The opportunities, and challenges, of pairing institutional capital with hyper-local projects.
Richard Walsh
January 13, 2021
All politics is local — and the same can be said for C&I solar.
A little while back, I was at an industry happy hour (hey, remember those?) where I ran into a friend and well-known industry analyst, Wood Mackenzie’s Michelle Davis. We had caught up earlier in the week to chat about the commercial and industrial (C&I) solar sector, in which my firm specializes and which she researches regularly. And on that street corner in Salt Lake City, we each made a few passing comments about the conference, the growth in C&I solar, the flood of capital into the sector, the increasing interest level and how challenging it is to scale. These challenges exist for a lot of reasons, but as we discussed the sector a bit more, we drifted into the topic of the local and regional nature of C&I. As we were leaving, Davis said to me, “Yes, the tail is very, very long.”