Learn from a diverse set of professional communicators and campaigners on how to best communicate the value of solar. We'll dive into the latest public opinion polling to show you what works and what doesn't, and help attendees learn better ways to tell their story, attract customers, and leverage the solar industry's overwhelming popularity to develop a more active and engaged public network of supporters.

This session will discuss common transmission-level interconnection challenges for solar and storage in Texas including how to most appropriately best practices to address energy storage in interconnection standards, best practices for interconnection timelines, and other related critical processes critical related to sustained utility-scale solar growth.

What is happening with Community Solar in Texas? Drawing from a diversity of experience, this session will investigate, analyze, and evaluate how to overcome key bottlenecks to the expansion of community solar in Texas and better provide homeowners, renters, and businesses access to the benefits of shared solar energy generation.

Between tariffs on a variety of solar imports, new announcements around domestic manufacturing facilities, and DOE's American-Made Solar Prize, the past year has brought the spotlight to solar manufacturing. This session will cover manufacturing trends, including the prospect for new domestic facilities, and how these developments impact the industry downstream.

In Congress, 2019 offers new opportunities to talk about clean energy in the context of infrastructure legislation, energy and tax policy. Meanwhile, regulatory changes at EPA and the Department of the Interior will affect electricity generation and usage nationwide. Attendees will learn about both short- and long-term opportunities with potentially massive implications for the industry and hear what SEIA is doing to protect your business in Washington, D.C.

The Austin Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar Photovoltaics (SHINES) project is an exciting collaborative investigation into effective utilization of distributed energy resources in Texas, slated to conclude in April. The program, which consists of energy storage in utility and customer sited applications, smart inverters, and software solutions demonstrates how we can improve the way that we generate, deliver, and consume electricity. This session will identify and provide an initial outline of how this specific project was able to demonstrate methods to optimize the value stream for solar and storage with a business model developed for grid, commercial, and residential applications.