Despite tariffs and uncertainty, SYSO Technologies President and Co-founder Nick Speyer said he expects another banner year for the solar industry.

Speyer recently spoke with NPM about the condition of the ISO New England (ISO-NE) market and the solar industry at large. He said that while tariffs drive prices up and executive orders from the Trump administration generate uncertainty for the industry, he believes the U.S. can expect another record-breaking year for new solar capacity installation.

His comments come after the Solar energy Industries Association (SEIA) released a report in partnership with Wood Mackenzie showing that the U.S. installed a record-breaking 50 GW of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades.

“Unfortunately, I’m not in the position to be able to quell much in the way of fear and uncertainty, but our portfolio certainly mirrored the national portfolio last year in that we supported hundreds of megawatts of solar assets going live, coming online, and operating under our management that we were helping face the market,” Speyer said. “So that’s just in one year, and that’s by far the most solar we’ve had come online in one year, and this year looks to be kind of a repeat of that.”

His theory on witnessing another record-breaking year for solar hinges on the sense of urgency generated as a result of Trump’s tariffs and executive orders impacting income tax credits (ITC) and the renewables sector.

“What I’ve heard is that there’s a lot of people rushing to get equipment ordered and landed to safe harbor their ITC from any potential change,” Speyer said. “So, if I’m in a position to be investing in projects, being fast does help mitigate some risk, because we don’t know what’s going to happen. To that extent, I would expect to see a lot more projects come online this year because of all that equipment being ordered, and folks are going to need to get those ITC bucks put to work.”

Speyer said that SYSO hasn’t made changes to its strategies in light of the Trump administration’s moves. He said their efforts remain “consistent with our ongoing thesis of us being able to support distributed energy and distributed and utility-scale solar and storage assets and wind assets to the extent that we’re able to.”

While developers and investors alike cope with uncertainty in the renewables space, Speyer said projects aiming to come online in ISO-NE are navigating additional ambiguity. In May 2024, ISO-NE submitted its proposal to comply with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 2023, which asks grid operators to transition to a first-ready first-served, cluster study model. ISO-NE is still awaiting a decision and is relying on its status quo model in the meantime.

Speyer said the ISO-NE market is in flux as it continues to use its former study model while it awaits FERC approval for its Order 2023 compliance. He said the changes have slowed things down in the region and leave looming questions for projects regarding transmission, but it’s not a total loss for developers. He said SYSO is helping developers remain profitable in markets with constant change.

If he could make his own changes to ISO-NE, Speyer said he’d bring back the operator’s price lock strategy.

In the past, ISO-NE’s Forward Capacity Market (FCM) allowed participants to “price-lock” by locking in a Forward Capacity Auction (FCA) clearing price for up to six additional capacity commitment periods, but FERC ordered ISO-NE to remove this mechanism in 2020.

“The market was originally designed with this whole construct around the idea of providing a financeable revenue stream to projects to solve the missing money problem that the capacity market is, you know, in place to solve, and in the absence of that price lock, it’s a lot harder,” he said.