Sunnova Energy International Inc (NOVA) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to Sunnova's First Quarter and Full Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded, and we have allocated an hour for prepared remarks and questions and answers.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Rodney McMahan, Vice President, Investor Relations at Sunnova. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin, please note, during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties that are described in our slide presentation, earnings press release and our 2021 Form 10-K. Please see those documents for additional information regarding those factors that may affect these forward-looking statements.

Also, we will reference certain non-GAAP measures during today's call. Please refer to the appendix of our presentation as well as the earnings press release for the appropriate GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations and cautionary disclosures.

On the call today are John Berger, Sunnova's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Robert Lane, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to John.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Despite persistent macroeconomic headwinds, we made excellent progress against our financial goals for the year by posting strong first quarter results, a summary of which can be found on Slide 3.

On our previous earnings call, we noted that we expected to capture approximately 12% of our full year 2022 adjusted EBITDA, combined with the principal and interest we collect from solar loans in the first quarter. I'm happy to report we exceeded that target as actual financial results were ahead of that goal.

While our expenses have increased in total, they have been in line with our expectations and are necessary at this stage in our evolution to take full advantage of the incredible array of profitable growth opportunities that we increasingly find in front of us. Many of these growth opportunities are not baked in to the Triple-Double Triple plan.

Slide 4 summarizes the growth in Sunnova's customers, battery penetration and dealer network. In the first quarter of 2022, we added approximately 15,300 customers, an increase of 74% compared to the first quarter of last year. As in prior years, we expect our customer additions to escalate throughout the calendar year, and we still expect to meet our full year 2022 customer additions guidance of 85,000 to 89,000.

In addition to the strong demand for our solar services, we are also experiencing accelerating demand for energy services beyond solar. This includes increased demand for energy services such as batteries, electric vehicle charging, generators and load managers and includes sales to both new and existing customers.

We are also seeing a surprising surge in demand from our customers to up-power or increase their solar generation capacity with us. It is the rise in these types of ancillary services that is positioning Sunnova to realize the full option value of its customers.

While this activity will not increase our unique customer count, it will increase our services per customer and, in turn, our net contracted customer value or NCCV on a per customer basis, moving us closer to our target of $18,000 to $20,000 in NCCV per customer by the end of 2025. As of March 31, 2022, our NCCV per customer was nearly $10,800.

To properly account for this change in customer appetite and to ensure we have an accurate and honest customer count, we recently deployed new software to analyze our customer data. This analysis resulted in a reduction in our total customer count of fewer than 3,000 customers from what we reported as of December 31, 2021.

This adjustment was driven by a tightening of our customer definition to ensure only homeowners with whom we have an ongoing economic relationship are counted as customers and are counted only once, regardless of the number of services we provide to them.

This reduction was not specific to any one period, but rather was blended across the decade Sunnova has been in business and, most importantly, did not result in any loss in NCCV or require any modifications to previously issued guidance for 2022 or 2023.

Additionally, installing these new stringent customer definitions will allow us to more accurately track, on a per customer basis, the value being created through up-powerings that typically coincide with the addition of one or more new energy services. It was these previously up-powered customers that drove this customer count adjustment.

Management is focused on increasing cash flow per share by driving up the value on a per customer basis as well as growing its overall customer base. We understand that there is, unfortunately, little consistency in non-GAAP metrics in the residential solar industry. Since Sunnova has gone public, we continue to try to increase transparency and disclosure across the industry.

As a result, we know that our definition of a customer is more conservative than that of some of our peers, but our customer definition gives management and stockholders an accurate way of determining value creation. We strongly encourage investors to make sure all residential energy service providers use the same or a similar customer definition.

Our battery attachment rate on origination for the first quarter of 2022 was 19%. This drop in our battery attachment rate was unexpected, but was a timing issue, as over the last 30 days, our battery attachment rate on origination has been 29%. The first quarter timing issue was driven by a surge in sales from Sunnova New Homes and the northeast region and a delay in our underwriting processing caused by the huge sales volumes in March.

Much more importantly, as our battery supply improved as planned, our battery penetration rate continued to grow and reached 12.5% as of March 31, 2022. This is inclusive of over 1,900 battery retrofits we have installed life to date.

Our growth continues to be driven by our rapidly expanding dealer network, which as of March 31, 2022, stood at 915 dealers, sub-dealers and new homes installers. We expect to eclipse our year-end 2022 target of 1,000 dealers in the coming months.

Finally, on Slide 4, we have updated our information on customer contract life and expected cash inflows. As of March 31, 2022, the weighted average contract life remaining on our customer contracts equaled 22.3 years, and expected cash inflows over the next 12 months has increased to $403 million.

Earlier in the month, we published our second annual ESG report, detailing the steps we have taken over the last 12 months to enhance our ESG strategy and reporting. Our new report titled, Charging Ahead, describes the impact of the growth we have seen this year and how we are integrating ESG best practices into our core business to drive positive outcomes for our business and society.

Building off our first report last year, our next step was to establish a more formal forward-looking strategy. To start this process, we conducted a materiality assessment to identify the ESG topics that were most important to our business and to our stakeholders.

We engaged our employees, investors, community partners, vendors and other groups to assess ESG-related topics. From this assessment, we identified 9 priority ESG topics for our business as well as others that we consider material. Results of this assessment can be found in our new report.

With our priority topics defined, we engaged leaders from across our organization to ensure a strong oversight of these topics and to develop multiyear goals to drive progress. These goals also complement our Triple-Double Triple growth strategy, whereby our planned growth and our customer base will allow us to offset 52 million metric tons of CO2 by year-end 2023.

Finally, we also made progress in enhancing our ESG data and aligning it with leading reporting frameworks. In 2021, we aligned our reporting with the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, or TCFD, reporting guidelines. This was an important step in demonstrating our commitment to climate action as a leading energy company.

To continue our alignment with TCFD recommendations, our goal is to complete a Scope 3 inventory for all material categories and to set formal climate targets by year-end 2023. We will also be working to conduct climate scenario analysis to better assess climate risks and opportunities for our business. We look forward to sharing these results in future reports.

Our team is pleased with the progress we have made to date and look forward to continuing to integrate ESG into everything we do. I encourage you to read our new report, which can be found on the ESG section of our Investor Relations website. And we welcome any questions or engagement on our current strategy.

I will now hand the call over to Rob.

Thank you, John. Slide 8 summarizes our recent financing activity and liquidity position. The 2022 financing transactions completed to date include $150 million in tax equity funds as well as a well-timed $298 million securitization closed in late February with a blended coupon of 3.1%.

Our total liquidity as of March 31, 2022, was $703 million, down from $831 million as of December 31, 2021, but up from $276 million as of March 31, 2021. This planned utilization of liquidity was driven primarily by the seasonality of cash flows and the expected increased requirement for working capital due to growth.

Included in these numbers are both our restricted and unrestricted cash as well as the available collateralized liquidity we could draw upon from our tax equity and warehouse credit facilities. Given available unencumbered assets as of March 31, 2022, this available collateralized liquidity equaled $378 million.

Beyond that, subject to available collateral, we had $423 million of additional capacity in our warehouses and open tax equity funds. That represents over $1.1 billion of liquidity available exclusive of any additional tax equity funds, securitization closures or warehouse expansions later this year.

On Slide 9, you will see our fully burdened unlevered return on new origination was 9.2% as of March 31, 2022, based on the trailing 12 months. While our returns increased from last quarter, so too did our cost of debt, resulting in an anticipated reduction in our implied spread to 6.0%. As we have discussed before, we model a long-term average for our implied spread in the 500 basis point range to estimate our guidance targets.

As we mentioned on our last earnings call, we and our dealers have been and will continue to increase pricing to offset the increased cost of capital. Taken together, these price increases, the youth of our industry, our increasing operating leverage and our continued growth in additional energy services will keep margins wider in the near term and position the company to push our implied spread back towards the 600 basis point range this year.

As to the progress of these price increases, you can see our first quarter fully burdened unlevered return increased from the prior quarter, and we expect further improvement in Q2.

Slide 10 contains both our gross contracted customer value or GCCV and NCCV. In just 3 years' time, NCCV went from $968 million as of March 31, 2019, to $2.2 billion or $19.67 per share as of March 31, 2022. As we discussed in the Q&A last quarter, regardless of what the proper discount rate may be, NCCV is still a punitive way to view Sunnova's blowdown value and gives us 0 value for our platform, customer option value or growth.

Remember, NCCV only includes locked-in contractual cash flows and thus excludes any value for growth, renewals, upsells, up-powerings, state or national incentive appreciation or other upside.

Another way to view NCCV and why we continue to believe a 4% discount rate is justified is to look at the undiscounted cash flows. That is net the nominal cash inflows generated by the contracted energy services we provide against all debt principal, interest expense, tax equity distributions, estimated service cost and even an estimate for defaults based on current actuals. This full residual cash flow view pencils out to approximately $2.8 billion as of March 31, 2022, which is approximately a 25% premium over our $2.2 billion NCCV estimate.

While investors are understandably concerned about rising interest rates, we encourage you to keep 3 things in mind. First, the interest expense of our existing debt is locked in, and we do not have any scheduled maturities on our corporate debt until 2026.

Second, we have managed and will continue to manage our fully burdened unlevered returns with a view towards offsetting increased interest rates. Third, our ability to increase unlevered and levered returns is high, driven by the increase in utility rates, which is our primary competition.

But no matter what discount rate one uses in their valuation, the fact will remain Sunnova has retained more value, originates assets more profitably and is accelerating the acquisition of long-term cash flows more quickly than any other company in the industry. As such, we can profitably invest to further increase growth or return capital to shareholders.

We maximize shareholder value through balancing customer growth with healthy margins, increasing services sold per customer, maximizing the amount of power sold to customers and minimizing losses of contractual cash flows from customer defaults. Sunnova is a technology-enabled service business or a wireless power company focused on providing customers a better energy service at a better price, giving them every reason to pay us for that essential service.

Currently, over 10% of our customer base is paying less than half than they would to their monopoly utility for the energy they use to power their homes by being a Sunnova customer due to significant increases in their utility rates. We expect that percentage could reach as high as 50% of our customer base as early as next year as utilities continue to ask for massive rate increases. This, together with our industry-leading customer service, has resulted in default and delinquency rates that are the lowest among our peers in an industry that is already the lowest of any major consumer asset class.

Beginning on Slide 12 through Slide 14, you will find our guidance that includes our detailed 2022 guidance, liquidity forecast and our major metric growth plan, the Triple-Double Triple Plan. There are no changes to these estimates as we are keeping our targets unchanged from where they were on our last earnings call.

As of March 31, 2022, approximately 90% and 70% of the midpoints of our 2022 and 2023 targeted revenue and principal and interest we expect to collect on solar loans was locked into existing customers as of that same day, respectively. This visibility is what gives us comfort in reaffirming our guidance today.

I will now turn the call back over to John.

Thanks, Rob. Changing consumer energy demands, global security issues and climate change are creating an urgency to transform the global energy industry. To aid in this critical evolution, we are embracing an equitable, practical and balanced energy future by providing homeowners the affordable, reliable and sustainable energy they need.

To ensure Sunnova is the energy service provider homeowners choose to power their energy independence, we will continue to distinguish ourselves by focusing on what differentiates us from the competition: a combination of service, software and aggregation. At Sunnova, we strive to provide our customers with a superior energy service, one that is more reliable and more affordable than the competition, including the centralized utilities.

Enabling our ability to provide this best-in-class service is our substantial investment in software for dealers, customers and for aggregation. Some of these software investments automate functions and displace the need for additional hires, increase the productivity of employees and dealers to serve our rapidly expanding customer base.

Providing the level of service required for this industry is a significant technological, logistical and operational undertaking and one that can only be managed by utilizing a next-generation software platform. Our software platform, together with our logistics capabilities, supply chain management, billing and collections team and efficient customer operations, all performed in-house by Sunnova employees, provides us with tremendous operating leverage and a huge advantage over our peers.

It is this combination of software and service that enables aggregation. As we obtain an increasing amount of scale, we can better utilize this combination to enable certain aggregation capabilities, which creates additional value for both our customers and Sunnova. Currently, we have multiple grid service programs in place with an estimated contracted revenue of $79 million over the next 20 years with even more programs in the pipeline to expand that amount.

Bringing these competitive moats together fulfills our expansive, customer-centric vision for the future. With the Sunnova Adaptive Home, we can provide an energy service offering that integrates solar power, battery storage, secondary generation, roofing, electric vehicle charging, energy and control management technologies, emission credit management and more to give customers unparalleled energy capabilities and reliability for their homes.

We see the Sunnova Adaptive Home as the core vision that fulfills the concept of no net metering needed and drives our growth in both absolute terms and on a per customer basis. After almost a decade of building out our service capabilities, we are well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us as we help build the home of the future for our customers through continued execution and by making the Sunnova Adaptive Home a reality.

With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Philip Shen from ROTH Capital.

In terms of the anti-circumvention case, I was wondering if you might be able to talk us through the impacts that you guys might be seeing on the business. Our work suggests resi module pricing has increased 10% to 25% versus pre-anti-circumvention levels. So just in a couple of months or a month, pricing has gone up a lot.

What kind of impact are you guys seeing? What kind of module availability do you think you have for Q2, 3 and 4? It sounds like a number of players have exited or certainly are holding off in terms of chipping in. And that includes, I think, a large Korean company. So just curious if you can share the impacts there.

Phil, thanks. This is John. We -- I'm not going to go through all of the -- what was gone through in the prior calls with the NextEra and Enphase call. I think both CEOs did a good job of explaining what our view is of the case. I would add that there's been some investigative reporting that's been out in the media over the last week or so. I think it points to the fact that this is, let's call it, something that's somewhat fraudulent in terms of the case itself.

And so I do think it's going to get resolved in a way that makes sense for the country as well as the other CEOs did. So let's get to us. We had a view, going into the year, first of all, that there would be some -- a war in Europe. There would be increased oil and gas prices globally, in hydrocarbon coal as well. And so we were very bullish on demand. That turned out to be accurate, and we started stockpiling equipment along with our dealers.

We now have over $1.1 billion in firm contracts that you don't see in the balance sheet. We're using our balance sheet and our cash flows with our partners, equipment partners to secure batteries, inverters, panels in large quantities. And we encouraged our dealers to do that months ago, and so they did so. So we feel very, very comfortable moving into 2023 on the equipment side of things, and we'll continue to be aggressive in terms of securing that equipment.

And I would add that this is an insurance policy for our dealers, so these are equipments that we've secured to make sure that if anything falls apart on their contracts and their -- what they have in inventory, we have some equipment inventory as well, as you can see in our balance sheet, that we'd be there for them. And I don't think anybody else in the industry does that.

So first and foremost, we're in great shape on the equipment side. I feel very comfortable. I'll add on the battery side of things, we ended exactly where we thought. We were at a good pace right now with battery deliveries. Some weeks are better than others, but we're in a pretty good shape on the battery front, just like we thought we would be. And so we look to be in great shape across on the equipment side.

Now as I think Badri mentioned, the Enphase CEO, some things can change. Certainly, we're watching for that. But right now, we feel very, very comfortable, particularly over the next few months, and certainly, as I said, securing all the equipment looking into 2023. We feel like we're in great shape.

On the pricing side of things, we haven't seen a big price increase. I've checked that. We have not seen that. Maybe do I anticipate some of the pricing as we move forward in the year? Could it move up just based on demand? And we'll talk about this with the utilities massively increasing retail rates across the country. Demand in our sector is going to go and has gone way up. Yes, I think that absolutely could happen.

But again, we haven't seen that kind of percentage, 10%, 25% yet. But it's possible to see it. But I also think I'm completely confident that we'll be able to raise rates as an industry to -- because the utilities are raising rates so much to more than offset that. So I feel very comfortable with where we are as an industry, and I feel extremely comfortable where we are as a company.

Great. That leads me to my next question around raising pricing for customers in the space you have there. You talked about that on the last call. Can you talk us through what you've done thus far? How much have you increased pricing to customers? What's been the average increase, what percentage of your markets that you serve? Have you increased pricing?

And how much more room do you think you can? And based on your prepared remarks, it seems like maybe half of your customer base could be paying half of the income and utility rate come 2023. So it seems like there's a fair amount of space to not only raise pricing, but with that, despite rising costs, maintain a very healthy spread.

Yes, Phil. So I'll address that last part first. In terms of the customer base and what portion is paying, less than half of what they would pay the utility, that is -- that would go more towards our locked-in customer base, right, so those customers that have signed up. It could have been a few months ago. It could have been a few years ago. But we've locked that in, as we've been very clear about. And so that's a locked-in spread, if you will, that keeps increasing.

Why does it keep increasing? Because customers are more and more inclined economically to pay us, right? So the default delinquency rate was already very low for our industry. It keeps going lower, for -- at least we can speak to ourselves. We think a couple of our peers on the service providing side are seeing some of that same phenomenon, but we're really seeing a drop in the default rate.

And that's real cash. When you don't lose entire contracts of value, not just cost of the contract that we paid the value, that's cash to equity, right? So we're making a point there that says, hey, look, we're -- our customers are getting a better and better deal, which means that our shareholders will get paid and, therefore, get a better and better deal.

On pricing on a forward basis, okay, so on forward basis, where I think your main question was, we have increased price across the board. We have some other opportunities to increase price. We'll continue to do that as we move forward here in the next few weeks and months. And I'll give you a little bit of numbers here.

We are aiming as the opening of -- Rob said in the opening remarks to that 600 basis points spread. We can obviously look at some of the previous ABS, the recent one, including Sunrun's recently and then GoodLeap's, and we can see that we've got a little bit of increasing number of return to do. I can tell you that's well on its way. That 9.2% that we reported out was a snap as of March 31. We made a comment that Q2 is going to continue to increase. It already has. And so you can see a trajectory there of increasing the unlevered return.

So how much room do we have? If you look at it, there was about -- for every 100 bps of unlevered return is equivalent to about $0.0175, give or take, per kilowatt-hour. Now this varies on region. It varies -- what the kilowatt rate from the utility is in that particular region, whether it's really high, like $0.28 or it could be a rather low on like $0.12 moving up, but that's a rough rule of thumb. And we have seen across just so far, and there's going to be a lot more, we know it's baked into -- in terms of the utilities asking their respective PUCs for rate increases. But we've seen an estimated across our base of about $0.035 to $0.04 a kilowatt-hour increase already.

So you look at that, we have more than enough room to increase to 200 basis points if we needed to do that. I would say, obviously, the starting point was the Q4 number, kind of call it the high 8s unlevered return. And so we have more than ample room to continue to increase to get that spread back where we need it. So the cost of capital continues to increase, which it does look like the spreads kind of peaked here a little bit with that GoodLeap deal.

I think the next transaction did a little bit inside that and is better. We expect the market to heal as the solar ABS market and the commercial banking market really through a lot of the solar paper out -- with -- in terms of baby with the bathwater with the other consumer asset classes, mortgages, autos, unsecured, et cetera.

And so as the performance of the paper, the data comes to investors, they're realizing that this is a very high-quality paper. Even as the country moves into a recessionary stance, people are paying us. And I'm going to go back to the point where as utility rates go up, you've got to pay the power bill, right, at the house. And so this is a bunch better deal, and it's actually economically accretive to folks.

So as times get tougher, they have a willingness to pay us in that spread, and the ABS market will come down accordingly. So we feel very comfortable. There's ample room to raise -- continue to raise rates. We've been doing so. I think we're probably leading the industry on doing that, but we're very focused on maintaining our profitability.

Our next question comes from Brian Lee from Goldman Sachs.

John, just maybe staying on the pricing topic for just a second. Could you sort of remind us what the pricing strategy is, I guess, in terms of timing? Is it dynamic where you're basically going into each market on a real-time basis and letting your sort of dealers work within an ever-evolving/increasing pricing paradigm?

Or is it more systematic where you're going in every few months and just raising the bar, just kind of level set us as to how dynamic the pricing strategy and how it works? And then how quickly does it flow through if you're raising prices by $0.01, $0.015 across the board in April? Does that show up within a quarter? Or kind of how quickly does it flow through?

Yes. We have so many different contract types that we're always launching out in new regions and in new services. And indeed, one of the main points for this call is just how many new services we've launched out, how many new services we're launching out in the next few weeks and months. It's quite substantial.

So the answer to your question, Brian, is going to be that we're constantly looking at pricing every single day. We have an entire pricing team just to make sure that what we're offering out there makes sense for the customer, makes sense for our dealer and makes sense for us.

So where I think you really wanted to go is like, okay, so these types of main increases in price in response to utility rates moving up and in response to cost of capital moving up, what does that effort look like across the board. And that is a big lift, and we don't do it lightly and we don't do it very often. But I think that we can all agree that the cost of capital has moved up pretty significantly over the last 3 or 4 months. That's a fact, and we're responding to that fact, and we said we could.

And if you look at the utility rates and they've gone way up, as I just gave in my answer to Phil's question. And by the way, your $0.01, $0.015, I would double that. And we spend time first going into, if not more -- we spend time going into our dealers and saying, look, the consumer can pay more and still have a great deal. So we need to push this up. It's nobody's fault. The fed is pushing up rates, as we all know, in response to pretty significant inflation. And so it is what it is.

This money is not necessarily going to Sunnova. It's offsetting the increased cost of capital plus other increased costs of equipment, et cetera. And they -- we work together. It's obviously nothing that we all want to really do. But at the end of the day, we work together. And it's the same as the equipment manufacturing companies that are out having to raise price for freight costs and cost of different materials going up and different product and assembly of labor and -- assembly labor and so forth.

So it's the same dynamic, but we do -- and across the board and we do it by dealer. And we work together with that dealer saying, hey, there's an ability to raise price on the consumer, and we need to do so because the costs have gone up across for us and for the dealer and for the equipment manufacturer.

Yes. Fair enough. Makes a lot of sense. And then earlier in the call, I think Rob mentioned the 3% plus blended rate you saw on the ABS, the securitization that you did in February, I think as you guys have mentioned a couple of times already. Sunrun did one recently. I think the yield was close to 5%, and spread was over 200 bps versus kind of the lower 100 bps we've seen over the past 6 to 9 months. So I guess a couple of questions in here.

Is that attractive to you as you think about what you just did in February and then moving into your next securitization over the course of the year, just kind of where the latest ones have been pricing? Or are you looking at other forms of paper where you think you might be able to get better terms? Just kind of maybe a bigger picture view on how you're thinking about financing and then maybe the timing of what you're planning next.

I'll answer briefly and turn it over to Rob to answer in more detail. So we have locked in our debt on our existing customers. We've been very clear about that. So it's really on a forward basis. I will remind everybody that we do have hedges on our warehouses. And so we -- obviously, those hedges have appreciated significantly, so we're hedged on any interest rate increase before we do the term securitization or do a commercial bank deal or whatever.

I would say that we're constantly scouring the market and making sure that there's nobody willing to lend money out to firms like us for less amount, and Rob does a very good job on that. So we're very, very confident that we have a full view of whatever is going on in the marketplace.

We also want to make sure we lock in terms, so we're not really interested in locking in very short-term debt. We want to go ahead and lock that in because we're not here to trade the bond market or try to figure out where interest rates are going to go over the next few months and years. I mean I don't think anybody can really figure out where they're going to go today.

So when you look at that, we've done, I think, a very good job of hedging any sort of near-term weeks', months' risk on the interest rate side of things. And so doing a deal, as long as you can continue to push those unlevered returns to the question I answered before, you should be fine. And it's a spread at the end of the day is the way to think about it. Rob, I'll turn it over to you for any additional comments.

Yes, I'd say that it's a good point that John makes about looking out of the market, and I think that you're implying there as well that there are all sorts of other options. I think that what we have found is that the ABS market still remains very attractive. I think that the bank term market does have its attractions as well. But at this point, we think that the ABS pricing is still better than what we would find in that market.

There's opportunities on the loan side as well, and we've talked about this that there's going to be some math with some loans where it does make more sense to monetize those loans upfront instead of to put those into the ABS market. So we really are looking at all options.

I will say about that last Sunrun deal, that was, I think, the biggest TPO ABS that had really come on to the market. That was -- it was a really big deal. But also, it's not really apples-to-apples with the loan transactions. The lease and PPA transactions tend to price at a slightly wider spread and also have longer duration. So it's not necessarily apples-to-apples, and we expect it to price outside of, say, a loan deal with a 5-year duration. But still, I thought that was a good deal that they had done out there in the market.

The other thing I'd say, and this is really critical, is that if you take a look at what we sort of go out there in the market, and I think this happens a lot more on the loan side with us versus our competition, is that we're really trading on our low default delinquency rates, and they're trading a lot more on their higher refinancing rates. So their ability to have in-house refinancing arms that go and take the solar loan and refinance it faster than ours, I think that's something that helps them, but won't necessarily help them in a rising interest rate environment.

For our side, our default delinquency rates keep going down. And we've talked about this, I think, in the prepared remarks here in John's comments as well. It really makes a difference. And if you take a look and say what is the one thing that will take value away from an asset base, it's default rates, the cumulative default rates. By us being able to crush that, not only does that accrete to the debt holders, but obviously, it accretes long term to the equity holders as well. So that is sort of the hidden interest rate savings that really isn't made apparent right off the bat.

And then finally, just going back to the point that John made, we've locked in these interest rates. We've locked in that high-yield bond last year. Really, the point that we're making was, hey, thank goodness, we did the deal when we did the deal, but the market still remains very attractive today.

Our next question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith from Bank of America.

So just going back to Phil's earlier question and some of the responses there. Can you talk a little bit about the balancing the impact of this increase in price point ultimately against the increases in the panels, inverters, as you alluded to at one point, as well as ABS? I think you specifically alluded to 2Q and seeing that sequential quarter-over-quarter improvement in returns.

How do you think about that through the balance of the year, if you will? Like are we going to continue to be able to see that trend as you think about your ability to continue feathering in that weighted average inventory price into your price points as you think about it through the quarter this year? Again, how much latitude is in price...

Yes, Julien, this is John. Yes, you will continue to see the unlevered return move up as we move forward through the year. Obviously, we'd like to have that sooner rather than later. And again, we've already made a lot of price moves. So I think that, that would be a good assumption to make as far as looking at Q2 versus the Q1. But we're going to continue to look for other opportunities.

For instance, the natural gas price move from, say, roughly [$4 an mm to $7, $8 an mm] is not baked into any utility rate that I'm aware of at this point in time. But it will be, right? Rough rule of thumb, as you know, probably better than most is take a natural gas move $1 per MMBtu, multiply it times like 7,000 heat rate, right? So you're looking at a pretty good number of $0.02, $0.03, $0.04 depending on the utility move on top of that just for the gas move, if not more than that, that we've had that's not baked into these rates.

So we've already seen, as I laid out, roughly call it a $0.04 rate increase across our base. Every 100 bps, like I said, is roughly about $0.0175 per kilowatt hour. And so we've been able to move up accordingly, and we continue to see a lot more room to move up accordingly. And that's on top of digesting some of the increases in equipment costs, which ultimately -- when you look at the relative cost increase have not been that high, right, when you look at the overall EPC on the resi side.

And the utilities scale, that's not our business. I can't speak to that. That's obviously a bigger -- much, much bigger impact, as you know. But on the resi side of things, there's more than ample room to increase price as utilities increase prices fairly dramatically. And we have done so, and we will continue to do so.

Got it. And just to clarify around that, just how are you thinking about your [invisible] position? It seems like that's declining sequentially here. How do you think about rebuilding? What's the right level considering the backdrop? And then also on the battery side, what's your position [on that front]? And kind of a similar conversation about raising prices versus the cost impact. And obviously, you have some attach rate implications there as well.

Yes. We've done a very good job of looking ahead. I can't tell you that I really -- I think it's most unfortunate that the Commerce Department is doing what it's doing and taking up the anti-circumvention. I think it's a total disaster for the country. It doesn't meet any objections whatsoever for any part of the country, including labor. So again, I'm not going to go down that road. I think that's been well treaded in the last couple of earnings calls from our peers.

But what I would say is, is that we looked ahead because we thought a lot of demand was coming. We're right. And I thought that was because the utility rates have moved up strongly globally. That indeed happened. We know that the war is a big part of that, particularly over the last, call it, 60 days or so. And so we got some -- we locked in some pretty nice deals on the pricing and the volume side of things.

And so we haven't really seen and we're not going to see too much inflation on the equipment side as we move forward in time. But as we maybe get into the 2023, we have more than enough and ample room to be able to move that up and work with our users to do that if they need to do so.

So I just want to go back in on the inventory line. We have, as I mentioned in answering Phil's question, over $1.1 billion of firm contracts for equipment, for batteries, for inverters, for panels. And that is not going to show up on our balance sheet. We're not going to say who they are because there's confidentiality. But there's a lot that we are able to do out there in the marketplace to secure equipment for our dealers. And it is for our dealers, and it is an insurance policy for our dealers.

So to make sure that we're doing everything we can to address the risks as we see coming up, and I think we've done a pretty good job of looking around the curve and seeing some things that maybe some others didn't see and making a big move to address that risk accordingly.

Our next question comes from Joseph Osha from Guggenheim Partners.

John, I just wanted to return to this issue of cost of capital again in a slightly different way. You have said in the past that, all other things being equal, you would rather retain value as opposed to monetize it because you think that's a little expensive. And obviously, it's gotten a little more expensive.

You've also famously said, don't name your cows. If something is not working, try something else. So I'm wondering in the context of what the market seems to be thinking at the moment, especially as regards to the equity price. Could we see you shift your strategy in terms of how you pull in and monetize contracts versus retain them?

Yes, Joe, this is John, and I'll let Rob answer the question. But yes, I'll answer directly, given that you quoted me, too. That still stands. We do what's right for shareholders. And look, the retaining of assets and cash flows really goes, and it's been a huge win across the board, whatever it is. When we retained all the emission credits, retained all of our lease PPA. We've built the balance sheet, and we're able to issue the industries really first and only bond last year. And that's a big win. And that was a well-timed deal, as Rob mentioned earlier, and that really enables all of that.

Now we have a huge contracted cash flow base. And regardless of what discount, rate, we're not going to get into like whatever discount rate you want to use your colleagues and anybody else you use it. We give enough information out there, you can be able to figure it out. Basically, every 100 basis point move, you can take or add $250 million of NCCV value to it or $2.20 a share, and so that will help you move the discount rate.

But use whatever you want. Our point is, is that these are contracted cash flows. This cash is coming in. And the way I look at it is we either -- as this cash grows at a rapid rate, we either take a portion of the cash and we invest it, basically spend it and invest it and growing the business so that we get more, much more long-term contracted cash flows and generate more earnings or we give it back to shareholders.

If it's not returning the investment like it should and we're not being accretive on a per customer basis NCCV or on a per share basis or in earnings, but cash flow per share is the only thing that matters, as you know. And then we'll give the money back to shareholders in some fashion. With that said, there are times and places where it makes sense to sell some assets. And you're right, I've always said, don't name your cows, and I still firmly believe that.

And I think you're going to see a transaction out of us sometime this year. We'll pick our time in choosing, and we'll probably sell some assets. They will probably be loans, but we're open to anything that makes sense for shareholders and always have been. And certainly, now that we have our balance sheet, we really have a lot of optionality, and we're going to take advantage of that optionality. Rob, you got any more comments?

No. I mean, I think there's a lot of math that goes into it. But at the end of the day, it's what John says. What is it that's going to make sure that we are -- that we build up asset value, and cash being a part of that asset value, and then what are we going to be doing that's going to flow the most cash back to investors. It's not just about short-term cash, it's about cash for the long term. But sometimes you make short term -- short-term cash is long-term cash. So we're going to make sure to do what's in the best interest of the shareholders.

Excellent. And then just one other question. One of the interesting things about that run ABS is the FICO was down a bit. Obviously, we're all going to run out of rich people eventually. I'm wondering what you're seeing in terms of the FICO profile for your assets and whether you've got any philosophy there in terms of where you're willing to go or not go.

Yes, it was down a bit, but I don't think it was down that much. And I want to remind everybody that -- yes, I don't think that really makes a huge difference on payment performance from what we've seen. But I would say this that as a reminder, there are plenty of "rich folks" that can't seem to pay their bills and don't have a good FICO score. I know some, and there are plenty of people that don't make a lot of money that find a way to pay their bills every day.

So the FICO is your ability to pay a bill. And so I just want to remind folks that, for instance, we estimate about 40% of our customer base is LMI customers. So these are people that increasingly, obviously, given what's going on in the energy -- global energy crisis, right, Joe, that we have that more and more people that really need to save money, i.e., they don't make a lot of money are turning towards this offering.

And I think that's one of the reasons -- I know it is one of the key reasons that Governor DeSantis yesterday vetoed a rate increase and a potential elimination of competition and the monopoly to give the people a floor, the ability to cut their bills in a time where they're rapidly escalating. So I don't -- I won't -- I don't think that, that securitization means that we're running out of "high FICO customers" or anything about nature. There's plenty out there.

In fact, if anything, again, going back into these natural gas, coal, oil, massive price increases and translating those into utility rate increases, we're seeing demand spread across geographies like crazy. And that's bullish as far as pulling in more and more customers that have the ability and have demonstrated that they can pay their bills on time. So I think overall, the industry, I can speak to it, is extremely healthy from that regard. Rob?

I would also add, though, that we do tend to look at ways that we can help underserved communities. So it's -- we do not do a whole lot of press releases and stuff like that on these sort of things, but there are a lot of projects that we have that we're doing. And we'll start talking about those a little bit more that are targeting underserved communities and trying to bring solar to places where, traditionally, our industry has not made big headwinds.

But at the same time, our FICOs have actually remained very consistent on a weighted average basis. And we -- I would not look at a lowering of FICO as a negative sign. I would look at that as a way that we and others in the industry are finding a way to broaden the market. One of the things we use in our underwriting is FICO, but there are a whole lot of other things that we look at as well to try to determine whether or not a customer is going to be good customer, and that really goes to that default delinquency rate that I'm talking about.

The best part of -- or the easiest part to make sure you have a customer that is paying you is to make sure that, that customer that you originate will be a customer that will pay you. And that can't just be done with FICO. There's a lot of other analysis that goes in there. And it can -- it's a lot, but we've got a great team. And we've made the right investment here, and it's one that's really paying off for us.

Our next question comes from David Peters from Wolfe Research.

Just on NEM 3.0, I'm curious you guys' expectation for the path forward and the proceeding, when this might pop back up on the CUPC's calendar, assuming -- I think that would take the form of an alternate PD. Tell me if I'm wrong. But -- and then just related to the comments on the Governor's veto of the net metering bill in Florida would be great.

Yes, this is John. I don't know, and I don't think anybody knows. But I assume the California Public Utility Commission members know. But what I would say this is that I think is witnessed by what Governor DeSantis did last night, the right thing to do is to look at how do you accommodate both the centralized or the monopoly needs for some additional revenues and then how do you balance that for allowing competition, for allowing consumer choice for consumers and what is an extremely challenging time for consumers with regards to energy.

And I don't think that, that's going to stop anytime soon and slow down. I think it gets worse as we move forward in time. I think that's already baked in and goes to my prior comments. None of the natural gas price move we've seen recently, for instance, is really baked into those utility rates yet, but it's coming.

So I think that if I'm running a state and I'm governor, I'm looking at this and I'm going to go do what's best for the people who are paying the bills. They're also called another name, especially come November, they're called voters. And going against them versus trying to go and please the constituency of a monopoly, a utility with this union, I'm sorry, I'm not going to make that choice.

I'm going to choose the people, and I'm going to choose the people that are working hard, they're trying to make ends meet. And I'm going to make sure that they have the ability to have competition and choice and a better energy service at a better price. And so I think that California will make the right decision. Governor will soon make the right decision. I hope he does.

He has now got a really shining example in Florida. And I think that hopefully, more and more folks on the Republican side will see that solar is actually something that's competitive. It's a market-based, not a government-based business. And we'll get on board with it and stop some of the politics that we see sometimes on the news channels and so forth and really move forward and do what's right for the people.

So I think that will happen, but I'll tell you what, I will answer the question you didn't ask, which is a little bit dangerous always. But if California doesn't make the right decision, as I made reference to earlier, given these utility price increases, natural gas, oil, coal and so forth, we'll just pick up origination someplace else where it makes sense.

But I actually think they're going to come out with something that makes sense, and we'll still do business there, and we'll sell a lot more battery service there as well as EV charging, generator and load management. So I think it's going to turn out well. But increasingly, they need to do what's right for their state, and we'll be fine on our side.

Great. I appreciate that. One other question I have is just, in the prepared remarks, you mentioned the purposely higher OpEx to take advantage of growth opportunities. I was wondering if you could just give a sense of where you see that trending on a per customer basis over the coming year or so. And then specifically with respect to the growth opportunities not included in NCCV or the Triple-Double Triple plan, just when do you think you see those start materializing?

Yes. I looked at that and I made that comment because if I'm looking at this, I'm looking at the spending increase year-over-year. It does have SunStreet in there. So it's a bit of -- that's one of the big reasons we list that out in our disclosures.

But I look at that as I try to put myself in the shoes of a shareholder, which obviously I am and say, "Okay, well, what's the spending increase? What's the trend here?" And that goes directly to your question. And I want to point out that on a per customer basis, we have been dropping. We continue to see that drop, but I'm just looking at the aggregate or nominal amount of spending. And I wanted to point out that I can't say what a lot of these growth opportunities are right now. We haven't disclosed those. But they're significant, and they're not making the Triple-Double Triple.

And I think that once we get the hiring done, the -- any sort of possible acquisition and so forth and any sort of implementation of software, implementation of our services, that we'll make those different growth opportunities public.

They'll probably be -- they probably will be service -- additional services. Again, it could be additional acquisitions. It could be additional markets that we open up. It could be additional verticals that we open up. It could be additional fulfilling Sunnova Energy International's destiny and moving in the international market.

So there's a lot of things here that we have an availability to that we're investing in right now, and I just wanted to point that out that. But that's directionally worthy spending is going, and it will be spent intelligently. And that spending will generate a return for shareholders or I will cut it.

Our next question comes from Ben Kallo from Baird.

Could you talk maybe just about the customer visibility and where you stand versus where you thought you would enter into the year?

Yes, Ben. This is John. Yes. The seasonality, I think we could have done maybe a little better job. I could have -- on saying seasonality in terms of the customer additions and so forth, I think we did a pretty good job on that on adjusted EBITDA plus P&I and cash flows and such. But -- which we did exceed, I want to point that out.

But on the customer side of things, there are always trials and tribulations in the field as you go into Q1, from holiday hangover, more vacations and so forth, winter weather in certain areas of the country that are more difficult than others and just differing issues with Q1. It's obviously a seasonal low quarter of origination in service and even cash generation, right?

So I'd look back and I'd say in terms of the service, if you noticed, the service line or the other line of customers really dropped from Q4 to Q1. I wouldn't make much of that other than the fact that we're retooling some of our service-only offerings.

You probably saw a release on Sunnova repair services. And we're going to be doing some more selling through our dealers for the service, but more on our direct sales desk in terms of selling service-only contracts out and facilitating the selling of those services through our service technicians, which again, they're doing a great job and making customers happy. And happy customers are paying customers, right?

So it's really more about that. So you should see that line move up here in the next quarter or 2 pretty considerably. I wish that line would have not dropped and then that would be my expectations. We'd have gotten a few more customers there. The change in definition in eliminating the up-powering customers, that probably dropped the customer count by about 600 or so in Q1. But again, I thought that was the right thing to do, is that if we have some additional information, that it's quite possibly the same customer signing up for us with 2 contracts, maybe one is the husband, one is the wife, which was the case.

And I personally saw one, by the way, in New Jersey just last week. Then we shouldn't count that as 2 customers. They should be 1 customer. So some of that was -- it was an impact as well. But went ahead and did what I thought was the honest thing to do and right thing to do and say that's one customer.

Now the cash flow is the same to the company, right? And the value is -- and indeed the value per customer has gone up. As I look forward, we've had a huge amount of origination in Q1, and I was very, very pleased with it. I'm very pleased with what we've seen so far in April. April probably will end up being our biggest month in the company's history as far as sales. So we're seeing a huge amount of demand. And we talked about raising price quite a bit, right, so far in this call. And so that's with that.

As I look forward, I'd say sometime in July, I'll have all the customers I need for this entire year, and then we'll start working on 2023. And so I like where our trajectory is on the growth rate. We're slightly ahead of where I would expect to be on the solar and solar storage customers through basically our dealer business. We're continuing to attract more dealers as you saw in the dealer count.

And overall, I think we're in really good shape as far as looking forward to the end of -- towards 2022 additions. And then even looking ahead into 2023, I feel pretty good about that. Come what may out of the policy side of things, I think no matter what, we'll be able to shift. And we've got such a heady steam of growth that we'll be fine in terms of 2023.

And on adding new dealers, is it getting more competitive? Or how do you see that? And maybe just on how sophisticated they are to selling to customers and how you're helping them and how that's changed going forward?

Yes. We've seen continued entry of contractors from various different businesses: home security, general contracting, electricians, roofing, a number of industries, HVAC. And we don't see that trend slowing down. This is a great business to be in. And so we're seeing a lot more of the dealers pop up in an increasing fashion that don't have the level of sophistication in a back-office. And frankly, the back-office is something that is something you can scale. And a lot of dealers, a lot of contractors don't get that right. And really, they shouldn't have to worry about that as much.

So we're trying to take on more and more of that where they want it. If they don't want it, they want to and they want to keep doing processing, permitting, all that stuff, design, then that's fine. But we're building a platform out and have built a platform out. We launched a new cool tool, I think as you're aware of, Catalyst out there. That is adaptive to whatever type of dealer you are.

If you want to be origination-only, that's fine. We've got things set up for you. If you want to be install-only, that's fine. We've got things set up for you. If you want to be a smaller dealer that does both origination and install, that's fine. We've got it for you. If you want to be a large-scale multi-state dealer and you want to do everything, of course, that's fine, too.

And we're even seeing some large dealers say, well, I'm going to do origination install in these states, but I want to do origination in these other states or installation in these other states, whatever it may be. So there's a mix and match is my point.

And then we're also seeing a lot of dealer growth out of the generator dealers, some partnerships there and EV charging dealers, installers as well. So we're seeing a lot of different folks come into the industry, and they all have different needs. And of course, our objective and challenge, and I think we're really making huge strides, I know we are on this, is to build a platform, software, services, et cetera, that really go to the need and cater to the needs of each individual dealer, whatever they may want their business model to be.

I guess just to [fence it off], are you bumping up against other companies, SunPower, Sunrun, whomever out there with your dealers? And are dealers getting to the point where they're switching between companies? Or how is that all working?

Yes, I think it goes to that -- so I probably do a better job of answering your question directly, so I'll do it now, is that we're building out these services. We're building out these software capabilities to meet all the dealer requirements so that we could be more competitive not just on price. And we're seeing that competitive moat, if you will, widen against the competition.

And I think if you're trying to do financing only of say just one type of financing contract, I think that's a challenging -- really, really challenging business. And so again, we're a service provider, a financing is an enabler. We're not a financing company. And it's something that increasingly, consumers are understanding about the service. So we're winning over a lot more dealers.

Do we see competition? Absolutely, of course, we do. And I respect the competition. Some are better than others, but we absolutely do. But we're seeing a lot more influx of new dealers that will just directly sign up with us before they sign with anybody else. And we're seeing more and more dealers come in and say, look, we can get everything from Sunnova, everything. And Sunnova is entirely focused on us versus trying to have their own direct origination, installs and so forth.

And we're not going to buy contractors. We don't believe in that. We're not -- it's not something we will help facilitate investments. If some life event was to happen to a contractor/owner or dealer/owner, we'll facilitate that. We're here for them. We're their friend. But we're not going to come out there and start buying, competing against our dealers. That's just not something we're going to do. We've been very clear about that since inception. We've maintained that, and we're not going to do that.

So that means that we're very comfortable that we're the right partner. We don't need to spend shareholder cash and stock and dilute shareholders to go out and buy dealers. We're not going to do that. I don't think that's a good use of shareholder money. And it's something that would be taken very poorly by our current friends and dealers. And so we're not going to do it, and we don't feel like we need to do it. We've demonstrated that.

Our next question comes from Kashy Harrison from Piper Sandler.

So my first one, John, in your prepared remarks, I think you said origination -- storage attachment rates on originations have risen to 29% over the last 30 days or so. Can you talk about whether you're finally starting to see improving supply from your equipment providers? Or is supply still pretty tight?

Got you. We saw improving supply, as I said in the previous earnings call in Q4, as expected. We saw -- we had, I think, the most battery delivered to us in Q1. So last quarter, this obviously, this earnings call. And we continue to see that ramp up as we move forward in time, and that's across all suppliers.

And so I think you've heard some comments, for instance, Badri, right? He has made some comments where he's managing the supply chain quite well. Kudos to him. And we see others being fairly nimble about that as well and increasing capacity. So we're cautiously optimistic.

We've obviously done -- taken a lot of aggressive action and contracting equipment, not just batteries, but modules in particular and then inverters as well to make sure that our dealers are taken care of. And again, it's an insurance and a backstop. But we continue to see more availability on the battery front and growth in manufacturing production globally.

So we're cautiously optimistic. And I would tell you, at this point, we have caught up with our backlog, and we'd like there to be a little bit more of a cushion, right? But I would be remiss to not have added that. But at this point in time, we still see where we're caught up, and we're in good shape. And like I said, we've taken action accordingly, but we're cautiously optimistic that things are off to the race as far as battery supply.

That's very helpful. And then I appreciate all the commentary on the rising cost of capital. I know we spent more time talking about ABS. But I was wondering if you could maybe speak to any changes you guys might be seeing in the cost of preferred equity since the Fed started raising rates. Have you seen anything change over there? Or is it still generally the same cost of capital on the -- sorry, I said preferred equity, sorry, but tax equity. Have you seen any meaningful changes on the tax equity side?

Tax equity really remained about the same from a cost of capital. It didn't move down much when rates went down, and it hasn't moved up really with rates moving back up. So the cost of capital for tax equity is remaining fairly consistent. And we think that, that's really going to drive a bit more of a shift back towards leases and PPAs in the market in general, not just -- I mean I think that there's a thought around the ITC making that push. But I think it's much more the cost of capital will be making that push, just generally speaking, which obviously favors us and the other service providers.

And we have seen that push back towards TPO versus loan over the last 30 days. Again, we're agnostic on it. But I just want to point that out that we've already seen what Rob just spoke to.

Our next question comes from Maheep Mandloi from Crédit Suisse.

John, could you just provide some more details around the Sunnova Adaptive Home and how it differentiates versus -- generally trying to understand how does it differentiate versus what some of the OEMs were kind of trying to offer a combined solution? How does that differ versus those?

Maheep, this is John. Happy to do that. So the Adaptive Home, which we've, I think, pushed before anybody else, but you can really see a lot of traction across the industry, reference some of the hardware manufacturers and indeed some of our competitors as well. And I think that should tell the market that we're moving in the right direction, right?

And it really fundamentally changes the industry from this idea that you're putting boxes or putting something on the roof, and it's effectively just plugging in. And it's like an appliance, and it doesn't break, and you don't have to worry about service. And it's not really about selling power right to the homeowner, it's about selling them a box or 2. That's just not the case. And we're moving towards where you're integrating all these different boxes.

And specifically, let me say there's modules, solar panels, energy storage systems, batteries, smart inverters, EV charging, load management, generators, amongst some other energy items. But those are kind of the core items that we're looking at and many of which we're already selling to customers. But just early days. Like generators, EV charging, load management, we hadn't really gotten into that. We expect to do that in the next few weeks and months, for instance. There's a lot of demand there from consumers.

So putting together, again, that nanogrid or that mini utility, if you will, that we operate as a service provider. Something goes wrong, we try to address it over the phone, over the customer portal, Sunnova portal. If we can't do that, we roll a truck, and we're trying to bring that truck roll time down considerably from where it is. We're making good progress on that.

And I expect to start reporting out metrics to you all about what is our response time to customers because that directly goes to, I think, more so than some other metric of customer satisfaction is. You've got a problem, how fast does the service company like Sunnova solve it and to your satisfaction? Basically, the power must flow, right? And we need to make sure we focus on that.

So putting all these different pieces together. Again, I was in the field in New Jersey with one of our customers and our service crews really work very hard. I was quite impressed with them. And what I saw in that house was a bunch of different manufacturers. So I understand that if I was running -- and one of my friends, they're running the equipment companies. We all know names, Enphase, Generac, Tesla, SolarEdge, et cetera. I would want to have every box to be my box as well, but that's just not the reality. And I don't think that's going to become the reality anytime soon.

So consumers and dealers were out there picking what they feel best and what they can get the best deal on and so forth working with us. And as long as we are -- we've passed it on our rigorous testing, which we have more and more equipment coming from all 4 of those partners and others, then we will go ahead and adopt to it and make sure that all that equipment and hardware is plugged into our software platform, so we can serve the customers.

So we're not here to have an attractive like home automation management and interface and razzle dazzle in a single pane of glass and all that. We just want to make the power flow for the customer. We want to solve the customers' problem. And so I think more and more of the equipment manufacturers, we're seeing -- we're having a meeting in their minds because it's in everybody's best interest to make the customer happy.

And the way to make the customer happy is to have a full understanding of what's going on regardless of who made the gear and regardless of what's going on in the home and fix that customer's problem immediately. So I think more and more, the service providers are becoming more and more understood. And the business model is very clear. The need in the market is very clear. And it's going to involve and absolutely has to involve integrating a number of manufacturers together to make sure that, that customer is well taken care of. Again, the power must flow.

Got you. I appreciate the color, and the integration is definitely a challenge here. And just like one last housekeeping from me, and I apologize if you already talked about this. Could you just talk about like how many customers in Q1 were held up in northeast and its Sunnova direct homes? And just wanted to understand the cadence of customer additions through the rest of the year.

Yes. I would say that -- I wouldn't pick particular regions if you wanted more customer additions, which I did. I would say it was more in the other bucket with service-only and some other services customers that we make good margins on. I'd say that, again, relaunching Sunnova repair services, seeing more of that being sold up the direct desk and then our technicians in the field, so that pivot cost us a bit of a quarter.

But we have a lot of the customers that we need. In fact, I referenced earlier that right now, sometime in July, we'll have all the customers booked and either booked, installed or in service and for the entire year. So that's exactly about where you want to be for Mike is more than, I guess, now approaching more than 15 years in the business. So I think we're in good shape there. We'd always love to get the customers booked earlier so that we can just make this very easy.

But some -- I still feel good about where we are as far as a balancing from the first half to the second half. Maybe some customers bleed off into third quarter. But I feel pretty good about where we are in backlog and gave you that more -- you guys more of that description out there as far as we just need to add another 2, 3 months and we'll have what we need just to give you some more comfort that we're well on track to not only looking at '22, but looking at 2023 as well.

The next question comes from Sean Morgan from Evercore.

Going back to the attach rate on storage, and I think like it was down maybe a little bit. And I think in the prepared remarks, you basically said that it wasn't really an equipment availability issue, but more of an underwriting question. So if you kind of look at the customer acquisition guidance for the rest of the year, we're going to have to make some, I guess, improvements or growth on the rate of customer acquisition.

So how are you going to solve for making sure that underwriting doesn't slow down the process on customer acquisition, but doing it in a manner that you're obviously not going to risk credit quality on the customers that you're taking on?

Yes. Sure, Sean. Probably a little bit of a misunderstanding there. We don't count a customer until they clear underwriting. So there's a signed contract, but they have to go through all the underwriting, get all the identification materials that we need in the respective markets and so forth. And so it can be very frustrating, and it certainly was in March, where you see the customers, those contracts are signed, but they're not full in our process.

But we're not going to change. That wouldn't be honest. And so we just said, okay, well, it is what it is. And those customers will definitely flow through, and they did. And that's why you see the surge in April as those customers flowed through and continue to do so.

Underwriting wasn't -- we're staffing up. It's obviously a huge growth rate. We're staffing in the customer service centers. We're putting more software automation in the customer service area. We also are looking at any way that we could. For instance, a customer can directly validate without talking to somebody in the customer service center through our software platform. So we're making more -- we've made more enhancements there to speed that up.

But it's just a timing issue. And great to have a lot of new Sunnova New Homes customers. Great to have a lot of northeast origination, right? We need to do more, and we are making progress to get the battery attachment rate up in those markets. particularly on the Sunnova New Homes. And so I think that, that will be a part of the solution as we move forward in time as planned. But it's just a bit of a timing issue.

I just made a point that I thought that Q4 storage attachment rate in what I was seeing in February was going to move up. It didn't. It moved down. I was wrong. That's on me. And just making the point that it was really more just a slight timing issue, literally measured in a matter of days. And so that's why we gave out April to say, don't worry, it's going to trend back up just as we told you in the last earnings call.

Yes. And just one more follow-up on storage. So people kind of look at the U.S. attach rates and then kind of view Germany as sort of maybe a blue sky scenario, north of 70% origination tax rate. So what structurally makes Germany so high in terms of their adoption of storage versus the U.S.? And is there things that the regulators need to do? Or what -- how do you sort of view those 2 markets and us sort of converging towards what they have already achieved?

It's money. It's utility rates. And utilities are hard at work, jacking rates up really fast and as much as possible. So that will solve that problem. And we're already seeing where people go, oh, well, I got a lot of room in the rate -- the solar rate that Sunnova is operating versus utility rate. What about battery? What about I've got an EV, how does that factor into the mix here? So it's -- money solves a lot of problems, right? And the utilities are working hard for us to continue to push those rates up. And I don't see any stopping of that.

I've said this over a year ago. I've been in the power business now over 1/4 of a century. I guess that dates me a lot. And I never -- over a year ago, I've never seen a market more constructive for rising retail rates. And boy, was that right? And it just happened a lot faster than I thought. Part of that, obviously, is the war. But I see nothing but rate increases as far as the eye can see, and big ones.

So that's going to drive a lot of adoption of storage and the other services here. And we've already seen that, where people are up-powering and looking at other things such as load management and so forth. And so you're right. I do agree with the thesis that you look over to Europe and you say, what could it -- what's going to happen here? Obviously, a different rate in different parts of the country, given the utility rates are different in different parts of the country.

But I think Europe is a good, if you will, canary in the coal mine about -- it's a mix of energy metaphors here, but as to what's going to happen here. And I don't think it's going to take a couple of years. I think you're going to start to see a real significant pickup in this country on storage attach rate of additional services. We're already seeing it as we move forward into the year and utility rate increases continue.

Our next question comes from Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James.

Let me go back to [AD CBD]. Is there a timetable you could suggest for how long can the industry sustain its kind of baseline pace of installations before potentially running out of modules if the uncertainty continues?

Pavel, this is John. I appreciate the question. What I would say is, is that the answer here reminds me of an old adage, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you. And it's a big problem, but it really is a killer for the utility scale industry, And you heard that on the respective call, somebody that's very important in that part of the industry. And you've also heard on other call where it felt like the residential portion of the industry is fine.

There is definitely a much smaller pool of panels at a good price. And those panels will flow into the residential portion of the industry because we pay more. We have the higher willingness to pay because we're offsetting retail rates that are rapidly rising as I've gone through in answering several of the questions this morning.

So I don't think there's a limit on that. It's just massively unfortunate, shall we say, to the people of this country to not have the availability in a time of a global energy crisis that I personally think it's much worse. I don't see how it gets better anytime soon, where you don't have utility scale solar and you don't have utility scale storage and maybe some issues on the wind side of things. I don't know, and we're not in that business.

But I think that's more of the issue. I know it is. And we're going to continue to navigate. We've been very aggressive, as I've laid out in as much detail as I can provide, about having -- using our balance sheet, our strong cash flows to go out there and procure insurance policies on equipment for our dealers, making sure our dealers are stocked up. I want to make that point.

We told our dealers months ago, and they did exactly what we asked them to do, is fill up on all this equipment, particularly modules. They did so. So we've got much more supply than you're seeing on our balance sheet of equipment than we have under contract directly with us for our dealers just in case and that we have out there with our dealers. There's a lot more supply that they've been able to go and get them themselves, and we encouraged and facilitated the help to do so.

So we've surrounded ourselves with a lot of equipment. I'm sure there will be, at some point, hiccups here and there. But I think we feel at this point in time, feel pretty good about it and all the way going into 2023. So I think at that point in time, the government will resolve this one way or the other, whatever that may be. And the uncertainty will be lifted as we look into 2023 probably in the back half of this year. But if not, we're going to be fine.

Okay. Let me zoom in on Puerto Rico and Hawaii as the only U.S. power markets where petroleum is a key feedstock. With oil above $100 a barrel, in those 2 geographies specifically, are you seeing a response by consumers that are a lot more attuned to the cost of fuel above and beyond what they're paying at the pump?

Yes, a very dramatic response. And I would also say that the reliability issues in the islands have increased. In particular, obviously, Puerto Rico, we saw that in the media, had a most unfortunate explosion at a major power plant. It's just a reminder of how fragile the centralized systems are across the country and across the world and really how they don't meet the needs of consumers in an increasing fashion for reliability.

And so you're right, oil markets tend to move faster than others. But again -- and I would add Guam, Saipan in there for our footprint, (inaudible), and so wanted to make sure they were included. But I would say that what they are is a harbinger of what's to come in the Lower 48. Natural gas prices have zoomed higher, as you know, better than most of all. And we -- absolutely, it's just a matter of math and timing that utility rates will surge across the country, and they have already started to do so.

So -- but that sort of gives us confidence on the forward growth of the residential solar industry writ large is that we're seeing these kind of massive rate increases, and we do not expect them to stop any time soon.

Our next question comes from Gordon Johnson from GLJ Research.

This is James Bardowski in for Gordon. Just had -- I don't mean to beat a dead horse on the cost of debt or your prices, but just had a couple of tertiary questions there. So in terms of the debt cost, how quickly can you pass on any incremental increase in your new debt on to customers?

We don't really pass on the cost to the customers. What we do is, as we've talked about, is increase our unlevered returns. So -- and as John says, we can do this on a very rapid basis if we have a price increase. That ends up going into the system, going -- and it's just really a matter of us pushing that through. One thing we do is we want to make sure we're communicating to the dealers on a timely basis that they see what's happening and nothing comes as a surprise to them. But we could do it in real time.

Okay, okay. That's helpful. And then noting that the -- noting the trajectory of debt costs, how high would your blended cost of debt have to rise before you reassess your 4% discount rate?

Again, we're just looking -- at the end of the day, we're letting you guys make that decision. We've given you the 4% discount rate because that's what we've looked at. Our weighted average cost of debt remains below there. So we still think that, that's a good way to look at it.

At the end of the day, though, as we stated in the prepared comments, it's also still a very punitive way to look at our cash flows. And really, at the end of the day, we're concentrated on cash flows. That's why we show that unlevered return because it's a cash on cash number. It's why we show the spreads, so you can understand sort of what we're looking at from a cash on cash versus the debt number that we -- and the debt -- the cost of debt that we end up paying.

So at the end of the day, as long as that spread remains positive, which it is, as long as we do a good job of continuing to build scale which controls our cost and as long as we continue to have this debt which is locked in for the next 4, 5 years, all that existing debt, we don't really see that there's necessarily an issue.

Utilities really are our best ally here because they continue to raise their rates, which gives us plenty of headroom to be able to raise our unlevered returns. And look, if new origination, for whatever reason, became difficult for the industry, we're the only ones that have a balance sheet full of contracted cash flows already there with locked-in debt matched up against it.

So it's really not something that we look at as anything more than would be a temporary thing within our business model and really that we feel we're the best positioned to be able to go through that. But really, at the end of the day, we're going to continue to manage our fully burdened unlevered returns so that regardless of what the interest rate is, we're doing things that are profitable and accretive to shareholders.

And one thing that I'd like to add is I would encourage all investors to look at and say, take your contracted cash flows, the NCCV we've laid out. Whatever discount rate you want to use, that's up to you. And what we've done is we think of that as a blowdown value. If we couldn't find intelligent ways to invest the capital, the cash flows are coming off the base, then we would just return that capital, not spend it, right?

And I would take a look at that across all peers and say, what's the contracted cash? Take out renewal, take out the option value of customers, which I think is real value. Take all that out and just look at and blow it down on a per customer basis on a per share basis. Because every time we issue shares with stock-based comp or something else to our peers, that dilutes shareholders.

Look at our per customer per share basis, and you will see unequivocally, we have the best profitability and margins in the industry. Period. Full stop. Just blow it all down. Blow it all down. Take a look at it, and you'll see that we're the best.

Got it. That is helpful. Okay. And then just finally, one more and I'll pass it on. You did mention that you've been raising rates. Is this -- are the rate increases just in defense of your margins? Or is there organic growth in there as well?

I would say it's in defense of our margins. We're seeing more organic growth in the up-powerings and the service. Some of that can be gain on sale revenues. It's immaterial at this point in time, but we see more opportunities for that. But in terms of specifically raising price, we're only doing that in response to the cost of capital and equipment price increases.

Thank you. Currently, we have no further questions. I will now hand back to your host, John, for any closing remarks. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. As we look back in the first quarter, you can see that Sunnova is managing supply chain very aggressively and working with our partners to solve the problems there in any way, any fears whatsoever about the equipment availability to our customers and to our dealers. We are increasing price and have ample room to do so.

We have demonstrated our ability to move forward in time and address the rising cost of capital and lock in long-term additional cash flows. We're seeing, and somewhat surprising, but a good surprise, a significant amount of interest from customers for up-powerings and additional services offered. And we're expanding that rapidly. There's so much growth ahead of us. There's so much opportunity ahead of us. And we're investing in that opportunity in an intelligent fashion.

This has been a great start to the year. And in fact, this start to the year has been the strongest that I've seen in many years of running this business. And we're looking forward to seeing you again on the second quarter call and in the future calls of the year. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for being us -- being with us today. Have a lovely day ahead. You may disconnect your lines now.