the analysis and the forecast will come out on March 9.
Stephen Lacey: Shayle Kann is our Senior VP of GTM Research. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Greentech Media, and this is The Interchange. It's our weekly conversation on the changing business of energy and cleantech. We'll catch you next week.
