Currents

Keith Martin, with Norton Rose Fulbright, joins us from Washington to discuss the likelihood that Congress will pass a tax extenders bill at year end and what tax changes of interest to the renewable energy industry are potentially in play.

Live from the Wharton Energy Conference, Manish Kumar, managing director at The AES Corporation, Jackson Lehr, operating partner, infrastructure at Energy Impact Partners, Martin Torres, managing director at BlackRock and Peter Zhu, senior vice president at Macquarie Capital, sit down with Todd Alexander to cover financing renewable energy. The lively panel discusses everything from traditional PPAs and tax equity to the latest trends the panelists are seeing in the industry.

Fleming Ray, senior project manager, due diligence at DNV GL, joins us to discuss all things solar plus storage. We get into the federal and state policies surrounding the market, the outlook for the next five years, the core technical due diligence focus areas, the integration of battery testing results including DNV GL’s recently published Battery Scorecard, and more.

Bob Shapiro, partner in Norton Rose Fulbright’s Washington office, discusses FERC’s proposed changes to PURPA. We go over what PURPA is and why it was created, its relevance today, the most significant changes that FERC is proposing and how those changes will affect the market.

Serge Abergel, director of media relations at Hydro-Québec, joins us to discuss how being state-owned affects the company's business decisions, how much energy the company exports and where the energy is being exported. We get into the business of hydro, its environmental impacts, the challenges of exporting to the northeastern US and more.

Jim Spano, co-founder of Radiant REIT, joins us to discuss the evolution of the solar market and the idea behind his new company. Radiant REIT has an interesting business model for providing long term fixed-rate debt to solar projects.

Russell Gold, senior energy reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Michael Skelly, a senior advisor at Lazard and founder of Clean Line Energy Partners, join us for a discussion about Gold’s new book on the ultimately frustrated effort by Clean Line Energy Partners to build four independently-owned transmission lines to move wind electricity from the Midwest to other parts of the country.

Jessie Robbins, senior director of structured finance at Sol Systems, joins us to talk about the ITC extension bill. We talk about whether developers still need to worry about safe harboring, how the ITC step down works, whether safe harboring is worth it, how module prices are affecting developers' decisions and more.

Ethan Zindler, head of Americas at BloombergNEF, joins us to discuss their New Energy Outlook. We get into how the outlook differs from others in the market, some of the biggest and most surprising findings, the big shifts that are being seen in the US power sector, how costs of wind and solar are changing, and much more.

Richard Matsui, founder and CEO of kWh Analytics, is back to give us an update on their Solar Lendscape from the asset owners’ perspective. We get into their methodology, discuss the recent trend of refinancing and how refinancing is being built into models, strategic partnerships in the industry and more.