Covering utilities and clean energy here at Morgan Stanley. On the Morgan Stanley side, I'm joined by Lourdes Sanchez-Bolanos. Lourdes is a Vice President focused on clean energy and utilities. We're thrilled to be discussing the transition to clean energy with two leaders in the space from SolarEdge and Sunrun. From SolarEdge, we have Ronen Faier, CFO. From Sunrun, Tom vonReichbauer, CFO as well. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for inviting me.
Thank you, so let me just run through a housekeeping item here in terms of a disclosure, and if investors have any questions you'd like to ask, feel free to submit online via our portal or just shoot me or Lourdes an email. We'll be sure to touch on those points, so let me go through disclosure. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Well, great, so I'm going to kick off the discussion here.
There's so many interesting topics in clean energy to talk about these days, especially for SolarEdge and Sunrun, and Tom, I thought I'd start with you on the Sunrun side. Texas is very, very topical these days, and I know you do business there. It looks like you're looking to grow rapidly in the state.
I was just interested in your take from sort of basically the fundamental use case for your product as a result of some of the issues that we saw in Texas. How do you think about the growth of storage? And also just maybe away from Texas, just weather volatility is showing up in so many of your core markets, which has provided opportunities. I wonder if you could speak to that more broadly as well.
Yeah, happy to, Stephen. The events in Texas, I think, continue to show the full breadth sort of the different layers of the value proposition that we bring to consumers. In the early days, there was a core value proposition around clean energy. Then it was the savings story. Then extreme weather events have pointed out the resiliency story that's available for consumers. And now, I think the events of Texas last week, you see the price certainty that presents real value to consumers.
Customers who had $500 energy bills now facing $10,000-plus energy bills when you're wholly exposed to the volatility in the energy markets. And so I think all of these different elements make the value prop for consumers that go into solar and storage more meaningful. Texas, we saw a great increase in incremental web traffic in the state, a 350% increase on the heels of it.
And it's not inconsistent with what we saw: wildfires in California over the last couple of years and storms in the Northeast. And I hope as a society, we take the opportunity to modernize our grid and make this transition because I think they are becoming increasingly common. And if we don't make the investments, the extreme events will continue. And we're excited about what this means for us. We expanded recently into the San Antonio market down there. And I think there's a great opportunity in Texas for solar and storage.
Very good. And in terms of just sort of, I guess, attach rates or percentage of your customers that you think are going to choose storage, it sounds like that continues to rise as well. Is that right?
Definitely increasing. We saw our attach rates grow from Q3 to Q4 on storage. We haven't shared the exact specifics there. But as we look at our guidance for 2021, we've said that our solar deployments will grow 20%-25%, but our storage deployments, we expect to grow 100%. So a 4-5X comparison there. In a handful of markets, we're leading with storage as a core part of the value proposition. And I think for reasons of weather, things like time of use rate pricing, there's just an increasing need for customers to have storage cited at their locations.
So it's been a great add for us and one that I think will drive a lot of the business moving forward.
Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe just on storage, that's a good transition over to Ronen. SolarEdge is doing a great deal of work in storage. You have your own storage product. And you have really, I guess, I think of your technology solution as allowing kind of an integrated home, being able to integrate storage with solar and then ultimately with EVs as well. But I wonder if you could just talk about sort of your own battery system. I think it's not every investor fully understands what you're doing in storage and what I think there's some really unique elements of what you're doing that add value.
I wonder if you could just talk through that business.
Sure. So I think that as a continuation of what Tom described, solar and storage are becoming more and more widespread. And the attachment rate, both in the United States, but also in areas like Australia and Germany, are growing. By the way, every region for a different reason. Sometimes it's resiliency, like in the United States. In Germany, it's simply the fact that the grid is not accepting more electricity. Or in Australia, because it's a good arbitrage due to electricity prices. And we as SolarEdge believe that over time, the majority, if not all, of the residential solar installations will come with batteries.
When we started to explore this area and try to see how to approach batteries, we decided to make our own battery.
The idea was that we would like to have a full system that is integrated in a way that the battery will talk to the inverter, that the system will be very complete, that we will be able to control the battery from outside of the system. For example, if you would like to do demand response or any other grid applications later on and you would like to use the battery, and even, by the way, since battery has software and hardware elements as well, we would like to be able to maintain them and upgrade them a little bit, but when we went into this market and we started to look for battery cells,
we found that this is a very hard thing to do. The first thing we saw was that nobody was really willing to commit on numbers and volumes for us.
We went to all of the large Korean players. Most of them were attracted or looking at EV as the major market. Solar or ESS was very small. And we could not feel that we can secure the right amounts and to be able to grow the business without being dependent on those players. And in some situations, we were not even promised at all that we can get any kind of a cell. The direction that we decided to take eventually was to actually acquire a company.
So we acquired a lithium-ion battery maker in South Korea, a company called Kokam. It's a company that is well known, active for about 22 years, has a good NMC technology. And what we did was simply to build a factory.
We started building just a few weeks ago, a 2-gigawatt-hour factory that belongs to us, to SolarEdge in South Korea, that can be expanded if needed, and this will allow us to have the capacity, but along the way, we learned another thing, and this is the fact that even in those batteries that you see today in the market, the Teslas, the LGs, and the others, the cells are cells that were designed for EVs and not for ESS, and the chemistry of a cell is a very unique creature in the sense that you can change it dramatically based on the application,
and the application for EV is different from the application that you see for ESS. You need less cycles. You need much quicker discharge.
And now, with having Kokam, we understood that we can actually craft the chemistry in a way that will allow us to generate eventually a battery that will be the best suited battery for ESS. So not only that we will have our own capacity, we will also have our own chemistry that is well designed for what we would like to do. And the idea is that we are today controlling everything from the powder, from the chemistry itself, all the way down to the system level and the battery and the inverter altogether.
That's really helpful, so as you, I think we've seen some shortages in terms of just available storage. And I think your product is really uniquely suited, as you pointed out, to sort of renewable usage. I think that bodes well, both in the near term but also in the long term as we see demand continue to grow. I didn't set up this panel with this intention, I promise, but I probably should ask a bit about the arrangement that you two companies recently announced, and maybe, Ronen, from your end, if you could just describe the supply agreement you reached with Sunrun.
So first of all, we worked with Sunrun for many years already. And actually, in these funny times of COVID, actually, this is the first time that I actually meet you, Tom. But in general, I always say that my first task when I came to SolarEdge, when it came to the U.S. market, was to arrange bankability with Sunrun because at that time, people thought that bankability is something related to finance. So they thought that the CFO, we later understood that this is more related to technological stuff. But we worked with Sunrun for many years as a supplier.
Sunrun has a very clear strategy about how they source their inverters. They choose among several inverters. They run a very well-defined process every year to make sure how they get the best from the vendors that supply them.
At the same time, by the way, they also hold very interesting discussions with companies like ours about the roadmap and the technology being a real technological leader. They don't just buy the product. They actually work with you in order to make sure that when they buy the product, it's a product that's good for them. So I think that in this sense, it's the first time that we gave publicity for a decent agreement that was signed mostly around the adoption of our Energy Hub inverter that will be used for storage, solar, and backup.
But in general, these are two companies that go a very long way together in the past, and I hope and expect that will continue to grow in the future.
Well, that sounds good. Yeah, it's great to see this agreement among two companies that we like and respect a great deal. Maybe just why don't we. I'm going to stick with you a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about market share dynamics, competitive dynamics. And some of our folks on this listening are very familiar with what you do and what's different about your product. But others may be a little less familiar. Maybe we could just talk about sort of the key elements that distinguish your product offering, like the Energy Hub in particular is interesting.
And then also sort of beyond, let's talk about the U.S., but let's also make sure we step back to talk globally about where you're growing and some of the key areas of growth that you see.
I think that the last sentence you said is very important because sometimes we're very much focused on what we see and what we hear, and this is the U.S. market, and we forget that a large chunk of solar is happening outside of the United States. I'll start by saying that in general, there are two ways to deploy solar inverters. The first one is what we call the traditional string inverter. It's one inverter that manages many modules, but you don't have any presence of electronics on the rooftop.
The second way to do it is called MLPE, module-level power electronics, and as the name suggests, it means that you have electronics at the back of every module. Two companies are doing this today relatively successfully. The first one is us doing what's called DC optimized solution. It means that we take the inverter.
The inverter is the unit of the system that is both optimizing the system and converting DC to AC, and we simply separate it where the conversion from DC to AC is happening in one central location, allowing to have economies of scale and cost benefit, and we put the element that is doing the optimization at the back of the module. By this, we're meeting all of the safety regulations in the United States that are very important, but we're able to bring more energy. We're able to bring better, we believe, of course, ability to monitor the system and more flexibility for the installers.
A competitor of ours in the United States, which makes very good product as well, by the way, is a company called Enphase, where they took a solution that is simply taking the inverter, making it a little bit smaller, and then putting a full inverter at the back of every module. The advantages, again, are just like ours. We believe, and again, take everything that I say with a grain of salt. I'm a little bit biased, is that we have a cost benefit and a little bit of system architecture benefit there. The competition in the US is very much different than what we see outside of the United States.
In the US residential market, there is a regulation called rapid shutdown. In essence, you need to be able to shut down electricity at the back of every module. And two companies do it out of the box.
It's basically Enphase and us due to the fact that we put electronics at the back of every module, and therefore there is a kind of a strange, I would call it duopoly de facto in the U.S. market, where you either buy Enphase or SolarEdge. Together, we're covering about 90% of the market, and all of the other solutions will be either more expensive or cumbersome, and this created the competition, which I believe is the great competition. It's a great product that we're competing with, very aggressive companies, very technological companies, and we simply fight one against the other.
Enphase had a very good move over the last few years after change of management. They came with new products that are addressing the U.S. market. We, at the same time, came with new products as well that are addressing the same market with the advanced capabilities.
But I think that today, what we bring to the U.S. market is the fact that our Energy Hub inverter is the first inverter actually in the market that makes the full house backup, meaning to have the ability of your home to be fully backed up in case of shortages, as we described in Texas, using our inverter. And more important than this, it's a kind of one-stop system management that allows you to connect everything in the future into the Energy Hub, allowing less work that you need to do around your load board. So once you have an EV and you have an inverter, it's very easy.
You simply connect an EV charger to the Energy Hub. And now we can use the PV to charge your electric vehicle.
If you have a battery, even if you don't have it today, but you'll have in the future, you do not need to do anything other than just connect the battery to the energy hub. Over time, we will be able to back up the home not only with battery, but also just with sunlight. So all in all, all of this is providing, I believe, a new level of resilience and a new level of ability to manage your home and your solar system in a better way. So in the U.S., it's a fierce competition. We're not happy about it all the time. We really have to execute very well. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but it's a very good and healthy one.
Outside of the U.S., we see a completely different situation.
It's a market where the rapid shutdown discussion is not existing simply because there is no such regulation. And we see a completely different landscape in which we compete. It's a landscape where you have MLPE solution, which is only us today. You see what we call Chinese string inverters and European string inverters. And the phenomena that we see there is very interesting because now the Chinese string inverters are becoming much more of a quality product, and they bite the European string inverters on the price.
So there is a movement there. At the same time, our products become more technologically sophisticated and sometimes cheaper. And we're biting the European string inverters from the other side. And what you see is that there is like the middle is squeezed between MLPE, which is us on one hand, and the Chinese on the other hand.
The competition outside of the U.S. is much more intense. The prices are much lower than in the U.S., simple economics. There is much more competition, and all in all, the thing that we are very proud of and I think happy about is the fact that 10 years after we started shipping products, we became actually the largest inverter company worldwide, being able to be not only successful in the residential market, but also in commercial and in utility.
It's a great overview. I mean, one thing I really like about what you offer is it's very simple. It's easy to operate and very efficient. So we like the product. It's always good to like a product for a stock that you like as well. I wanted to turn to Sunrun and talk about, I guess, growth at a high level. Tom, I think Sunrun's had really fantastic growth over many years. We do get a lot of questions about sort of in a post-COVID or, to be more specific, a post-vaccine world because I know that we're going to be in a post-COVID world.
But drivers of sort of recovery, and I'm thinking about both residential and larger scale kind of commercial businesses, what kind of volume of growth do you see? What sort of growth outlook do you have? What are some of the limiting factors you think about that put an upward limit on growth for you?
Yeah. So our outlook for the year is that we're going to grow our solar capacity deployments 20%-25% year over year. And as I mentioned earlier, growing storage more than 100% year over year. We see overall, I think the market's rebounded quite well and been very resilient throughout the COVID period here. I think fundamental drivers here, continued increases in utility prices, decreases in their reliability, a desire for consumers to see savings. I think a broader awareness of the need to decarbonize, great awareness of the solutions we have available for customers.
And so there's a lot of natural pull there. We completed the acquisition of Vivint last year, and I think that gives us a newfound reach. We've got the largest omnichannel presence in the industry.
You can find us online, selling door to door through our channel partners in retail and a handful of other mechanisms there that give us just incremental reach. And I think we feel as though we're very well positioned to be sort of a share taker at those levels of gain. In the very near term, I think as we come out of the COVID period, a couple of things are going on that are maybe near-term governors. We've talked a little bit about the tightness in battery supply.
It's a product that saw tons of incremental demand last year. It's still early days in manufacturing, as Ronen pointed out, building a lot of products that are really purpose-built for residential and scaling manufacturing there. And so I think there is a bit of tightness. I think we feel well positioned to get through that, but some tightness overall.
Our presence in retail, obviously, goes without saying in the COVID world, that's had some touch-and-go moments. We're generally feeling really good about that. And I think as we sort of re-enter whatever this new normal looks like, we'll work through how the shifting consumer demands and preferences shake out. But I think as we're being available anywhere that customers may be thinking about their energy consumption and alternatives for their home is really critical for us. So I think a lot of good tailwinds on the business overall. And yeah, we feel quite optimistic about the growth here in 2021.
That's helpful. And just as we think about your margin potential, as you point out, I mean, utility bills continue to go up, your costs continue to go down. That's a great wedge to have. When you think about sort of degree of competition that you face in your key markets, and I'm thinking about markets with higher penetration levels like California versus other markets with lower levels of penetration, are you seeing differentials in competition, or is your business model fairly scalable and just overall penetration levels are so low that you still see good ability to have very strong NPV per watt?
And I know you have new measures now, but would you mind just speaking to kind of that degree of competitive pressure and margin potential?
Yeah. So we made a lot of improvements over the balance of 2020 and exited, I think, in a really healthy position here on the margins that we generate per customer. And our outlook for the year has us generating total subscriber value of more than $700 million. We've got obviously some benefits accruing over the course of the year through synergies from the Vivint acquisition. I think continuing to improve and expand our product offering and product differentiation is very powerful.
The brand, I think, will be increasingly important to us as well as we move forward, being the company that consumers know and trust and know is a credible partner for them as they think about making sort of a long-term investment for their home.
So we see a lot of opportunities to expand margin as well, adding more batteries to each customer, increasing our deployment of virtual power plant opportunities. And these are things that can expand the margins we have. I think what that gives us now is, as we came into the year with a strong margin profile and then see these avenues for continued margin expansion, we're in this position now where we can choose to take some of those margin dollars and invest them in accelerating our growth.
Our growth rates this year are expected to be the fastest they've been in any recent period while still delivering strong margins.
Some businesses are in that unfortunate position of thinking, "Okay, well, do I have to sacrifice margin dollars in order to acquire customers?" I think we now have the benefit of being able to really kind of optimize both and make sure that we don't leave meaningful growth opportunities on the table while still putting up very strong overall margins. So we're pretty positive about how that sets us up in the calendar year ahead.
Yeah. And it's a really good point as well about storage really just expanding the pie for you in a meaningful way. You're adding additional value to the customer. That increases the overall value for you as well. So point well taken. I'm going to just touch on one last question for Ronen, then I'll hand it over to Lourdes. I guess, Ronen, just from a global perspective, as you think about sort of it's so easy for us in the United States to be very focused on COVID in the US, but the picture is very different around the world.
But I wondered as you kind of look at kind of in a post-vaccine world, growth outside the US for you and just trends you're seeing in terms of growth beyond the US. Let's just maybe add to what you talked about before a little bit.
It's a good question because even in the post-vaccine world, I live in Israel. I'm vaccinated, and I'm still here in Israel for the longest time ever in my professional career. But in general, I think that what we see worldwide is actually a return to normality when it comes to solar. So starting from what we call rest of the world, which is anything other than U.S. and Europe, we actually did not see any stop in the rate of installation or decline due to COVID. We saw growth that is mostly in the South Asian countries that was double-digit, very strong commercial. You don't see residential in those areas.
We're very excited about this area because we truly believe that our solution with the flexibility and the ability to build on sometimes surfaces that are not very optimal, such as floating systems, for example, allowed a lot of opportunities there. We see this as a very nice growth opportunity for us. We put a lot of effort in Korea, in Taiwan, in Thailand, Vietnam, Japan that becomes a market for us. There really no COVID at all. Europe was a little bit of a mystery because, first of all, it's not one country.
So by definition, even within COVID, we saw Italy dropping dramatically, but then bouncing back to levels that were pre-COVID. I think that when we left the area of pre-seasonal term of lower installation due to winter, we saw almost return to normality in Europe.
We had a record year in Europe, both from taking share and growth of the market itself. We saw markets like Poland that were simply exploding with, I believe, high double-digit numbers, and right now, from the discussions that we do, and actually at the end of every quarter, we do quarterly business review with the head of every country that we serve, which is 40 countries today, we basically see, I think, almost global phenomena of expectation of growth.
Not all of the areas are going to be as massive as in the United States where you see 20%-30%, but you see a very, I would say, optimistic atmosphere and a market that is ready to be taken.
The last thing that is also interesting, and again, I do not know what it will be the effect of the Biden administration in the U.S., but you start to see in Europe some stimulus plans that are becoming very interesting. In Italy, for example, you can put a solar system on your rooftop. You will get a tax break of 110% of the system value over five years. So basically, you put a solar system on your rooftop, and now the government pays for it. And actually, if you do not want to finance it from your own pocket and get the money over five years, you can sell the right to the banks immediately.
So you can basically get the system almost free of charge, put it on your rooftop, and that's all. Of course, these are terms that are supposed to help us as well to grow. It looks, as Tom mentioned, for the U.S., it looks like a very interesting year that will be ahead of us.
Interesting. Thank you. Well, why don't I turn it to Lourdes to touch on a few additional topics?
Sounds good. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Tom and Ronen, for being here with us. I think I'm going to start with Tom first. You've talked about the strong growth that you're seeing, expecting that strong growth in 2021, and we've talked about the extreme weather situations now in places like Texas as well. We see a business case for increased penetration of distributed energy resources. Can you comment on potential bottlenecks on your end?
Maybe in the sense of your inventory levels, if we see a spike in demand because of what happened in Texas, what are any bottlenecks that you see in the market these days?
Yeah. So I touched briefly on some of the tightness on the battery supply chain. That's definitely an area where we're just at this interesting intersection, I think, in any growth industry where demand has in the short run outstripped supply. And I think we feel as though we'll get through that quite well and we'll be well positioned. Overall, I think we put a lot of effort in as a company in 2020, really trying to position ourselves to be agile and able to respond to sudden movements in market demand. As we took a bunch of measures in late Q1 and early Q2, we believed that there was going to be a bounce back.
We just didn't know when. And I think we found that nice balance in our ability to move quickly.
Over the long run, there's going to be continued demand for talent in this industry, sales reps, installation workforces. I think we feel well positioned. I think we're trying to build the talent brand of choice where anybody who wants to work on this transition to a more renewable energy economy, that we are one of the first places they think about working when they think about doing that, and the evidence right now shows that we're able to effectively recruit and attract there. We've got good lead times as we've tightened our cycle times for customers.
We also have an ability to adapt to sudden spikes in demand, right, where you can shift around dates a little bit. You can extend installation time, so I think we've got a pretty resilient business model there, but it's a rapidly evolving market.
These sudden fluctuations and spikes in specific geographies require us to maintain that level of sort of agility and our ability to react quickly.
Before I switch to Ronen on a similar question, Tom, is there anything from a market design perspective that would accelerate that growth if we see changes in ERCOT, for example, or if we see changes in the Northeast? Anything from a market design perspective that would accelerate the penetration of solar plus storage?
Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind there. I mean, there's some talk right now of investment tax credits for standalone storage and things like that that will incentivize the build-out of more distributed resources. Obviously, sort of market-level mandates on the number of decentralized resources and encouraging load-serving entities, whether that's a utility or a grid operator, to have more resources on standby for these types of extreme events can be quite powerful for us. So I think a little too early to draw specific conclusions, but I think that the move is definitely in that direction.
I mean, FERC had an order last year providing more credence towards distributed resources as well. We see the failures of centralized resources, and they're going to play a role in the overall mix, but making sure that we have a more resilient system.
Then I think rooftop solar, residential-sided storage are going to be a critical component to doing that. Some discussion as well on how we think about compensating for net metering and time of use and the like that I think also generally move in the favor of encouraging more solar and storage adoption.
Understood. Understood. And Ronen, if we can switch it over to you on a similar level, any bottlenecks that you see from a global perspective on your manufacturing capacity and also raw materials? We heard some of your peers mentioning that they saw some constraints on raw materials last quarter as the economy ramped up after COVID. Can you comment on that? And also, I'll put that together with, I think you have a business that is capital-light, so maybe not a lot of investors appreciate that and how you can contract that manufacturing capacity. So maybe if you can comment on that as well.
Sure. There is a component shortage that is being built, I believe, in the last few months. It's something that we noticed over the last months growing significantly, I would say. First of all, the cycles of component shortages are not strange for us. We saw one in 2013. We saw one in 2017 and 2018. While we did not really expect this one, we took measures that help us to overcome it.
After the last shortages that we suffered in 2018 and 2019, we changed our inventory policy in a way that allows us to hold at any given point of time a substantial amount of inventory of critical components in our warehouses in a way that will allow us to overcome, I would call it, the first period of such shortages. This is exactly the situation that we're seeing right now.
We start to see vendors looking at quantities. They try to decommit, and in a sense, we have some supply in our warehouses that gives us a long enough runway to negotiate and to make necessary changes to some of our products in order to meet this. I'm not sure if we will be able to compensate for everything with the amount of inventory that we have, but we definitely feel that we have a good enough time or a period that will allow us to be more effective in the way that we're doing it.
One thing that I can tell you is also the fact that in previous years, we also decided that when shortages are coming, we will support our customers.
Two years ago, my gross margin was affected by 300-550 basis points simply because of the fact that we airshipped products to our customers to make sure that such shortages are not damaging them, and we will do whatever is necessary to bring products to our customers. At the same time, we're also facing a situation where we're very big in the amounts that we're consuming from our vendors, and in this case, we're big enough for them to consider us as a preferred customer sometimes when they think about a location.
It doesn't give us any immunity, but it certainly helps, and we're always looking about how we can capitalize on this and how we can squeeze a little bit more components wherever it is needed. On the capital side, I think that you're right about the fact that we are relatively capital-light.
We manufactured until recently with large contract manufacturers with Jabil and Flex. In 2020, we actually opened our Sella 1 factory. It's a factory that we built in Israel, north of Israel. It's a state-of-the-art robotic assembly line for our product that is located in Israel. So our R&D capabilities will be translated into building machinery and automated machinery, and also in order to allow us to do new product introduction of new products in a better way and then simply send the knowledge to the various centers around the world. So this is something that we did.
We're also now building our 2-gigawatt factory in Korea. This is an investment of approximately $100 million. So I think that what we will see over time is that we will remain relatively capital-light when it comes to our manufacturing. The majority will not be ours.
But I think that you will see more and more involvement of our engineering team and operational team in the manufacturing process itself to allow that we come to the best processes that will be cost-efficient, that will provide better quality of product, and again, will also help us to experience a little bit of the hurdles that our suppliers are seeing and therefore maybe make us a little bit more knowledgeable of how we can help them to make our products better.
Understood. And I think you have provided the number in the past. I don't remember right now. Based on your manufacturing capacity, what level are you utilizing today? Because if I remember correctly, there is room for you to expand that. So can you comment on that?
Sure, so I differentiate between our Sela 1 factory that is right now ramping up, expecting to get to full three shifts by the middle of this year, and we'll get to 100%. So this is one pocket. The second pocket is actually the Jabil and Flex in here, wait a minute. This is what happens when you have a dog sitting with you in the room, so we have today about 80%, I believe, usage of our capacity. But the beautiful thing is the fact that we can actually grow the capacity relatively quickly due to the partnerships that we have with Jabil and Flex that with the proper time will allow us to extend floor space and allow us to grow.
What actually becomes more interesting is that as we grow, the bigger constraint for faster growth is the component manufacturing and supply and not our own capacity when it comes to the factory that we have.
Got it. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Tom, I'm going to switch it over to you, and I think you touched on this a little bit already, and it's in regards to federal policy. We saw back in December the extension of some tax credits, but there is a lot of noise around another set of clean energy policies being passed potentially in the summer. What are your thoughts on what's likely in terms of we've heard a lot about an ITC for storage?
And we have, of course, our own view of what are the potential policies that we could see, but wondering if you could share from your perspective, what are the things that you see as doable this summer?
Yeah. So the extension at the end of 2020 was a great first pass, getting 26% for two more years here. I think we're probably likely to see a further extension and/or expansion of that, whether that's 26% for a longer period of time or step back to 30%. I think there's a whole host of proposals that are getting floated. Incentives for storage as well continue to increase in their importance, and I think the events of the last few weeks in Texas further highlight that, so a lot of potential on the ITC side.
I think it's been great just to see generally an administration that's pushing hard on clean energy and decarbonization here, and so you could imagine infrastructure bills and investments in worker training and the like that I think are going to be net positives for the industry overall.
I think time will tell in terms of what some of the specifics look like. I think we've often tried to operate under the guidance of current law, making sure that we have a cost structure and a trajectory in our business that can withstand stepdowns in the ITC and then take the incremental wins as we get them in terms of extensions that show up. The extension last year was great, but one we were planning against in terms of being able to weather the stepdown were it to occur.
Yep. Understood. And from a tax reform perspective, could you comment on also what are your thoughts there, also availability in the market for tax equity? And I guess unrelated, but rising interest rates, how does that impact the financing on your side?
Yeah. So as we look at overall financing for new deployments, yeah, you can break it into sort of the two component parts here on tax equity and project-level debt. On tax equity, we, on our call last week, announced that as of the call, we had over 500 megawatts of available capacity beyond what had been deployed at year-end. I think we've proven a lot of credibility as a strong partner to a number of counterparties in the tax equity market, and when they have tax appetite and are looking to deploy capital, I think we're one of the first places they call.
That's never really been a credible constraint for us, and I think we've just proven that we're a great counterparty there, so I think that'll continue to be the case.
And while there may be some shifts in the actual tax needs that are out there based on either losses or changes in tax rates, I think we overall feel as though we'll be well-positioned. And then on the project debt side, we've seen continued spread compression over the last few years. Our most recent issuance was an ABS deal through Vivint right before the acquisition closed back in September with a senior coupon of low-2% range. If you put high single-digit capital behind that, all-in cost of capital was in the range of 3.5% for that portfolio. So incredibly attractive terms.
Some movement in base rates here could provide upward pressure. We do think there is spread compression yet to happen across the full portfolio, though, within the residential asset class, which will help offset that. So I think we'll still be raising capital at very attractive terms.
To the extent that translates into even higher rates, which most likely to be a high inflation environment, some of that shows up for us in the form of utility prices increasing and therefore giving us a bit more pricing latitude while still being able to deliver a savings value prop to consumers. We'll keep an eye on that as it evolves. We tap a variety of different markets, whether that's ABS or the commercial bank debt markets, which also allow us to navigate dislocations in the market at a given moment in time and find the right moment in time to raise capital at attractive rates.
Yeah. And you're bringing a really good point in terms of utilities also being impacted by that. So you see rates going up in utilities while your costs come down. I have one final question for Ron, and then I'll hand it over to you, Stephen. The question is also around policy. If you have any comments that you want to add, of course, on the U.S. side. But I'm also interested in, given your broad footprint, any other countries that are key that we should keep an eye on in terms of policies that we should track or things that are pending these days from a legislative standpoint?
On this policy, I'm not sure that we have a different view than what Tom just described. I think that it's very positive, and I think that we're yet to be seeing what's going to be the changes. However, when it comes to other countries, I think that most of the interesting areas are today the European countries. The Green New Deal's kind of stimulus plans are going to be placed soon. I believe that in Italy, the Ecobonus, we already start to see very nice signs of growth in solar systems, and the other European countries are yet to define what are these deals that are going to put in place.
The overall notion, I think, is that if we were facing a few years ago the threat that government policies will actually make solar less favorable, I think that today under COVID and after solar being more and more widespread, the situation is different. We're actually looking at where are the opportunities that governments will make it even more attractive than it is today.
Very interesting. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Stephen, I think I'll hand it over to you for some ending remarks or any other questions that you have.
Yes. Thank you, Lourdes. We did get a couple of questions. I'll just leave with maybe one question. And this is for Tom. And Tom, it's a question geared from a technology investor perspective, but it essentially deals with distributed generation benefits versus sort of centralized utility-scale solar. And the way this investor phrases it, it sort of seems like the differences between distributed solar and centralized or utility-scale solar is the same thing as managing your own computer network versus going to the cloud and letting someone else do it.
How do you think about that analogy? What are the differences there? I can think of a few in terms of just reliability needs and local control of where you're getting your energy. But just how do you think about that sort of benefits of decentralized power versus centralized power?
Yeah. I think there's elements in that analogy that do feel right. Obviously, having if I pick a neighborhood and I've got thousands of rooftops, if anything, one thing goes wrong on a given home, obviously, the impact of the larger system is muted. There's definitely sort of just the pure diversification benefits, and then I think over time, as we think about building these things out, there's inherent cost advantages as well to going this route of distributed resources. You think about a lot of incremental renewable infrastructure at commercial scale.
We're building solar farms in deserts and wind farms on mountain passes, and the incremental transmission and distribution costs inherent in building those systems and connecting them back into the grid, I think, aren't to be ignored, I guess.
And so the opportunity for us to site things on available rooftops, we already have the infrastructure out there that makes it easy to interconnect these things back into the grid. And there are tons of suitable rooftops. So there's just a natural spot for this. And the diversification of production and geographic location and having it sited closer to consumption is quite meaningful.
Makes a lot of sense. Well, I think we're going to leave it there. I want to thank Ronen and Tom. Two great companies. And we covered a lot of really interesting material. So thank you both very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
All right. Have a great day.