FERC’s controversial MOPR ruling, the troubles of the petroleum industry and ways to continue manufacturing electric buses were topics of a webinar hosted by the California Energy Commission on Tuesday called “Weathering the COVID Crisis.”

The CEC, which dispenses hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for clean-energy innovation, brought together leaders in electric vehicles, rooftop solar and utility-scale solar to talk about how they were coping with the effects of the pandemic.

CEC Vice Chair Janea Scott, who heads the commission’s research and development programs, said the CEC is taking care of critical business as usual even though most of its employees are working from home.

“We recognize the importance of continuing to invest in our clean energy entrepreneurs, and we are actively preparing to release new solicitations,” Scott said. “In fact, in the R&D team, we anticipate releasing seven solicitations that would make about $150 million available over the next few months.”

The CEC is also supporting its current grant recipients, she said.

“We recognize that people may not be able to get into a lab to do the testing,” Scott said. “We recognize that folks aren’t necessarily able to do wet signatures and things like that.”

The commission is extending due dates and working with the Legislature to make relief funds available, she said.

“Please know that the Energy Commission is a resource for you to reach out to anytime,” she told the 350 people on the webinar, which was co-hosted by New Energy Nexus, a nonprofit that supports green-energy entrepreneurs.

Building Buses

Ryan Popple, executive director of Proterra, the largest North American manufacturer of electric buses, described his company’s efforts to fill orders while protecting workers.

Electric buses have been one of the fastest growth sectors for EVs and could be the first to fully electrify, Popple said. While airports and some cities have cancelled orders, most cities “still want their electric buses,” and the company has an 18-month order backlog to fill, he said.

“Cities are still thinking long-term about their zero emission and electrify-everything strategies,” Popple said.

The company has three factories in South Carolina and California. In each jurisdiction, he said, “we were informed that public transit vehicles are essential, and if we can keep building, we should.”

The company has been enforcing physical distancing on the factory floor, providing coveralls and masks, and checking workers’ temperatures before they enter the building, Popple said. He urged other businesses to strictly follow government policies.

“We don’t have any practices that don’t line up line-for-line with guidance from [states, the federal government and the United Nation’s World Health Organization],” he said. “We make sure we are 100% compliant and up to date with the science behind [the official policies].”

Popple said he doesn’t think the world will go back to normal, at least until a vaccine or therapy lessens the threat from the COVID-19 virus, “but we’ve got to get back to work in the safest way possible.”

He said he thinks the U.S. will adapt to COVID-19 the way other countries have dealt with malaria as a persistent threat — for instance, using face masks the way some countries use mosquito netting as a preventative measure.

“If we’re going to get people paid and get the economy recovered, we’re going to have to do that,” he said.

End Game for Fossil Fuels?

Popple also talked about the current crisis in the oil industry, where futures prices fell below zero this week.

“We’ve got to take very seriously that the fossil-fuel industry is backed into a corner right now. And my grandfather, who was an Illinois state trooper, told me, ‘Don’t ever back anybody into a corner because the only way they can get out is through you.”

Despite mounting evidence that vehicle pollution contributes to COVID-19 deaths, he said, the fossil fuel industry will try to roll back electric-vehicle mandates in California and elsewhere.

“If you’re faced with losing a multi-trillion-dollar industry, you’re going to take any shot you can get.”

“I think we are seeing the end game for fossil fuels. We’re seeing a preview of it,” Popple said. “So, don’t be surprised if a policy that was already implemented, that positively affected your business [comes under attack]. You better be prepared to defend it.”

Solar Survival

Lynn Jurich, CEO of Sunrun, a major rooftop solar firm, gave a pep talk of sorts to the green-energy industry.

She said she and her co-founders started Sunrun when they were students at Stanford in 2007 and racked up expenses fast, counting on millions of dollars in financing to bail them out. Then the recession hit in 2008, and the banks that the entrepreneurs thought they had deals with backed out – all except one.

That one bank loaned them the $40 million they needed, and they were able to get a jump on the competition during the downturn, Jurich said.

“Sometimes these crises can be a benefit for entrepreneurs and people who can get through to the other side,” she said. “In many ways, that gave us a head start because we were able to weather this really tough period. So, from a business standpoint it was harder for other new entrants to raise capital and copy [our] model. We got a little bit lucky.”

Jurich said the recession that began in 2008 taught Sunrun to make sure it had plenty of cash on hand and to maintain good relationships with lenders.

“We’re like Depression babies,” she said. “We’ve been conservative about planning for a rainy day.”

In the current situation, Jurich said, “I’m really optimistic we’re going to come out of this as a stronger industry.”

Rooftop solar is too expensive and permitting too difficult, she said. Firms should use the coronavirus crisis as a way to spur innovation and accelerate cost reductions.

“Consumers want this product more than ever,” Jurich said. “They feel let down by institutions in many ways and want to take matters into their own hands.”

The rooftop solar industry relies on face-to-face sales but needs to turn to e-commerce and become more efficient, she said.

“I think this crisis is going to accelerate this industry by one or two years,” she said.

Jurich said she wasn’t denying the difficulty of these times, but “I’m really optimistic that it’s going to force a lot of the discipline that we need to really put the solar and batteries on all infrastructure and decarbonize the energy business quickly. Time is essential, as we all know.”

‘Under Direct Attack’

Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of NEXTracker, is a veteran of the utility-scale solar industry, the biggest driver of California’s growth in renewable power.

The CEC has been a leader in promoting clean energy “in stark contrast to what’s happening on the federal side,” Shugar said. “Every one of the companies on this call is under direct attack from the Trump administration, and so we have to respond.”

The administration’s new tariffs on solar panels and its attack on net-metering, key to rooftop solar, are two examples, he said.

“FERC also had an extremely alarming ruling in the PJM regional transmission operator territory, which serves 65 million customers,” Shugar said, referring to the commission’s order applying the minimum offer price rule (MOPR) to all new state-subsidized resources. “It impacts $10 billion of economic value that’s traded for capacity in the Northeast. Essentially what they’re doing is subsidizing coal and nuclear at the expense of renewables.” (See related story, Stakeholders Appeal Expansion of PJM MOPR.)

The motivation isn’t to save consumers’ money, he said. Wind, solar and electrical vehicles have created more than 2 million jobs. Power from wind and solar now costs significantly less than natural gas, coal or nuclear power, he said.

Shugar urged his colleagues to fight back.

“We have the opportunity to win at everything — create jobs, help the environment and create value for our economy,” he said. “You must engage [politically] this year more than ever. It’s really important because these policies … are really a first-order impact of massive overreach by the federal government to unravel these benefits that we’ve helped create.”