Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, joins us to discuss the company’s $20M Series B fundraise and the emergence of climate insurance. We discuss what the fundraise means for the industry as a whole, why climate insurance hasn’t emerged yet and the challenges the insurance industry faces when insuring renewables, solutions he has seen on the insurance side, the partnerships that are happening in the industry, the improvement in modeling on the underwriting side and more.
Lacuna Sustainable Investments leads Series B round to accelerate kWh Analytics’ growth and build on its leadership in developing insurance solutions that prevent climate change.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (FEBRUARY 8, 2022) – kWh Analytics, the leader in Climate Insurance, announced today that it raised $20 million to continue the organization’s expansion.
The capital raise reflects the increasing focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues, particularly within the insurance industry. While many insurance companies are addressing ESG by divesting from fossil fuels, kWh Analytics has taken a proactive approach by developing data-driven insurance specifically for zero-carbon assets.
“The most recent 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was clear: it’s a ‘code red’ for humanity,” stated Richard Matsui, CEO of kWh Analytics. “The world needs more renewable energy to mitigate climate change, and insurance is key to ensuring these projects get built. This new category of “Climate Insurance” is a massive, once-in-a-generation market opportunity; kWh Analytics is proud to be a market leader in this space.”
Matthias Weber, the former Chief Underwriting Officer of Swiss Re, noted, “kWh Analytics has filled a critical gap in renewable energy insurance, using an innovative, data-first approach. This fundraise underscores their position as the leader in this space.”
As the custodian of the world’s largest database of renewable energy asset performance, kWh Analytics has emerged as the leading provider of Climate Insurance by leveraging its real-world data to power its underwriting. This innovative model has been widely successful: the company’s first product, the Solar Revenue Put, now protects over $3 billion of solar power plants, while delivering a best-in-class loss ratio. Now, kWh Analytics is proud to announce the launch of its highly anticipated Property Product, which provides all-risk coverage against physical damage for solar, storage, and wind projects. Learn more at https://www.kwhanalytics.com/property.
“As an investor in renewable energy power plants, we understand firsthand the challenges that investors face in procuring cost competitive insurance,” said Brad Bauer, Partner at Lacuna Sustainable Investments. “On top of that, today’s standard insurance offerings miss important nuances specific to renewable energy equipment, like the impact of microcracks and hotspots on performance. That’s what makes this fundraise and product launch so important — not only is kWh Analytics supplying more insurance, but they are innovating on the existing products by using their proprietary data.”
With the new funding, kWh Analytics plans to develop additional solutions to support solar, wind, and storage asset owners and investors. The company will also bring these solutions to new international markets. These new offerings will continue to revolutionize underwriting and pricing within the renewable energy insurance space by leveraging real-world data. Notably, this investment follows ongoing collaboration with leading global re/insurers, including Swiss Re.
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About kWh Analytics
kWh Analytics is the leading provider of Climate Insurance by using our proprietary database of renewable energy project performance of over 300,000 operating assets — the world’s largest database — to underwrite insurance policies for renewable energy, backed by the world’s most trusted insurers. To-date, we have insured over $3 billion of American solar power plants with our first insurance product, the Solar Revenue Put. kWh Analytics is funded by venture capital and the US Department of Energy. To learn more, please visitwww.kwhanalytics.com, connect with us on LinkedIn, or follow @kWhAnalytics on Twitter.
SAN FRANCISCO – kWh Analytics, the Insurer for the Energy Transition, today announced that it structured the first-ever Solar Revenue Put+, which will provide 20 years of Solar Revenue Put protection, for a project located in the Southern U.S. The project is being funded through a private bond placement. SwissRe, a leading global corporate insurer, is providing insurance capacity for the Solar Revenue Put+. This deal represents the longest solar generation guarantee in the industry and the second bond deal structured with the Solar Revenue Put.
The Solar Revenue Put is a solar production and revenue insurance policy, which serves as a credit enhancement for financial investors. Using its proprietary actuarial model and risk management software (“HelioStats”), kWh Analytics developed the Solar Revenue Put to drive down investment risk and encourage development of clean, low-cost solar energy. The Solar Revenue Put+ is an innovative new offering that extends Solar Revenue Put coverage from the typical ten years to up to 30 years, or the full amortization period of a project.
“The Solar Revenue Put+ allows asset owners to achieve the benefits of the Solar Revenue Put across a project’s entire life,” said Richard Matsui, Chief Executive Officer at kWh Analytics. “This means it’s easier than ever to achieve a lower cost of capital and reduce downside risk, even for uncontracted portions of the lifecycle.”
A recent survey of the solar industry’s most active lenders indicates that a majority of active lenders value the Solar Revenue Put as a credit enhancement. Solar portfolios ranging from thousands of residential rooftops to utility-scale plants have utilized financing structures supported by the Solar Revenue Put. Portfolios supported by the Solar Revenue Put are securing debt sizing increases of 10% on average, while mitigating downside risk. The Solar Revenue Put+ offering extends these debt sizing and risk mitigation benefits by an additional 5 to 20 years, across the project’s full lifecycle.
For more information about this product, please contact Sarath Srinivasan, Head of Risk Transfer Products at kWh Analytics.
About kWh Analytics
kWh Analytics is Insuring the Energy Transition by leveraging the most comprehensive performance database of renewable energy projects in the United States (300,000+ operating assets) and the strength of the global insurance markets. Through the industry-leading Solar Revenue Put, asset owners and lenders are able to minimize risk and increase equity returns of their projects or portfolios. kWh Analytics also provides HelioStats risk management software to leading project finance investors in the solar market. kWh Analytics is backed by private venture capital and the US Department of Energy.
kWh Analytics achieved another Solar Revenue Put milestone with a recent claim paid to a leading solar asset owner for a utility-scale project in Texas. This represents the sixth claim; all have been paid in full and within 30 days for the over $3 billion in solar assets insured with the Solar Revenue Put. Notably, the Solar Revenue Put typically insures projects for ten years with an annual settlement, meaning the product has paid out a significant portion of claims in its 34 total completed operating years.
“Our claims track record demonstrates that the Solar Revenue Put works as advertised: it ensures that asset owners can recoup any losses insured by the Put through a quick and easy claims process, insulating their projects from negative financial impacts,” said CEO,Richard Matsui.
This particular asset owner structured the Solar Revenue Put on the project in 2018 to guarantee production for ten years. In Q1 of 2021, the project underperformed its production estimates due to a combination of overly aggressive production estimates and the impacts of Storm Uri. kWh Analytics’ quick claims process allowed the asset owner to issue their quarterly debt service payment. This claim illustrates the Solar Revenue Put’s ability to protect against all risks, including extreme weather, such as wildfires and severe storms.
For additional details on this claim, please contact Sarath Srinivasan, Head of Risk Transfer Products. For more information about our claim track record, download our claims case study here.
SAN FRANCISCO – kWh Analytics has expanded its team to establish an innovative property insurance product for renewable energy assets with the addition of two experienced insurance professionals. Issac McLean joins as the Head of Property and Darryl Harding joins as Senior Underwriter.
“As documented in our 2021 Solar Risk Assessment report, the renewable energy property insurance industry has significant room for growth in understanding and underwriting risks for this asset class. Our new team will allow kWh Analytics to offer a new, data-driven Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance line that underwrites risk using real data from over 30% of the US operating fleet, the world’s largest database of operating assets.” said Richard Matsui, Chief Executive Officer. “Isaac and Darryl will expand our capabilities to meet the needs of the solar community, while cementing kWh Analytics’ ability to achieve its goal of Insuring the Energy Transition”
Isaac McLean joined kWh Analytics from ICAT Managers, where he served as a Senior Product Manager. In this role, he led the development and launch of several successful insurance products and teams, including multiple P&C programs. Previous to ICAT Managers, Isaac worked at Safeco as a claims examiner and product analyst. Isaac brings over 18 years of experience in insurance, underwriting, sales, marketing, and product development.
Darryl Harding joined kWh Analytics from Hartford Steam Boiler, a Munich Re company, where he served as a Senior Production Underwriter and supported the development of their Solar Property and Shortfall product lines. Prior to his role at Hartford Steam Boiler, he served as an underwriter for commercial lines at The Hartford. Darryl has over 10 years of experience underwriting insurance products and collaborating with brokers to find innovative solutions for insureds.
In this edition #Solar100, Founder and CEO of kWh Analytics Richard Matsui speaks with Nat Bullard, Chief Content Officer at BNEF.
Nat Bullard is known for his research and reporting in the clean energy industry. He has spent almost 15 years analyzing the market and informing everyone from senior executives to the broader public about how the industry is evolving. Like H.G. Wells, he’s a prominent, forward-looking thought leader, who has devoted his talents to advancing one of the most critical causes of our time — the development of clean energy.
In this Solar100, Nat weighs in on his experience researching the industry, how solar technology has evolved over time, his predictions for battery storage and hydrogen, and his advice for young professionals.
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RICHARDMATSUI: Starting all the way back — I know you studied art history and architecture as an undergrad, then went on to a graduate degree in international studies. Can you walk me through that career arc and how you landed at BNEF?
NATBULLARD: Yes, I studied art history as an undergraduate. I picked that major, because it was a small department, and I was able to get a lot of face time with professors. The major also focused on what they called “formal analysis,” which is a structured way of inquiry. I realize it sounds like an unusual segue into thinking about business, but it was actually quite useful – a structured way of looking at something, considering it, and describing it. It would have been a fine background for a management consultant (and I had classmates in the department who did just that). But I ultimately decided I didn’t want to be a business or management consultant, so I took a job as a teacher at the American International School in Cairo instead.
I returned from Cairo thinking I would study international affairs or international relations development, but I also realized I wanted to focus my studies on something measurable. In my case, that ended up being energy trade growth, and that’s where I ended up in graduate school.
When I graduated, I was looking for a job and I did not have the traditional technical skills that someone would need to work in energy at the time. Most people came from an engineering background, a physics background, or a finance background. However, I was one of a few people that had a background in development economics and climate science, which was useful in the fast-changing part of the global energy sector, so I managed to get hired by Ethan Zindler and Michael Liebreich, at what was called “New Energy Finance,” based in London (I worked from DC).
The trajectory for me and for our research firm followed a familiar arc: I focused on solar, we got acquired, and we became part of a much bigger company, Bloomberg. That’s when I moved to San Francisco, and then I continued to broaden out my research from there — more content direction roles, overseeing some of our custom work, and later four years of living and working in Asia before returning to the U.S.
MATSUI: Is that where your focus remains today?
BULLARD: I would say my role is divided into three equal parts. The first is our management committee. Our group has a small management committee, since the whole company is roughly 250 people. We support the business of BNEF, the research group. There is another third that is external facing, which includes channeling our work for senior clients into materials like a board briefing or a Bloomberg event. Finally, the last third is my weekly writing.
I developed that last part about seven years ago now. We were discussing new projects and my team asked me what I wanted to do. I said I want to write an email to people, but I want to send it to them on the weekend and I didn’t want to send it to everybody — I want to send it the boss of the people that we typically worked with. So, we put together a weekly briefing for executives that I sent out on Saturdays. I started out with a distribution of about 175 people, and it’s now grown to 160,000.
It’s hard to keep good information bounded, so we opened it up with subscriptions and then eventually moved to Bloomberg Opinion. Then about two years ago, Bloomberg began a new editorial vertical called Green, and the editors asked if I would join that vertical instead. That’s where we’ve been since then. Today, the email still has my name on it, but it includes a broader package of topics that we write about, including transportation, climate, finance, climate science.
LESSONS LEARNED & CURRENT TRENDS IN SOLAR
MATSUI: Over those years you’ve written about so many different angles on solar. What are your thoughts on how far we’ve come as an industry and what are the latest trends you’re seeing?
BULLARD: I’m perpetually trying to determine how far along the journey we are. I often try to think about the electricity sector in the United States as a whole and how renewables fits into that story. On the renewable energy side, for wind and solar specifically, we’re at about 10% of the total electric capacity. So, on a linear basis, there’s 90% of capacity left which might become wind or solar.
Now, we may run into limits of exactly how much of that capacity becomes renewables, because it’s not going to necessarily be 100%. Part of figuring out how much capacity becomes renewables hinges on whether we’ve done the groundwork to substantially decarbonize the global economy through other means.
In terms of the latest trends, something I wrote about recently is the slowing of
“asset rotation” in the industry, which essentially means projects are changing hands less. This is happening, because the stable returns from renewables look positive on a balance sheet and companies are increasingly able to refinance their assets advantageously – some with the help of your Solar Revenue Put — to gain more capital without actually selling the project. It’s unclear how this will impact the industry in the long-term.
MATSUI: Any surprises, from the research?
BULLARD: Solar provides a very particular lens on thinking about the energy transition. It’s a field with an extraordinary amount of aggregate success and an extremely high specific failure rate. If we think about many of the companies that we would have dealt with a decade ago, more likely than not, they no longer exist due to acquisition or exiting the industry altogether.
Certainly, the history of the solar business was the aggregation of millions of marginal transformations, but it was generally the people with a bit of a crazy vision and the skills to implement that vision that succeeded. In retrospect, I think many companies survived by having allocated part of their vision to a particular part of their staff. Good developers were generally agnostic about technology, but absolutely rigorous about location, planning, permitting, money, all those kinds of details and making sure they had the right people to execute on them.
MATSUI: As a market watcher, what makes for good business in the renewables industry?
BULLARD: That’s a great question. One of the advantages of solar and wind is that you might have locked up some land, but that does not preclude other people from employing sun or wind – it’s not an exclusive resource. However, being early is definitely beneficial. Being thoughtful about where you build a pipeline is good. Having capital helps, especially the ability to recycle capital if you’re an asset owner. Creditworthiness is big. The things I’m describing here are rather dull in the sense that these are attributes of other industries as well, like the real estate business.
MATSUI: Relatedly, what do you think makes for a sustainable competitive advantage that one can have in solar? Is there such a thing?
BULLARD: It’s a fundamental question. I think the combination of balance sheet, domain expertise, and human capital helps determine a company’s competitive advantage, although I’m not sure that any advantage will be perpetual. I think this sector as a whole has, outside of probably wind turbines, relatively little durable competitive advantage at a company level, but the renewables industry and solar, in particular, is still so young and a lot can change.
MATSUI: You’ve been watching the industry for a long time. Can you remember times when people in the industry were right or wrong about where the industry was headed?
BULLARD: Yes, definitely. Over a decade ago, everyone – including myself — believed that solar thermal would win out in power generation versus solar photovoltaic (PV). They were competing architectures and competing logics, if you will.
Solar thermal was a solar inflected version of industrial architecture. Downstream of the solar field, you basically maintained the same thermal-energetic system, so everyone in the sector was familiar with how that worked: you had a lot of things that were hot, you had things that rotated, and you had things that needed integration. The pitch for solar thermal was that the plants were very reliable and the grid operator could treat it like a gas plant.
On the other side was PV. PV was run with batch manufacturing in the early days, and then later on small scale manufacturing. It had measurable unit success, so you could look at each plant and measure cost and efficiency. The pitch for these projects was that the plant will be able to deliver some significant savings in time on large pieces of unused land.
As we know, PV won, because you could measure it, and it had a lot of visible iterations. Also, frankly, you had a lot of good sharing of information. We were able to find out more information about what was happening in the PV world.
In short, there was a competing logic of high frequency, low latency development on one side with mega projects on the other [solar thermal] side. It’s been ten years now, yet I still return to this as my durable learning on logic — Megaprojects versus high volume manufacturing.
My other lesson from the PV versus thermal debate was about being perpetually on the margin. PV is the marginal new unit of power in almost any power system in the world right now. That means that it can be built at whatever scale is needed at the time and place – be it a gigawatt of capacity, or a module on a roof. That position, being on the margin, is a great place to be! You have the chance to try new things, to provide new products and services, to meet incremental demand growth and displace retiring capacity.
MATSUI: What other innovations do you think enabled the growth of solar?
BULLARD: One of the biggest innovations happened in the polysilicon industry. Around 2004, solar panels were essentially using the offcuts of the semiconductor grade polysilicon industry. People started buying polysilicon at 5 or 6 “9s” purity levels for solar, rather than at 13 “9s” purity levels for chips for computers. The polysilicon product for solar was technically an inferior product, but the industry used it. It started as a small piece of a high-margin business, then became a separate business where that “inferior” product was being produced intentionally. The story of polysilicon and solar is a very classical disruptive innovation in that way.
Back then, solar only made up a small part of the polysilicon industry. I remember when we developed a tracker to identify when solar became the main driver on a volume basis for polysilicon. It was a while ago, but interestingly, we saw a similar pattern happening with lithium-ion batteries rotating their main demand driver from consumer electronics to vehicle applications.
PREDICTIONS FOR BATTERY STORAGE & HYDROGEN, THE NEXT FRONTIERS IN ENERGY
MATSUI: Has developing a framework for solar’s growth helped you in your other, more current iterations of technologies in the Energy Transition?
BULLARD: Absolutely. I’m always thinking about the governing laws for different aspects of the industry. For instance, the wind sector has one set of governing laws, manufacturing has another, and so on. So, the companies that were the leaders in wind turbine manufacturers a decade ago are still the leaders. There are new ones, but there is sort of the industrial logic that that process hasn’t changed. As we look at the new technologies that are arriving, it’s worth us asking how they compare to existing technologies.
That kind of interrogation helps me think about the future of emerging technologies, like direct air capture. For example, I often ask myself questions like, “What’s the future of direct air capture? How many direct air capture units are we going to build? Are we going to have 200? 2,000? 200,000?” Any of those figures might work and they may even have similar economics, but the logic of getting there and the ownerships behind them will be very different. That’s when I use the PV-thermal metaphor I described earlier.
Lately, I’ve been using that line of thinking to investigate hydrogen specifically.
MATSUI: What’s your take on how hydrogen will unfold?
BULLARD: I think what’s going to be the most interesting aspect to watch is the margin of competition, similar to solar PV and thermal. Three years ago, most people thought heavy-duty trucking would likely be molecular (e.g., liquid fuels), because that’s how we would energize these kinds of vehicles. What we’re now seeing, though, is that the molecular side does not move as fast as the electron side (e.g., electricity). So, now we’re seeing manufacturers producing high volumes of batteries and providing me a forward curve of what the batteries are going to cost in the future. This kind of behavior is obviously going to support the growth of the electron side and I think that’s where the industry is headed today.
CARRER ADVICE FOR RENEWABLES
MATSUI: What advice would you give to someone looking to get into renewables?
BULLARD: There are a lot of companies in this industry – both established and start-ups. So, my advice for people entering this sector is to ask yourself what needs to be true for the industry to thrive and from there, narrow down where their time and talents may be best suited.
So, I’m looking at a company, a technology, a sector. What needs to be true for it to be net zero emissions within its domain? Is that a question of science, a question of policy, a question of money?
Take policy for example. What kind of policies do we need to enact? Does the industry require a national net zero standard? Does it require a tax benefit? Does it require land access? Does it require intellectual property regulation? Then on the technical side, does it have a learning curve that we can measure, or might it? And again, back to my industrial logic, are there a small number of very large things, or a very large number of very small things that are going to make the industry move? The other factor to consider is competition. And then one might consider the type of people that are going to be attracted to this work.
Asking these questions can help people figure out which companies to target in their job search. There are lots of facts that need to be true for companies to be successful and impactful, and if you build it up your case in an evidentiary way, then I would encourage someone to try it out.
