This Week in Solar

Thousands of Buildings in Exact Solar’s Territory Qualify for Additional 10% Solar Tax Credit

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:30:49 GMT

What’s New:

Exact Solar is excited to announce that on June 10th, the IRS redrew its map of “energy communities,” and most of Exact Solar’s service area in Southeast Pennsylvania and New Jersey landed inside the lines.

Commercial buildings in those areas can now claim an extra 10% federal tax credit on a solar project, on top of the 30% they already qualified for.

This IRS designation will offer commercial building owners who go solar within certain counties the opportunity to claim up to 40% back on their commercial solar projects. If their projects qualify for Domestic Content, they can claim up to 50% back on commercial solar projects.

Exact Solar worked with the Amicus Solar Cooperative to pre-safe harbor several project slots. Even though the commercial solar tax credit is on an accelerated phase-out, certain companies who work directly with Exact Solar can still claim the tax credit under the old Inflation Reduction Act Rules.

If you own or manage a commercial building, a school, a township campus, or a house of worship in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, we’d love to work with you to check if your building could qualify and show you how much your organization could save. Book a time to talk with our team by clicking the link below:

Show Me What My Building Qualifies For

Listen to this episode here, or on:

So, What is an Energy Community?

An energy community is a place the federal government has flagged as having built its economy on fossil fuels.

When a mine closes, or a coal plant shuts down, the jobs leave with it, and sometimes the land is left too contaminated to use for anything else.

Congress built the 10% bonus credit into the Inflation Reduction Act to push new energy investment toward those places, stimulating economic growth in communities that the fossil fuel industry left behind by retraining their workforce to build clean energy projects.

There are three ways communities earn the label of “energy community”:

Fossil fuel employment. The county employed a certain amount of coal, oil, or gas workers at some point after 2009, and its unemployment rate is at or above the national average.
A coal closure. A coal mine shut down there after 1999, or a coal plant retired there after 2009. Neighboring tracts count too.
A brownfield site. In this case, fossil fuel activity or other energy-related industry activity has left land in the community too polluted to use for anything else.

It’s worth clarifying that energy communities have nothing to do with community solar, aren’t a utility program, and aren’t a group you join. Either your building sits within a geographical area that the IRS has designated, or it doesn’t.

Energy community designation could save commercial entities who want to invest in solar tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That extra budget could be put to much better use, no matter what type of organization claims this credit.

School districts can use that extra budget to hire more teachers and invest in extracurricular programs. Townships can build new roads and restore old ones. Churches can invest back in their congregations. Business owners can hire talent with the money they save on their operating costs.

If you’ve ever wondered how much your organization could save with solar, or your organization previously looked into going solar but couldn’t quite make the numbers work, the IRS just gave you a reason to run them again.

Contact Exact Solar’s team today.

Sources:

How It Feels to Own Your Energy With Solar: Curtis Sawyer

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:31:53 GMT

Imagine if you opened your electric bill, and it said:

“We’ve decided we’re going to pay you this month instead.”

Curt Sawyer, an Exact Solar customer in Bucks County, lives in that reality.

Curt and his wife Candy went house hunting nine years ago with a very unusual requirement: they wanted a roof that was already worn out, so they could tear it off and build a new roof specifically designed to add solar energy.

If you want to know what it feels like to live in a home where energy is free, this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Watch Kurt’s full solar tour on our website here.

Expect to learn:

What happens to your brain once your home’s electricity is free.
How going solar can essentially turn your utility company into a savings account that pays you.
What net metering and SRECs actually pay to an average homeowner who’s gone solar over time.

Quote from the episode:

“Once you start actually operating and you realize electricity’s basically free now, you start thinking about your house in a different way.”

— Curtis Sawyer

This Week in Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your highly reviewed, locally-owned solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

If you’re interested in flipping your relationship with your utility company like Curt did, book a time to talk to Exact Solar’s team by clicking the link below, and we will walk you through how much you could save by putting solar energy on your property.

Show Me The Numbers for My Home

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Curt, I reached out to you after your solar tour went live, which anyone can see on Exact Solar’s website. And I noticed that you said nine years ago you and your wife went shopping for a home with an old roof, which I think is a pretty interesting hook to get us started. So if you’d like to start the story there, I’d love to hear it.

Curtis Sawyer: Sure. We had been looking for some time for a way to reduce our energy footprint, and we looked at different kinds of solutions and ultimately decided the only thing that was going to be financially feasible was to buy an existing home and retrofit it with some energy features. The most important one of those to us was solar.

So we started looking around for houses that were suitable for the things we wanted to do with solar. In particular, we were looking for a south-facing roof, no trees, that kind of thing. But another thing we knew we wanted to do was not put solar on top of a new roof — not rip off a half-life roof or something, because we just don’t like to waste stuff like that.

So as we started looking around, we were working with an agent. We told our agent we wanted to meet these criteria, and one of them was an old roof, so that we would rip off an old roof as soon as we moved in. That had its complications, not the least of which was our home insurance company, but we convinced them that we were serious about ripping off the roof and putting on a new one.

We also really wanted to put on a section of standing seam metal roofing, which is not a common choice other than in little decorative spots. Some people have a portico or something where they put a little metal roofing on. But we wanted to put a substantial section of that on, because we wanted to put the solar array on the standing seam metal roof.

I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered that before, but fundamentally, if you have standing seam metal, you can clip the panels directly to the seams. They’re structurally strong enough. And there are clips that are manufactured that go right over the standing seam and clip right to it. That way you end up with an array that hugs the roof nicely, and it requires no roof penetrations except for one wire.

In our case, we tore off the roof, we put standing seam metal on the section where we were going to put the solar panels, and then we shingled the rest. The section we put the standing seam metal on pretty much exactly matches the size of the solar array. So looked at from the street, it looks like that section of the roof is just solar panels. You don’t see any framing or anything like that underneath it. It’s not standing proud of the roof. As far as you can tell from the street, it is the roof. It turned out great.

Aaron Nichols: It is really interesting. When you look at the images — like I was doing when I was writing the case study — you can see there’s just a little bit of an edge of the metal roof that comes off. For anyone who’s listening, you can go look at Kurt’s solar tour on our website, as I mentioned. You can see that most of his roof is normal asphalt shingles, and then there’s just a section of standing seam metal roof that the solar panels are mounted to. I was also curious — cost-wise, how much of a difference did that make when you were replacing your roof?

Curtis Sawyer: It makes a difference. Standing seam metal is expensive because it’s custom work. They sent out a different crew of people to do that section of roof than the ones who did the shingling, because it’s guys who know how to do standing seam metal. They essentially manufacture the sections of roof right on your property. They had a truck and they bent metal — I mean, they start with flat metal and bend it into the right orientation, and then cut it to match the exact length. It’s a highly skilled process. So on a per-square-foot basis it’s about twice as expensive. And it isn’t necessary.

But if you’re going to put solar panels on a roof, your solar panels are going to last twenty-five years or more. So from our perspective, it was worth it to put a roof underneath that was going to last fifty years, and we’d never have to mess with that roof while the panels were on there.

Aaron Nichols: And one thing I love about the story is that you had that system on the standing seam metal roof for a little while, and then you liked it so much that you came back for more a few years later. Would you share that story as well?

Curtis Sawyer: Sure. This is the thing that happens to you — you start doing something and you get tuned into it. We were looking at the website every day to see how we were doing on generating electricity. It becomes a little bit obsessive. But at the end of the day, we learned something.

The orientation of the house is mostly south where we put the panels, but it also faces a little bit to the west of south — it’s actually off about twenty-one degrees. What that does is shift things in time. It doesn’t really change the power you produce, it just shifts when you produce it. So we could see, from watching the readout from the SolarEdge inverters obsessively, that we weren’t making any power early in the morning. It was really mid-morning to late morning when the panels were coming online and starting to make power.

So we said, well, if we put some panels over on the east side of the house, we could start making power as soon as the sun rose in the morning. And that’s what we did. We did not add any inverter capacity, so the total amount we’re producing at any minute of the day is no greater than it was before. But in the summertime we start producing at eight o’clock in the morning and we produce all day long, until past five o’clock at night when the sun finally goes behind the trees to the southwest of the house. We get a lot of production.

Aaron Nichols: This is one thing I wanted to ask you that’ll take me a second to set up. I saw your video, I saw the excitement you had. You’ve had a solar energy system for about eight years now, and you started watching the app obsessively, seeing the production. A lot of people tell us that they get excited to see the production. And one thing I’m really interested in is that a lot of people start thinking about how much electricity they use for the first time in their lives once they go solar. So after eight years — what does it feel like to own your own power?

Curtis Sawyer: That’s an excellent question. It really does change your perspective. We launched into this knowing we’d essentially be producing 100% of what we needed for the house. We also knew at the time we put it in that we were going to have at least one electric vehicle, so that factored into our thinking as well.

But once you start actually operating and you realize electricity’s basically free now, you start thinking about your house in a different way. Over the course of time, we had a perfectly fine gas cooktop. It was working fine. But we said, electricity’s free — why don’t we get an induction cooktop? It takes that fossil fuel out of the equation entirely, and we made enough power to be able to do that with no issue. So we said, let’s do it, and we replaced that cooktop with induction. And I’ve got to tell you, induction is magic. Anybody who’s tried it loves them.

Same thing with the air conditioner on one side of the house — it failed. And we said, hmm, electricity’s free. Why don’t we make that our primary heating source? So we put in a heat pump on that side and switched over to that being the primary heat. We have propane as a backup on that side of the house. When the other side goes, it’s going to be the same thing.

You start to factor that into your thinking all the time. Cars, you know? Why would we put gas in a car? So when my wife was finally ready to part with her nineteen-year-old Prius, we said, let’s get you an EV. I was already driving one. Drive every day on sunshine — what’s not to like? That’s where we are. Over the course of time, as opportunities come up to switch other things over from fossil fuels to electricity, why not?

Aaron Nichols: So it feels great, obviously, and it has informed a lot of your decisions.

Curtis Sawyer: Right. And it’s getting us where we wanted to go. We wanted to go to a greener lifestyle, and it’s getting us there. We have two electric vehicles, we heat half the house with electricity that is a hundred percent green because we make it with our solar system. We’re not relying on PECO to send us dirty electricity. Every time we can plug something in instead of using a fossil fuel or relying on the grid — well, there we are.

Aaron Nichols: You also mentioned that it makes enough electricity that your relationship with your utility has changed — it’s basically a savings account for you now, rather than someone you buy a service from. Would you mind elaborating on that?

Curtis Sawyer: Sure. In Pennsylvania there is essentially two-way metering. So we buy from the grid and we sell to the grid, and any excess we have we sell back. Over the course of a year — obviously on any given day it’s who knows what it’s going to be — we make more electricity than we actually use to run the house and fuel the two cars. We sell the excess back to the grid, and PECO is essentially our bank.

So when we get a “bill,” quote unquote, from PECO, what it says is: here are your banked kilowatt-hours, and here’s your credit from last year that we turned into money. Each bill says you owe zero, but it also says, and here’s what you’ve got in the bank. All during the course of the year I’ve banked kilowatt-hours, and then at the end of the year, when we settle up, they give me a credit against my future purchases from them — which aren’t going to be anything.

Over the course of time I’ve made some money selling power back to PECO, and I also make a little bit of money selling solar renewable energy credits — SRECs — in the market, because that’s a tradable commodity. Every time you make a megawatt-hour of solar power, you get one SREC. And you can sell that SREC to somebody who wants to buy it.

Aaron Nichols: So not only is energy free, you actually occasionally get a little bit of a financial reward for it.

Curtis Sawyer: Right. Now, when I initially penciled this out, we were looking at what the house needed and what one car needed, that kind of thing. I wasn’t planning on making money on it necessarily. What I was planning on was being able to offset my costs, and that was what was going to pay me back for the initial investment. It was originally calculated at about a nine-year payback. I’m now eight years into a nine-year payback, so I’m sneaking up on it being a positive-forever situation.

Aaron Nichols: And how did you end up finding Exact Solar? You seem like someone who does a ton of research, who loves the numbers, who loves crunching things, who loves optimizing things. How did you end up working with us rather than anyone you could have chosen?

Curtis Sawyer: Well, at the time this was not as well developed a process as it is today. But we did some research on the internet, and I interacted with people I knew as well, to see who had what experiences. I was for a period of time on the environmental advisory council for Doylestown Township, and that’s a great place to meet people who are doing environmental things, including green energy. There were people on the EAC who had already gone the solar route, and we knew that Exact Solar was heavily involved in that kind of stuff.

So we talked to a couple of vendors, Exact Solar being one of them. Once we had chatted with them — and we’d already heard of them through our contacts — we felt very comfortable that Exact Solar knew how to do this. Number one, we were in the right area of the market, in that they worked on the residential side as well as the commercial and municipal side. So we felt comfortable that they could engineer the right solution, and that they’d be there for the long haul to service it. You don’t want to get the long warranty from the guy who just started in the business last week. That doesn’t do you any good.

Not only did they do a great job on the installation, they’ve met the need when we needed service. We’ve had basically two service calls in the time we’ve had the system, and both were related to inverters. One inverter failed and was replaced under warranty. And then we had one that glitched — I think that’s the technical term. Not sure why it did, but it took itself offline, and Exact Solar sent somebody out and they got it back online. I have no complaints.

Aaron Nichols: I’m very happy to hear that. It’s amazing to work for a company like this, where I can feel so good about putting my face and my name behind it, because we take care of people. Now, if you were to recommend anyone who’s thinking about a similar thing — thinking about fully electrifying their home, getting EVs, going solar — where do you think people in your specific region should start, and what resources are available that maybe weren’t available when you were looking at this?

Curtis Sawyer: Obviously there are a lot of places online where you can find solar installers. To some extent, you have to whittle down what it is you’re wanting. Are you looking primarily for financing? Or are you looking primarily for the people who have the expertise to do the installation? Those are different things.

There are a lot of folks out there — my God, I get so many unsolicited phone calls and emails all the time from people who want to sell me solar. Well, they don’t want to sell me solar. What they want to sell me is financing.

Aaron Nichols: Right. It’s obviously something we have to deal with too. There are a lot of companies doing that, and it gives the industry a bad name. It’s an upstream reputation we have to fight against sometimes.

Curtis Sawyer: Sure. But when I’ve talked to people about solar, I tell them you’ve got to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish first. If you’re looking for financing primarily, and you want to do a power purchase agreement or something like that, that’s a different kind of thing — because then the installer is basically in control, and they’re deciding if you’re worthy, not the other way around.

So that’s a different transaction. I was not interested in their financing. And of course there are lots of ways to finance something. You don’t have to do it through a solar company. You can borrow money against your home equity and put the solar on yourself and own the thing. People have different things they’re interested in. But if you want to own it, and you want to find somebody who’s good at the installation and the service after the fact, that’s a different deal than somebody who wants to finance some panels on your house.

Aaron Nichols: We at Exact Solar service a lot of systems for people who went with companies that are now no longer operating, unfortunately.

Curtis Sawyer: Right. A lot of them were just in it to write the paper for the financing. They really didn’t care what it was for. You could have been putting radio antennas on your house — they didn’t care. They just wanted to sell you some financing. We wanted people who were going to be around, and going to be able to do a quality job and quality service after the fact. Financing, I can finance things if I want to.

Aaron Nichols: I’m very grateful to you for coming on today. As we’re winding down here, I have one last question, and it’s the same last question I’ve asked everyone who’s come on this show. It has to do with the fact that last year I spoke at my grandma’s eightieth birthday party.

As I was reflecting on that afterwards, as someone who works in the solar industry, I realized that eighty years — my grandma being born in 1945 — means she was born into a world where what we call renewable energy now functionally didn’t exist, other than very rudimentary windmills and hydropower. PV, solar energy, wasn’t invented until she was nine years old, in 1954.

And then everything that’s happened up till now — Jimmy Carter putting solar thermal panels on the White House in the ‘70s, solar powering satellites, it getting cheaper and cheaper and more efficient, all the way to now, when solar is the cheapest, easiest-to-deploy power source in the world — all of that happened within my grandma’s lifetime. So if you’re going to moonshot to play us out here: what do you think energy is going to look like eighty years from now?

Curtis Sawyer: Well, that’s interesting. There’s no question that we’re reaching the end of the fossil fuel era. It remains to be seen how long it takes for that to be displaced. The right answer is that ultimately petroleum ends up being used for the chemicals you can produce, and plastics and things like that, which is really high value — and we’re not going to burn it in order to create energy. That doesn’t make any sense.

In my ideal world, I would love to see much more distributed power production, where power is produced much closer to where it’s used, rather than this idea that you have these large plants somewhere and then a bazillion miles of wires to get it to you. That really makes very little sense. And it’s very fragile.

Aaron Nichols: Which, by the way, is just rotting. It’s falling apart all the time and has to be maintained.

Curtis Sawyer: Absolutely. It’s very fragile. And it’s not the way the rest of the world is going to go. If you don’t already have a grid up, you’re not going to put one up. That doesn’t make any sense. If you were designing something today to put in where nothing existed, you would never string all those wires all over the place. You’re going to put in distributed power production.

That really does mean solar and wind and things like that, that can be produced much closer. And in terms of residential areas, there’s nothing that’s going to beat solar, because it’s essentially passive. It doesn’t require any maintenance. It doesn’t interfere with anything. It’s just the ideal solution.

I think we’ll see much more of that, both because it’s getting less expensive every year and better every year — the panels get better and cheaper every year — but also because it adds resilience. Around here, not a lot of people deploy batteries, because we don’t have time-of-day metering, so there’s not a strong rationale for that. But for the people managing the grid, think about it: solar panels plus batteries, you can’t beat that. I read a paper recently where somebody referred to batteries as bacon for the grid. It’s just the ideal addition. It makes everything better.

Ultimately we’ll probably be using our EV batteries for a lot of that. That’s not as well developed yet as it will be. But ten years from now, twenty years from now — the electric vehicles with all those batteries all over the country, what a tremendous resource. If we can get the smart controls in place to manage all of that, we just won’t worry about blackouts. It just won’t be a thing anymore.

Aaron Nichols: Those are the two things I think I’m most interested in as someone working in the industry: vehicle-to-home and what’s going to happen there, and then plug-in solar, and what’s going to happen when we just kind of turn the ability to add power to the grid over to anyone, in very small quantities. I’m really interested to see what happens with those two movements.

Curtis Sawyer: Yeah, and both of those just add resilience. Which makes sense. We’ve just heard recently about hackers trying to attack water systems and power plants and that kind of stuff. We don’t need to have that. There’s no reason to be subject to that, because it could be distributed and hugely resilient.

Aaron Nichols: Right. So power plants are just going to get smaller and smaller and more distributed.

Curtis Sawyer: More distributed, yeah. And we will ultimately take advantage of all those vehicle batteries. That is a huge untapped resource. My car has ninety kilowatt-hours of storage in it. That’s huge.

Aaron Nichols: Which is probably enough to power your home for a couple of days, right?

Curtis Sawyer: Several days. I use a rule of thumb of about thirty kilowatt-hours per day, unless it’s intensively in either heating or air conditioning season. If it’s just run-of-the-mill, it’s about thirty kilowatt-hours per day. So my car could run my house for three days. And I’ve got two cars.

Aaron Nichols: I’m excited to see the news story that’s inevitably going to come out where someone’s car is backing up their home in a blackout, and then the husband drives to the store to get supplies and leaves the wife in the dark.

Curtis Sawyer: That’s why you need two electric vehicles.

Aaron Nichols: Right — it solves the problem. Well, Curt, is there anything you’d like to plug, or anywhere you’d like people to find you online?

Curtis Sawyer: Nope. I’m free and clear of all that. Aaron, nice to chat with you today.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. And for everyone listening — that’s been This Week In Solar.

Sodium-ion Batteries Are Making Major Progress

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:31:26 GMT

What’s new

Earlier this week, Solar Power World published an article called “Sodium Ion Batteries are Ready for World Domination.” (linked at the bottom of today’s episode). At Exact Solar, we love learning about what’s coming, because we always want to have great offerings that serve our customers.

So we went looking to learn more about this technology and what needs to happen before it’s widely deployed!

TL;DR;

Sodium-ion batteries are hitting the market, but have a long way to go before they start being widely deployed.

This Week in Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your highly reviewed, locally-owned solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

If you haven’t looked into solar for your home yet, book a time to talk to Exact Solar’s team by clicking the link below, and we will walk you through how much you could save by putting solar energy on your property.

Show Me The Numbers for My Home

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Why This Matters

Right now, Lithium is only mined in a handful of places, and the supply chain that turns it into a battery runs largely through China. Sodium, on the other hand, is not a rare or contested material.

So Sodium-ion battery technology will likely have a much less complicated supply chain. That means that a sodium battery factory can, in principle, go up in Pennsylvania or New Jersey as easily as anywhere else.

Another great thing about Sodium-ion batteries is that they are far less affected by weather. Sodium cells run from roughly -40°F to 140°F without losing output. Lithium-ion batteries are much more sensitive.

Grid-scale lithium needs chillers, fans, refrigerant, and filters just to stay comfortable. One Sodium-ion battery company, Peak Energy, says its passively cooled sodium system is still at 85% health after 20 years, versus around 65% for liquid-cooled lithium.

So What’s Holding the Technology Back?

Sodium cells currently need more material to store the same amount of energy, so the carbon footprint per kilowatt-hour of manufacturing is actually a bit higher than lithium batteries today.

Just like any other technology, that’s expected to change as designs iterate and improve.

Morgan Stanley Research expects sodium to go from about 2% of new battery storage deployed in 2027 to 20% by 2030 and 37% by 2035. But it’s going to be widely available in small-scale applications before larger ones.

The world’s first sodium-ion portable power station, a 900-watt-hour camping unit from Bluetti, came out last year and was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of the year.

It makes sense that this technology is starting to be embraced on smaller-scale applications like that. If you buy a portable power station and it’s not as good, it’s not the end of the world.

But when we’re talking about commercial-scale or even residential-scale batteries, the upfront investment is much higher. If you need an electrician to tie something into your home, and it doesn’t work as well, then that’s a much different conversation.

Reputable solar installers like Exact Solar want to know that batteries are backed by a track record of great performance and warranties that will make it easier to put our name on them. We install equipment we can stand behind for decades, and at the moment, that means lithium batteries.

More episodes like this:

Sources:

Sodium-ion batteries are ready for world domination (Solar Power World).
These new batteries are finding a niche (MIT Technology Review).
Bluetti Pioneer Na: The Best Inventions of 2025 (TIME).
Bluetti Pioneer Na

Building a Sustainability Legacy in Montgomery County: Devi Ramkissoon

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:31:12 GMT

Aaron talks with Devi Ramkissoon, the first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Devi’s a great storyteller and was a joy to interview. She came to her current role after running economic growth programs at USAID and a stint as the executive director of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia.

If you want to know what sustainability work actually looks like day-to-day in local government (and how to talk about sustainability with people who do not care about “being green”), this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

You can connect with Devi on LinkedIn here.

Find our episode about our latest installation in Montgomery County here:

Upper Dublin Township Goes Solar

Meet Devi in person at We Conserve Pa in October:

We Conserve PA

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We have a special bonus for This Week In Solar Listeners.

For a limited time (July 1st–August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Expect to learn:

How Devi makes the case for sustainable projects to people who don’t care about sustainability.
The way Devi thinks about making lasting change in the world.
Devi’s riveting story of helping build a food security program in Bangladesh to raise the incomes of women farmers by building a cut flower industry from scratch.

Quote from the episode:

“Procurement is not a sexy thing. It’s not going to make the front pages of the Inquirer. But it’s something that I think has a powerful and lasting impact.”

— Devi Ramkissoon

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Devi, you’re Montgomery County’s first Chief Sustainability Officer, which to me means that they created the role just for you. So congratulations.

Devi Ramkissoon: Thank you.

Aaron Nichols: For people who hear that title and aren’t sure what it means, how would you explain your role? And could you just introduce yourself for the audience as well?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yes. My name is Devi Ramkissoon. I’m the Chief Sustainability Officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. And yes, this is a new role in the county entirely, one that was just created last year.

In general, a chief sustainability officer is responsible for things like setting and leading a sustainability strategy, ensuring that acting under the strategy is compliant, and also embedding a lot of those goals, whether environmental, social, or governance, into the operations of an organization or entity. So I do many of those same things for the county, but that looks a little bit different on the public sector side than it might look in a corporation.

In Montgomery County we have a limitation in that we are not a home rule county. That means we cannot have large scale policies that impact all of our 62 municipalities that are set from right here in Norristown where I work. And so that means we have to work not only on our own operations, but also work side by side with the 62 municipalities to understand what their needs and goals are as well, and to develop programs and ways that we can better support them in reaching their own sustainability goals, which may or may not exactly align with what our priorities are in the county.

Aaron Nichols: Now, before joining the county you worked with the Sustainable Business Network, and you did some work in international development. So how did that background shape the way you think about local sustainability work?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it shaped my understanding of sustainability quite a lot.

I started my career in international development, as you mentioned. I worked primarily with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and my entry point to sustainability is actually through economic growth. I did economic growth programs around the world with a goal of reducing global poverty.

Sustainability was embedded in all the programs we did, whether or not that was the area of focus of our work. So that looked like: how do we do no harm to the environment through our programming? How do we ensure that we’re promoting community resilience in all of the programs that we do? How do we ensure that any sort of economic growth is equitable and sustainable in the long run, so that we’re not being extractive or harmful in those types of programs?

And a lot of the work I did was at a systems level, which means looking at not just one part of the sector we were working in, but all of the related sectors and related stakeholders that were involved in those programs.

So taking that holistic approach to what we worked on at USAID, I translated that into working alongside the private sector to advance sustainability through the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. I very much see the private sector as an ally in driving sustainability outcomes. In particular, in my work at SBN, that meant working with companies that had already, quote unquote, drunk the Kool Aid when it comes to sustainability. Ones that were already interested in implementing sustainability outcomes, but also ones that were thinking about what does sustainability mean for my business model, and how do I integrate it in a way that is sustainable in and of itself in the long run.

And I would say we saw a lot of growth in that space through SBN. During my time as executive director, we saw over 60% growth in business membership. So that meant to me that that message was resonating with local businesses, and it continues to be part of the strategy that I apply here in Montgomery County as well.

Aaron Nichols: I love international development, and I did some of it in my own early career as well. I’m interested in what some of your biggest wins were, if you’re allowed to talk about them. If it’s all classified, of course, we can move on to something else. But I’m interested in what some of your favorite stories are from the projects you worked on.

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah, I can talk about one that is especially close to my heart.

I did a lot of work in Bangladesh when I was with USAID, and I worked on food security programs in the agriculture sector, because agriculture was such a big part of the economy in Bangladesh. We were thinking about ways to increase incomes for women farmers, because we saw that women tended to make financial decisions, to the extent that they could, that benefited a household tremendously. So we saw higher educational outcomes, better health outcomes, things like that, when women were able to leverage capital in a unique way in their families.

With that understanding, we worked on a project that tested out a number of different value chains, or different supply chains, to understand: is it working in the rice sector? Is it working in jute? Is it working in some other industry in the Bangladesh ag based economy that would help bolster income levels but also improve women’s ability to leverage their own income?

And interestingly, we found an exciting opportunity in the cut flower industry, which is not something you might expect. We discovered that a significant amount of the cut flowers in Bangladesh were being imported for festivals, and we found that they could easily be grown locally. So we helped develop a cut flower market in Bangladesh, working with women farmers as the primary business owners and leaders in the farming space for that market, and developed an entire sales operation around cut flowers locally.

We saw a significant increase in the household income of those women farmers who were involved in the industry. We saw the growth of a nascent industry in Bangladesh, where instead of having to import things that were more expensive and less sustainable, they were able to grow things locally and have access to that year round in a way that they didn’t have available before. And we also saw that the income gained from that industry was used again for better food and health outcomes, for better education, for more improvements in the local communities.

So that was one of my favorite examples of a project I worked on that had long lasting impacts long after that program ended.

Aaron Nichols: That is so cool. And I actually saw a video in a college class years ago about a cut flower program increasing income. So I don’t know if it was yours, but that’s awesome. That’s great that you helped create something like that. You must be very proud.

Devi Ramkissoon: Thank you. Yeah, it was great to be part of it. I mean, it was a much larger team that worked on that project. But it was great to be part of it, and to know that it was going to have lasting impact.

And I think that project is a good example of how I look at sustainability. It’s about understanding how a project like that has a net positive impact on the local environment, how it benefits local communities, how it improves things beyond just dollars in your pocket, but improves things like health, education, food security. It was also really focused on empowering women business owners, and there was a huge private sector development push from that program. So to me, that program is a great example of all aspects of sustainability really coming together in action. And like I said, one that is long lasting, well beyond the end of a project life cycle.

Aaron Nichols: Right. And I think that leads us really well into our next question, because one of the things we’re very proud of at Exact Solar is that we just completed an installation on Upper Dublin Township’s municipal building.

Devi Ramkissoon: Congratulations.

Aaron Nichols: We’re very excited. I just did an episode on it two weeks ago that came out. It’s gorgeous. It’s a beautiful system. There’s a carport, it’s on the police station and municipal building. And it was when they were rebuilding after Hurricane Ida that they decided to power the building with solar and just build back better. We’re very grateful that we got to be involved in it.

I know you weren’t directly involved in the project at all, but for these types of projects, people drive past them, they park under the canopies. There’s a solar carport over the parking lot that now not only provides shade for cars, but also makes power for the building. How important is visibility like that in building public trust around clean energy and sustainability?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah, that’s a great question. Before answering it, I just want to again congratulate you and your team, and Upper Dublin, for completing that project. It was a huge win for sustainability in general and a huge win for our local community.

I actually talked about that very same project. I did a presentation this past Monday on solar accessibility for commercial properties, and I cited the Upper Dublin example as a great one of how communities can make that possible. So definitely shout out to you all, and congrats again for making that happen.

But to your point, visibility is a huge component in any sustainability project. I think now more than ever we have to work harder to be transparent, to be consistent, and also to be authentic in how we approach, implement, and communicate sustainability, so that communities really see and feel regularly the impact those types of projects are having.

One of my favorite recent examples that drives that home is a company called SmartFlower. I don’t know if you’re aware of them or not.

Aaron Nichols: No.

Devi Ramkissoon: They’re a company that does solar panels that are in the shape of a flower. So they have a stem, and the petals are the panels. The flower will open and close with the sun, and it will also tilt and follow the sun.

I think it’s a really unique innovation. I don’t work for the company, I’m not trying to promote them by any means, but I think that type of example is a really great one, because I think this company recognized the importance of visibility. Their smart flowers are very visible from the roadside. You cannot miss one if you’re passing by. There’s one that’s parked nearby in Norristown at the moment, and I think people who come and see it want to understand what it is. They have so many questions. And they in turn learn more about solar.

I also recently learned that there’s a city in Texas called Henderson, and they actually bought up a whole system of smart flowers. They have an innovation park where you can go and see all of the flowers in this park. I think they have a program to have them installed in people’s backyards and homes.

So again, I think that helps build trust in clean energy. It helps signal to the public that you’re committed to that as an approach, and also that they work. If an entire city is really committing to something like that, then clearly there’s something there that works and serves the residents of that space. And so I think those types of projects, like the one in Upper Dublin, or the way that other cities across the country are approaching solar in a big way and in a very visible way, really matter.

Aaron Nichols: I love that approach, because I joke all the time about how one of the things we have to overcome in solar is that solar is just too good at what it does. So it’s boring. It just sits in the sun, it makes energy. There’s no whiz bangs, there’s no moving parts, it doesn’t light up, there’s no fireworks.

So the flower thing is really beautiful, because I think we need more positive associations. We often end up selling solar with negative associations, like, do you hate the fact that your power bill is rising so fast? So I love the fact that a company is doing something like that.

Devi Ramkissoon: Me too. And it goes against what you think about. A traditional homeowner might say, I don’t like the look of solar panels, I want them on the side of the roof that nobody can see, I want them out of what is publicly visible. I think this flips it on its head. That solar can be beautiful, and it can also be something you want to display because you’re really proud of it. And again, that it is, to your point, highly effective. So it can deliver what you need, but also help educate your neighbors and people driving by about how a system that now seems basic can be innovative and interesting and beautiful.

Aaron Nichols: That one’s always so funny to us. Our sales team deals with it all the time. We don’t like the look of solar panels. And we’re always like, how much do you look at your roof now? How many times a week, a month, a year do you look at your roof? Well, you’re probably going to look at your roof about that same amount once solar panels are on there. You’re just dramatically overestimating how much this is going to impact your perception.

But we all do it. We’re all guilty of opinions like that.

There’s a perception that sustainability can be a waste, that it can be frivolous, that it can be expensive. When we talk about solar, we’re often always talking about how soon it’s going to pay for itself. And when we talk about something like Upper Dublin’s project, we can say that rather than paying for ever rising utility bills, this community can now take that money and put it toward things that aren’t just paying more for the same product every year.

How do you do that in the sustainability world? How do you talk about projects that can reduce emissions while also bringing in messaging that may work for the people who don’t care about the green side of things?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah, it’s a great question, and one I grapple with all the time.

I think our accounting systems are really not made in a way to account for things beyond just cash in and cash out. They’re not really considering: how do you value something like our kids having clean air to breathe? How do you value something like having enough clean water to supply your family and your community? And it’s only thinking about the short term.

Even with solar projects, we think about a 20 or 25 year payoff for large projects. And beyond that, we’re not thinking about, well, how much am I saving in emissions? How does that help the air quality around me? How does that prevent future medical costs for kids or families not having to deal with asthma or other related health issues?

So that’s how I frame it when I get asked about the cost question. Yes, we do have to care about cash in and cash out, but we also have to think about these other longer term impacts that maybe are not as easy to quantify but matter just as much as those other things. People who maybe don’t care about being green, they do care about their families having safe and clean water and having clean air. And I think those are things that really hit home for a lot of folks personally.

Aaron Nichols: And then for local governments who are trying to do stuff like this, what are the most common barriers to completing sustainability projects? Is it funding? Is it staffing capacity? Is it public understanding, or misunderstanding, or misinformation? Where do you see the most common barriers, and what are you most commonly overcoming in your role day to day?

Devi Ramkissoon: It’s going to be different for a lot of local governments. So it depends if you’re talking to a municipality in Montgomery County, or the county itself, or a state government. It’s going to vary.

But oftentimes I find that the challenges I hear about the most are things you already cited. A lack of awareness of programs or funding sources. A lack of staff, especially at the municipal level, where there are not many staff focused on those types of projects. In my department, I have a staff of one, so I definitely hear and feel the staffing constraint issue.

And also, I think it’s about how you communicate those outcomes. We talked about the issue of the ROI of sustainability projects. If you’re communicating that to your residents, how do you do so in a way that garners support and excitement for those types of projects as well? So that communications and PR piece is another part of it that I don’t think a lot of folks tend to think about at a local government level, but I think is really important.

In my role in the county, we’re thinking about how we help deal with some of those issues, especially around funding, which is the one I hear about probably the most. I could do this project if I could get enough funding, or if we didn’t have to raise local taxes to do so, and so on.

So one of the projects I’m working on right now in Montgomery County to help address the funding constraint is that we’re exploring establishing a green bank in the county that could help fund those types of projects. Right now we actually have a survey out to gather data around potential uses, interest rates, localities, and so on, that might be interested in leveraging that funding. And it’s been really fascinating to look at the responses and see how a constraint like funding can really stop projects that could have really long term positive impacts.

Aaron Nichols: Now, in your previous work at SBN, you spent a lot of time helping businesses adopt more sustainable practices. We at Exact Solar have been very lucky that we’ve done a lot of work with the private sector commercially, and with nonprofits and schools, more publicly funded or just more nonprofit kind of groups. And they’re often very interested in very different things.

I think the nonprofits and schools are often more interested in the sustainability piece. But when we talk about businesses, they’re generally interested in how much money can we get, how much is this going to reduce our operating costs. And then, anything that’s sustainable, they’re often asking us for help marketing on the back end once the project is installed. They use that as a benefit for them, but it’s not often what gets them across the finish line, in our experience.

You have done this across so much wider an area than we have. What do you think local businesses often misunderstand about sustainable initiatives?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah, and that kind of goes back to our previous two questions, thinking about our accounting systems and also thinking about that focus on not having financing.

For businesses in particular, I would say a lot of businesses don’t realize they’re eligible for financing support, especially when it comes to things like solar installation. And I’m seeing that beyond just a traditional bank loan, there have been a lot of other avenues to pursue funding for those types of projects.

I also think a lot of businesses feel like you have to go big or go home. That you have a building, you have to cover the entire thing in solar panels, and that’s the only way to go about it. My advice to them has been more around thinking of this as incremental change. It’s not going to be a massive transformation overnight. It’s going to be about a way that works best for your business in terms of how you afford this year in and year out, how you balance all of the other interests, like hiring more employees or paying your staff well, having great benefits, and so on. It doesn’t have to be that big, massive project all at once. It can be done in stages, and you can work your way up to larger scale projects.

And also, I think your customers appreciate things like that as well. We see consumers vote with their dollars. They look to understand that if I’m supporting a local business, their values reflect mine, and that I want to see that they’re working on those types of things, because that shows they’re thinking about the products or services they’re selling in a more sustainable way as well.

Aaron Nichols: Right. So if you want to attract better customers, take the actions that better customers want you to take.

Devi Ramkissoon: Or if you want to attract more customers, I would say. You might be able to hold on to your customer base, but you might also be able to expand to customers who might not have come to your business originally. If they see that you are investing locally, that you are reflecting their values, then you might have converted a customer who would have gone to a big box store but instead is choosing to support your local business.

Aaron Nichols: Right. Now I’m interested in how you’re thinking about yourself and your own legacy. Because you’ve already accomplished so much, and you have a public profile out there, which I was able to go research a bunch of. That’s not true of many of the guests I’ve had on this show, so it was amazing that you’ve left this trail I could follow.

When you’re thinking about your own legacy, and when you’re sitting in the rocking chair, elderly on your porch, what would make you look back and say that your work has been successful?

Devi Ramkissoon: It’s a great question. I don’t think I set about this work to have a legacy for myself, but rather to just make lasting change.

Yes, it would be cool to say that I helped build a massive solar array, or helped with some really exciting infrastructure project. But I think a lot of lasting change tends to be at a level that often goes unnoticed.

For example, one of the things I’ve been able to work on this past year that I’m really excited about is our procurement policy. Procurement is not a sexy thing. It’s not going to make the front pages of the Inquirer.

Aaron Nichols: Okay.

Devi Ramkissoon: But it’s something that I think has a powerful and lasting impact, or can have that.

So we were able to revise our procurement policy to integrate sustainable procurement into it. To say that we are going to spend our money locally. That we are prioritizing products and services that are not going to harm the environment, and that are not going to harm our employees and residents. That’s reflecting our values.

And I think when we shift how and where we spend money, and really open up opportunities for more local businesses, that can have lasting impacts beyond however long I’m a county employee, or however long the next person is. That can have impacts for generations.

So I’m thinking about what are ways to integrate systems level changes into the way that a county or an institution operates, so that those impacts can be felt for many, many decades to come. And that’s the kind of thing that I think again is not sexy and exciting, but I think is going to have probably the most long and lasting impact.

Aaron Nichols: I’m going to have to sit with that and journal. That was a great answer. And I think you’re a better person than me, because I spend a lot of time thinking about my own legacy and how I can do things that are sexy and exciting.

Devi Ramkissoon: I mean, I wouldn’t turn down a great project either. But I think that, again, at a systems level, those kinds of changes are the ones that are lasting.

Aaron Nichols: That’s a beautiful answer.

Now, for someone who is maybe visiting from another town and drives by the Upper Dublin project, gets excited about the carport, and says, I wish my township would do something like that. What can they do if they’re in Montgomery County? How can they get involved? How can they try to push something like that across the finish line? Who do they talk to?

Devi Ramkissoon: There’s a lot to do if you’re driving by a great project like the Upper Dublin one. There are a few programs out there right now that I think are really interesting, and now’s the time to take advantage of them.

I’ve been working with the Philadelphia Energy Authority. They have a wonderful program called Solarize Greater Philadelphia.

Aaron Nichols: I had Lisa Shulock on, by the way. She was a great guest. She’s amazing.

Devi Ramkissoon: She’s wonderful. I love Lisa. If you think about somebody whose impact is lasting, I think of Lisa, definitely.

But they are working with the PA Solar Center as well, another great group. And they’re trying to get solar assessments for as many commercial properties as possible before the tax credits go away. Even as they go away, I think there are still other financing opportunities out there, both commercial and residential.

So I think the best time to start is now. There are still great programs like the one from the PEA that are out there. But even then, there are a ton of resources available for commercial and residential, and things that are also coming down the pike. I mentioned the interest in starting a green bank in the county. A green bank would be there to fund those types of projects in the future. There’s also other green financing out there.

So I think finding ways to fund those projects, making sure that your township manager and other local officials are on board, and harnessing the community support as well, I think is really important.

Aaron Nichols: Devi, I ask everyone who comes on this show the same closing question, and it has to do with speaking at my grandma’s 80th birthday party last year.

When I was reflecting on that afterwards, I realized that 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where renewable energy, what we call renewable energy now, functionally didn’t exist. We had hydropower, that made a ton of electricity. I don’t know if windmills made electricity yet, because I don’t know a ton about wind. But I know that she was born in 1945. Solar PV wasn’t invented until she was nine years old, in 1954. And then for a long time it was this wild fringe technology, and then it only powered satellites and spacecraft. And then we put solar thermal on the White House, and then Reagan took it down, and the whole saga has brought us to now, where solar energy is the cheapest source of power in the world at the moment.

All of that happened within my grandma’s lifetime, and basically started with nothing. So if you’re going to moonshot to play us out here: what do you think energy is going to look like 80 years from now? How will we make energy? What will it look like? Where will we get it? What do you think?

Devi Ramkissoon: I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, or to be aware of what innovations are yet to come.

But I guess I go back to my roots and look at what other countries are doing, maybe countries that are less resourced than the United States even, and where they are investing. I look at examples like India and China. China is a massive investor in renewable energy. India is, in my mind, one of the more exciting countries when it comes to leading in its work around solar. There’s a massive solar park that has been installed in India, and I think that’s leveraging the amount of sun and sunlight they have there.

So I think it’s about looking to understand how different countries are assessing their own resources and how to leverage those resources to generate more clean energy down the line. And also helping their neighbors. If they make excess energy, selling that to other countries around the world that may not have access to it.

I think that’s a really interesting and exciting space to be in, because it’s not a one size fits all solution for everybody. Rather, it’s a way of understanding which sources of clean power make sense for different places, and actually utilizing what happens locally to make the most of it.

So I don’t know if that’s a great answer to predict the future. Again, I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but that’s where I’m seeing trends right now across the globe. And I think there’s a lot of excitement around renewables.

Aaron Nichols: People have given me wildly different answers, which is what makes it fun having that as the last question. I like to joke that 80 years means none of us will probably be around anyway, so no one’s going to hold us to these answers.

So, where do you like to be found, online or otherwise, if you do want to be found? You can also just say don’t find me.

Devi Ramkissoon: We have a county department webpage, so if there are updates around sustainability, we’ll have them posted there. And then personally, anyone can find me on LinkedIn and message me around anything I’ve said today that is interesting. My work email address is publicly available on the county website as well, so that’s another great way to contact me.

Aaron Nichols: Fantastic. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up today?

Devi Ramkissoon: Yeah. Depending on when this airs, I would love to make everyone aware of the annual Environmental Advisory Council gathering that my department is hosting in Montgomery County alongside We Conserve PA. It’s an annual gathering of EACs from across the state, and we’re holding it in Montgomery County on October 24th. It’s a Saturday, from nine to three thirty, roughly. We’ll be having lots of discussions around cutting edge topics like where the solar industry is going and how we can make renewables possible for local communities. So I would love to draw attention to that event coming up.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we should definitely send someone to that from Exact Solar.

Devi Ramkissoon: I think that would be a great idea.

Aaron Nichols: Thank you for coming on today, Devi. And for anyone listening, that’s been This Week In Solar.

Devi Ramkissoon: Thanks so much, Aaron. I appreciate the opportunity.

New Jersey Approves Agrivoltaic Funding and PECO Begins Paying Homeowners for Battery Power

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:30:48 GMT

What’s new

It’s a great week for New Jersey farmers and anyone who buys their power from PECO (the utility that covers Southeast PA and the city of Philadelphia).

After listening to this episode, anyone intrigued about putting solar or batteries on their property in New Jersey or Pennsylvania should contact Exact Solar.

Book my free estimate with Exact Solar’s team

Last week, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities signed off on 52.06 megawatts across farms in eight counties in the opening round of the Dual-Use Solar Energy Pilot Program.

(“Dual-use” means putting solar panels above or between crops instead of replacing the crops, not “covering farmland in solar panels so it can never be used for anything else,” as opponents to this type of legislation have suggested).

These 16 farms will grow soybeans, hay, grains, vegetables and fruit under and around the panels. Some will graze livestock between the panels. They’re spread across Atlantic, Cumberland, Gloucester, Hunterdon, Mercer, Monmouth, Salem and Warren counties.

At the same time, PECO officially launched Flex & Save, a program that pays homeowners for letting them borrow power from their home battery during times of high need.

PECO says the average participant will earn roughly $480 a year, up to $640 per year.

This Week in Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your highly reviewed, locally-owned solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

If you’re interested in participating in either of these programs, book a time to talk to Exact Solar’s team by clicking the link below, and we will walk you through how much you could save by putting solar energy on your property.

Show Me The Numbers for My Home

Why The New Jersey Farm Story Matters

Dual-use programs have been successfully installed and well documented across the country, most notably at Jack’s Solar Garden, the Agrivoltaics installation Byron Kominek put on his family’s land years before Agrivoltaics was a widely used term. Anyone interested can learn more about them by visiting Jack’s or looking up the Colorado Agrivoltaics Learning Center.

Every application for this program needs a landowner, a farmer, and a solar operator on the team. The farmer must be actively involved in planning and operations.

There are still funding rounds available, and any interested farmers or landowners should contact Exact Solar so we can get the application process started together.

Speak With Exact Solar’s Team

Why PECO’s Home Battery Program Matters

By paying homeowners for battery power, PECO is building a virtual power plant, or VPP. Instead of one big plant in one location, it’s thousands of home batteries in garages and basements all across Southeast Pennsylvania that PECO can call on whenever they need to meet times of high demand.

This will be a few times a year, whenever everyone goes home and turns on their heat or AC at the same time.

PECO’s new program is very compelling for anyone interested in home batteries. Here’s how this will work in practice, once someone has signed up:

PECO won’t pull any power from your battery for seven months of the year.
They’ll only pull from your battery in two specific seasons:
- June 1-August 31
- January 1-February 28 (or 29th, if it’s a leap year).
Outside those windows, they’ll leave your battery alone.
When they need power, they will signal your inverter, and the battery will discharge for a few hours.
You likely won’t even notice because they’ll draw power very slowly and never fully discharge your battery.
If the forecast shows severe weather in your location, they will not discharge your battery.
If you invest in home battery backup, you probably want to make sure your power stays on in an outage. This program won’t interfere with that.
You can always opt out.
Whenever PECO plans to discharge your battery, you will be informed, and you can opt out through your battery manufacturer’s app.
A paper check will arrive within six weeks after each season ends.
You’ll receive a separate check for $80 per kW of your average contribution across all event hours. If you participate in both seasons, you’ll receive two checks per year.

This program will be a win-win for everyone involved. Utility companies need energy when demand is high. By compensating homeowners directly for stored power, they save money and meet a regulatory requirement to offer customers ways to lower their power costs.

It’s actually cheaper for PECO to compensate homeowners this way than it is to build and maintain peaker plants that they only turn on a few days a year.

Sources:

More episodes like this:

Everything You Need to Know to Buy or Sell a Home With Solar: John Nichols and Kate Collardson

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:31:07 GMT

Realtors often think of solar as a four-letter word. So how do we change that?

Today’s episode was recorded live in front of an audience and features two guests:

John Nichols is a realtor with Lokation Real Estate who has had some frustrating experiences with solar energy systems during home transactions.

Kate Collardson has two decades in the solar industry under her belt, and now runs a solar inspection and service business that helps give home-buyers peace of mind.

If you own solar, want to own solar, or might someday buy or sell a house that has solar on the roof, this is for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with John on LinkedIn here.

Connect with Kate on LinkedIn here.

Watch Kate’s first appearance on the show here: We Can Fix Solar’s Recycling Problem.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And starting today.

For a limited time (July 1st–August 31st, 2026), Exact Solar will pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” link below.
Tell us if you’re an existing customer or if you’re just referring someone.
Select Aaron Nichols as your Sales representative
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Expect to learn:

Why a paid-off solar system can add $10,000 to $30,000 to a home’s appraised value.
The single most important thing to demand before you buy a house with solar panels.
How you can find service and production records for solar panels on homes (even if the company that installed them is out of business).

Quote from the episode:

“What I’ve learned is that realtors generally think of solar as a four-letter word. They think it mucks up the transaction, throws off the debt-to-income ratio, it’s a mess, it’s a nightmare. And so hoping to ease that, as an industry.”

— Kate Collardson

“I don’t know if I’d say it’s a four-letter word. I do think solar is great. But I just think if it was teed up the right way, it would make all the difference in the world.”

— John Nichols

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Hello everyone, and welcome to Buying and Selling Homes With Solar. For anyone who’s listening on Substack or any podcast platform, welcome to This Week In Solar, what is now widely considered the world’s most important podcast. Wait, wait, pass him the mic.

John Nichols: Aaron is my son, and there was a finder’s fee, I had to bribe him to get on such a popular show. So I’m really honored.

Aaron Nichols: I believe what you said was that this is the pinnacle of your life.

John Nichols: By far the pinnacle, yes. A definite high point.

Aaron Nichols: All right. So I have invited John and Kate. Kate’s been on the show before. Kate now has a business servicing solar energy systems, and my father, John Nichols, is a realtor who has had a couple of headaches he’s told me about with solar energy systems during home transactions. So I want to invite both of them, record a conversation with some questions that I got from people, and then do some Q&A with you guys. How does that sound?

Kate Collardson: Woo. Amazing.

Aaron Nichols: So, first question, either of you can take it, but please pass the microphone to whoever will take it, because it’s a low-budget show. What are some common misconceptions homeowners have about solar panels when it’s time to buy or sell a house?

Kate Collardson: I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that because it passed inspection, it was necessarily installed correctly. Sometimes there are things that do in fact break.

A lot of people assume that it’s working because it’s up there. They don’t necessarily check their monitoring as much as they should. They don’t pass on the monitoring information to the new homeowner. And home buyers don’t think to ask for it.

So that’s one, monitoring, and then just kind of assuming that all installations are quality installations. That’s not necessarily true, sadly. For the most part the equipment is usually fine. Every once in a while things will fail. But we do run into some poorly installed systems every once in a while.

John Nichols: I’ll piggyback on what Kate said, because I really believe that’s true. A lot of people make quite a few assumptions, and it can run the gamut. It can be, “Wow, they have solar, that’s great, I’m going to be saving a lot of money”, just kind of trusting the system, thinking of it as a black box. It just works. Or in some cases you get this feeling of dread: what is this going to mean? That panel is broken. I’ve heard bad things about solar. How much extra am I going to pay for it?

So it really comes down to, number one, as a realtor, when we visit a home, we hope the listing agent has done a good job of educating the public and the other realtors ahead of time. Saying this is owned, this is leased, here’s what the payment is, providing some utility bills, that type of thing. But in many instances there’s just not a lot of information going in. So like everything else, a regular inspection, a solar inspection, a sewer inspection, you really need to dig in and find out what we have.

I think one of the biggest frustrations I run into as a realtor, and I think that’s echoed by my buyers, is that we just don’t know if the system is actually worth the payments, or worth the payoff. And we don’t know if it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do. There have been times where we get some utility bills and we get kind of a before and after, and when I’m speaking to the buyers about the whole thing, we’re all confused. It’s as though the solar is not really doing what it’s supposed to do.

I’m sure Kate has run into a lot of situations where the solar is just not working, and yet the home has been advertised as having solar. So again, you run into either excitement because it exists, assuming that it is producing energy and will save them money, or they’re just not sure what to think. In many cases it’s kind of a negative reaction.

Aaron Nichols: To jump off what you said a little bit and ask you a question, Kate: when someone’s in a situation where the solar might not actually be working, not everyone has access to someone like you who specifically fixes broken solar energy systems. And for us as an installer, though we do service them, for something like a real estate transaction, for us to come out and check if it was working or not would be quite expensive and probably wouldn’t be worth our time.

So how does the average homeowner usually find out if a system is working?

Kate Collardson: Right. There are folks out there who do inspections. And there are home inspectors, obviously, who inspect the whole home. But when they go to a system, they don’t necessarily know more than “that panel is cracked,” or “I see a red light, maybe it should be green.” Or maybe it should be red, and they don’t necessarily know.

You have to have the credentials, to have done the trainings, to be able to go into the monitoring. So there’s a specialized group of folks — like your company, that can do that, that have access to that.

And so it is important, I would say, to get these checked out when you’re buying. Even if you’re selling your home, it’s worth getting the inspection done and being able to say everything’s good. You add that to your listing, right? I think it’s definitely worth doing that. There are folks around who will hop up on your roof and check out your system.

John Nichols: First of all, I’m very excited that I’ve connected with Kate, because since being a realtor in 2019, since 2019, I really haven’t found someone who can focus on inspecting the solar. And I think that’s really important.

So for the most part, what I’ve been doing is: we only have the utility bills, we have the disclosures, the seller’s property disclosure, any information from the agent, and then our own regular inspection. The inspector can go on the roof and say the solar panel is loose, or the solar panel is cracked. But there really has not been anyone so far that I’ve been able to rely on to really inspect the solar.

So I think she’s onto something, and I hope to use her services. I think this is a really important service that needs to be provided, so that buyers can feel good about the system, or be able to object and ask the seller to do something before they purchase the home.

Aaron Nichols: So, John Nichols of Location Real Estate, Dad, a follow-up question for you. Is this something you think can be rolled into the closing costs?

Because the company I work for, Exact Solar, is one of the only companies in our region that will service systems we did not install. But just coming out to check if a system is working is probably something we either wouldn’t be interested in, or if we were interested, would be quite expensive, to send a van and a technician.

So is this something you think could be rolled into closing costs, so that someone isn’t having to pay for it upfront? Or is this, do you think, a cost that’s going to come out of someone’s pocket right away?

John Nichols: I think for right now it would have to come out of somebody’s pocket. It would just be part of the due diligence that a buyer needs to take care of.

When I’m working with buyers, we talk about: let’s do a radon test, let’s do a sewer scope, let’s do a top-to-bottom inspection of the house. But as of right now, I don’t have anyone to do that extra layer and say, let’s inspect the solar. Let’s find out what kind of energy it’s actually producing. Let’s find out the age of these panels. Let’s find out the payment arrangement.

In many cases, when I talk to sellers about listing their home, they may not really know. They might have bought the home after it was installed, and they don’t have a lot of information about what company installed it. Because, and I think I’ve learned this from you, Aaron, in a lot of cases you have these companies that’ll install and then they leave, and then we don’t know who’s doing what.

Having talked to Kate a little bit, that’s part of her business model: to help the seller dig in and get all that information. So the more information the sellers can provide the buyers, and as long as the price is reasonable,I think it can’t really be a closing cost. It just needs to be another financial commitment for the buyer, to make sure they’re purchasing the home they want and it’s worth the investment.

Aaron Nichols: Another thing that’s commonly understood about solar, it’s gone so far that in New Jersey they have a property tax exemption. Specifically, an exemption on the increase in property tax when you put on solar. If you can prove solar has increased your home’s value by X amount, you don’t have to pay property tax on that amount.

So one of the most common things we’re told about solar is that it increases home value. Does solar actually increase a home’s appraisal value, and how do buyers look at that extra cost?

John Nichols: So I did consult with an appraiser ahead of time, and the answer I got is: it really depends.

If the system is completely owned and the seller has already paid it off, that can increase the appraised value of the home anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000, depending on the extent of the system and depending on the house itself.

If it’s leased, most appraisers are not really adding a lot of value to the home, because it’s a leased system and it’s not really owned by anyone.

And then if it’s being purchased and there are payments, it can go either direction. It can be very valuable, but only if the seller is willing to pay that off before closing, and that usually needs to be structured ahead of time so the appraiser knows. At that point it pretty much goes back to option one. If the buyer is taking over the payments for the purchase of the solar, then there will be a little bit of a value add, but not as much as if the panels are already paid off.

So it really does depend quite a bit as far as how much value it adds. But potentially it could add quite a bit.

Kate Collardson: And it’s more than just the material value. It’s of course the energy that will be produced. That’s why an inspection is important, to make sure that it is going to produce the monetary value you’re adding for that equipment.

Aaron Nichols: Now, you touched on it a little bit, but what’s the difference in the selling process if the panels are owned outright versus if it’s leased or paid for with a loan?

John Nichols: If it’s leased or paid for with a loan, then it could potentially knock the buyer out from having the ability to purchase the home. If their debt-to-income ratio is already stretched, which in Colorado and many states right now, between the price of the home, property taxes, insurance, et cetera, they’re barely qualifying for a loan, and then if you’re asking them to also take over payments, that can significantly change the game. To the point where either they don’t qualify for the loan, or the seller is forced to say, in the case of making payments, we’re just going to pay off the whole situation.

It really depends, but that’s kind of, in a nutshell, where this process stops.

Aaron Nichols: Which is an important thing to note, and something that’s not widely understood. You’re often told that someone’s just going to have to go through a credit check in order to take it over, but the debt-to-income ratio piece is really important. They might be trying to be approved for an extra $30,000 or $60,000 loan on top of the loan for the home, and that might just kick them out of being eligible to buy it. Whereas if it’s owned outright, it’s like buying a dryer with the house.

John Nichols: Yeah. And I have buyers right now that are in the final stages of purchasing a home in Milliken. That home had been on the market quite a while, and one of the reasons is that the seller was not willing to pay off the solar panels.

But sellers get very motivated when their home doesn’t sell. So by the time I went to see that home with the buyers, the agent had already made an agreement with the seller and already put it in the broker notes that that system would be paid off at closing. And that changed the game completely, because we weren’t trying to qualify for that loan as well. There was just that peace of mind knowing, okay, we don’t know exactly how well the system is working, but what we do know is that we’re going to be able to buy this home. It does have solar, and it’s not going to be an extra expense for us on a monthly basis.

Kate Collardson: I think a lot of realtors have picked up on this. When they see that they’re going to be listing a home with solar and that there’s a loan on it, or a lease, or third-party ownership, they’re going to make them pay that off. I think with loans, generally you have to pay them off. But with leases, a lot of the realtors I’ve spoken with have said, yeah, we do that too.

What I’ve learned is that realtors generally think of solar as a four-letter word. They think it mucks up the transaction, throws off the debt-to-income ratio, it’s a mess, it’s a nightmare. And so — hoping to ease that, as an industry. To make that better for that home sale transaction.

Aaron Nichols: So the next question is definitely for you first, Kate. If a buyer is looking for a home that already has solar installed, what are two or three things they should inspect or ask for before making the purchase?

Kate Collardson: They need the monitoring. That must happen, 100% of the time.

And they should be inspected. You should find out, is the system working like it should? Sometimes you’re getting electricity, and it’s not producing as well as it could be because X, Y, or Z is happening.

And if there’s no critter guard, everyone should have critter guard installed every time they install solar. But if there’s not critter guard, of course you’re going to want to check for critters and any damage that might have been done there.

But number one: get the monitoring. Get that information, and then watch your system, or connect with somebody who will.

Aaron Nichols: Well, two things there. As someone who works for an installer: there are a lot of people we talk to who see critter guard as an extra couple hundred dollars, and they’ll say, I don’t want it. We usually just include it and don’t have it as an add-on, because it’s just not worth it. Squirrels. Solar industry, take note.

John Nichols: Are we referring to the thing that covers your gutters so you don’t get leaves in there? What is critter guard?

Aaron Nichols: It’s metal mesh that goes around the solar panels so that squirrels can’t chew your wires. Because squirrels will chew the wires.

Kate Collardson: And pigeons will nest. They will have big old families.

Aaron Nichols: Then the important note I want to make for anyone listening is that monitoring is not through whoever installed your system. Even if your installer goes out of business, monitoring is run at the inverter level, I believe.

Kate Collardson: That’s correct, yeah.

Aaron Nichols: So most people probably don’t know who made their inverter. But you can go okay, all the wires from the solar system go into this box in my house. What’s the brand name on the box? And you call that company and say, can you help me monitor my system? And they will say, you need to pay us $200 and we will gladly help you monitor your system.

Kate Collardson: Yeah. Yeah.

John Nichols: I earlier mentioned this whole concept of wanting to know: is the system actually working? Before and after. Like when you’re on a diet, it’s nice, you’ve got the before and after photos, you see those on the commercials all the time, and you can say, okay, whatever they’re doing seems to be working.

In many cases we don’t have that before-and-after data. We really don’t know what to compare it to, and that’s extremely frustrating. If more of that information was available, and we knew how much energy they were actually producing, or how much money they were saving on energy from the sun, that would be really, really valuable.

And I can see how, even if the appraiser didn’t value the home higher, if I’m a listing agent and I can prove that to people, that’s just another selling point. But right now there’s very little data out there to prove that this is working really well.

It’s like if you’re selling an investment property and you can prove it has great rental history and a great cap rate, you’re obviously promoting that, and buyers are saying, I want to buy this thing because it’s going to do something for me.

I would love to see a system or a program out there that allows the home solar to be inspected and to have some sort of number to prove this is really valuable, from an energy production and a cost savings standpoint, especially with utility rates going through the roof. That would be such a great marketing point.

So it sounds like we’re moving in that direction, and I’m looking forward to seeing people like Kate in the community, and wanting to bring them on board to be part of the whole inspection team.

Aaron Nichols: Last question. A decade from now, do you guys think solar will still be a premium feature on homes, or do you think it’ll just kind of be standard? I know a lot of companies include it when they build homes now, but some don’t. What do you guys think?

John Nichols: Do you have a crystal ball? I wouldn’t say it’s now, you said, will it still be a premium feature? Is that what you were saying?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Right now it’s kind of like a premium feature.

John Nichols: I think it’s going to become more and more standard. You’re seeing some subdivisions that automatically include it, and others that are not. It’s hard to say. But even if a brand-new subdivision has solar, I still think you can run into the same issues.

Let’s say it’s a big home builder, I better not mention any names, for liability’s sake, but let’s just say one of those massive publicly traded home builders that’s throwing these homes together and they all have solar on them. Well, the solar’s being subcontracted. In many cases I’ve helped people buy brand-new homes with solar and they’re really unclear as to: is that part of the home warranty? Is that something completely separate? In many cases it’s a company no one’s ever heard of. And in a lot of cases the company goes out of business, and then these people really don’t know what they have.

So if we’re having more and more homes that automatically include solar, and if those homeowners and those communities are going through the same type of situation I just explained, then I don’t know for sure what the future looks like, whether it’ll just be commonplace, or whether it’s always going to be a little bit of a novelty. In some cases it works really well and it’s worth having, in some cases it’s not. So yeah, it’s hard to have that crystal ball and see what’s going to happen in the future.

Kate Collardson: We are a young industry. Solar is young, and we have seen a lot of churn. Really, the industry started taking off about 20 years ago, and we’ve seen a lot of churn in those 20 years. We’ve learned a lot of lessons.

I’m thinking about the very big players who have gone out of business and left systems on homes that weren’t even turned on, unfinished, for sure. But then there are some that look completely done, and the homeowner thinks it must be working, because it must be working, because it’s on my roof. And the system isn’t even commissioned. Monitoring isn’t available. And it’s a really frustrating experience for a lot of people.

I do think that as an industry we are going to get through this and continue to provide value in clean energy. Maybe 10 years out we’re still very premium, and maybe 15 years out it’s less so. In my 20 years in the industry, solar has gone from nothing to, now it makes more financial sense to build a new utility-scale solar plant than it does to build a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired power plant.

And to think what we were doing on roofs 20 years ago, that was a pipe dream. It was ridiculous to think that a utility company would ever, ever use that technology, because it was so expensive. We’ve come down in cost over the last 20 years, we’ve gotten better, and we’re still learning. And I think there’s still value in rooftop solar on a lot of levels, especially when storage is there. I think we’ll get to that point where it’s just standard, but I don’t know that 10 years is a long enough time for that.

Aaron Nichols: Too optimistic.

All right, well, I’d like to open it up to the audience. If anyone has any questions, I’ll pass you this little mic you can speak into.

Audience member: What’s the lifetime of a solar system? Are you seeing them age out, and is it getting better over time?

Kate Collardson: Ooh, that’s a meaty question.

The lifespan of a solar module, a solar panel, they’re generally warranted to produce up to 80% of their original rated output for 25-ish years. Twenty, thirty years. And I’m seeing a lot of older systems, and a lot of them are cranking, really still producing. I’ve seen a couple of systems that are not as healthy as they used to be.

I think it really depends on the technology. One thing I will say: I talked about the cost coming down, and one reason for that is called dematerialization. We’ve taken a lot of materials out of the panels themselves to reduce the cost. It’s made thinner frames and thinner glass and thinner cells, fewer wires, less copper and silver. I’m not sure that that has increased the longevity.

And the ones I’m seeing right now are cranking. And there are great manufacturers who build really good quality product that really will last. But time will tell.

Audience member: So for someone who’s considering putting solar on their house, what I’m hearing is there are things you should do to think about, okay, what do I need to do in case I want to sell? Choose quality, set up the monitoring. And then, as you prepare to sell, you have to assume you’re going to pay it off before or during the sale.

And, as a realtor: if a seller gave you a report that showed, just like someone selling a business, here’s the income generation, would that be compelling? Or would you tell your buyer to pay another thousand dollars for another inspection on the solar?

John Nichols: I think it would be very compelling. As a realtor working with buyers, I think it would be great to have that information. I think the buyers would really want to know that, and if they do need to pay a little bit more, I think they would do it.

There are a lot of reasons why people pay a price for a home. It could be time on the market, it could be all the other features. But assuming all the other features are very marketable and it’s a sought-after home, if a system was well put together and producing energy, and we definitely have a great before and after and we can prove that, and let’s say you’re working with a listing agent that’s helping you sell it, and that listing agent is putting all that information out for people like me and my buyers to see, and it’s showing this is a great system, it’s a high-quality company, here are some of the utility bills before, here are some after, it comes with a warranty that when you buy that home it’s transferable and they’ll come and fix it, if that information was available, I think it would be like gold. And I think buyers would be willing to pay more for the home if they had that information and it could all be verified.

Aaron Nichols: And this is why it’s important to go with a really good installer as well. Most of the stuff you mentioned upfront is something Exact Solar will give you in a packet after you’ve gone solar with us. It’ll talk about the warranty, it’ll talk about the components that are used, and we do the monitoring, but if you call us, we will give you access to your monitoring portal and we will walk you through everything and exactly how it works.

John Nichols: And you’ve been with companies before, or you’ve heard of other companies that are not doing that, right? Obviously I’m seeing the end result of that as a realtor. That’s a good reason why people should be working with Exact Solar, or a company of that quality. But you’ve seen plenty of examples, or heard of plenty of examples, of the opposite of that, right? Where they’re kind of slapping it on, I think, Kate, you’ve already mentioned this, slapping it on, and then good luck.

That’s the part where I think, as realtors, we get very frustrated. So I don’t know if I’d say it’s a four-letter word. I do think solar is great. But I just think if it was teed up the right way, it would make all the difference in the world.

Aaron Nichols: To hammer on that, it’s like doing anything else to your home. You want to do it with the best company. When you’re thinking about something like this, if you save a couple dollars up front, you might end up with an expensive nightmare in five to 10 years. So it’s really important, when you’re doing something that’s going to be on your home for decades, that you’re working with someone who’s well-reviewed and experienced and knows what they’re doing.

Anybody else?

Audience member: One of my barriers to having a solar system on my roof is that it’s ugly. And I was really psyched quite a few years ago when Elon Musk’s company talked about having roof tiles that were the collectors. That sounded really cool. And that’s all just kind of dropped away, and I haven’t heard anything about it. Do those still exist? Are there competitors? Are there better-looking systems?

Aaron Nichols: There are companies that do that, but we discourage people from installing them at Exact Solar, for a couple of reasons.

It can be five to 10 times as expensive for the same energy output. And when you’re building a solar energy system, you are building an electrical system that has points of failure. That’s just true of anything that has electricity in it. When we’re talking about shingles, we’re talking about more than a hundred panels on your roof instead of 10 to 20. So we’re talking about many, many more points of failure.

And also, because those are only built as what are called strings, they’re not big enough that you can put microinverters under each panel, which means monitoring is only going to happen at one central inverter. So if one of those breaks, you don’t know which one it is, and you take them off until you find it. It’s like a string of Christmas lights.

To your other point: a lot of people do think solar is ugly, which is fine. But I think the truth of the matter is that people tend to dramatically overestimate what the impact of a decision is going to be on their lives, and then hedonic adaptation happens and we forget about it in a couple of weeks. You put solar on your roof, you think it’s ugly for a couple of weeks, and then you forget about it, and it’s there, and your life moves on.

Audience member: But I’m a design wonk. How beautiful is that pipe, or the fire access, the hose access on that wall right over there? How beautiful is the transformer that’s sitting on the corner? How beautiful are the telephone poles? When they first went in, they were ugly. And then everybody got used to them, and we don’t even see them anymore.

Kate Collardson: I can’t not jump in on the question of solar shingles, because I worked in solar shingles for 10 years. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic.

Aaron, everything Aaron said is exactly right. Yes, there are so many things that can go wrong and do go wrong. Electricity on a roof, sparks can happen. And I’ve heard that as of today you cannot find the Tesla Solar Roof online. You’re confirming that.

I just want to say: the market for BIPV, building-integrated photovoltaics, solar shingles, is always going to be there. The homeowner is always going to want a beautiful system.

I also think there is a code out there to crack, and we can get it right. There are things that can be figured out, and we can make a system. I think we need to think outside the design box we’ve put ourselves in. But I do think that we humans can engineer a system that will sit on the roof and be your roof, and it will produce electricity. We have not cracked that code yet. The code is there to be cracked. It has not been cracked.

Aaron Nichols: Another thing I just remembered is that they’re far less efficient, because heat decreases voltage, and there’s no airflow underneath.

Okay, she knows more.

Kate Collardson: We could live with that as a manufacturer. There is a drop. He’s not wrong, but it’s not huge. That didn’t kill it. But it does take a lot more space.

John Nichols: I’ve noticed in some of the newer subdivisions that you can hardly even see the panels now. They’re so blended in with the roof. So I think the design is definitely improving.

And then you mentioned hedonic adaptation. I learned something new. Just wanted to say that.

Kate Collardson: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. Some of the racking has come a long way. We have these better lines, and we’re not looking straight under the panels and seeing the wires. I think the design has gotten better over the years. It’s not blue and silver rectangles against the shingles like it used to be.

John Nichols: I do wonder, though, because a lot of those are on the newer subdivisions. The first question that comes to my mind is, again, how efficient are they? They’re very sleek, they’re very well designed. But as an agent, and for a buyer that I represent, we’re kind of coming in and it’s literally kind of like the black box. Okay, well, it looks good, and it’s not an eyesore. We assume it works pretty well. But that’s the big question.

I know we’ve been discussing this quite a bit tonight, if there’s anything that can happen to educate the public about the value and the efficiency of the system, that’s going to make a huge difference.

Aaron Nichols: All right, we have another question.

Audience member: It’s not a question. I just wanted to say I think solar panels look totally cool. If we want to argue about how something looks, can we work on the headlights with LED lights that you can’t see when you’re driving in front of? There’s so much that just changes that we have to adapt to. It’s neat that we can’t control how they look on our roof.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, that’s a good thing. I think that’s propaganda we should spread. Solar is sexy now.

Kate Collardson: It’s always been sexy.

John Nichols: I don’t know if I’d call it sexy, but it’s another thing I’ve learned tonight. We’re quite the vocabulary education.

What you mentioned reminds me a little bit of some of your LinkedIn posts, where you’ll have a before and after. There’ll be solar, and people will say, I don’t think solar looks very good. And then you’ll compare it to pollution all over the world. So a little bit of a trade-off, maybe the roof doesn’t look perfect, but knowing how much energy is being saved if it’s working properly, maybe not using as much oil. For somebody who cares about the environment, that means a lot to me.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I’ve done this meme quite a few times and it always gets a laugh and a good amount of attention. I like to compare solar to other ways we generate energy, aesthetically, simply because we’re very privileged to live in a country where we don’t have to look at things. We put our trash in a box and someone comes and takes it somewhere, and we don’t have to look at it.

If you look at solar next to a natural gas plant, those things are heinous. They look disgusting. They’re spouting smoke everywhere, they’re just pipes, and they’re covered in grime. Solar is much sexier than that.

All right, anybody got another one?

Well, thank you everyone for coming tonight. For everyone who’s listening, that’s been This Week In Solar, and I will talk to you next week.

John Nichols: Thanks, guys.

Balcony Solar's Biggest Problem Isn't Legalization

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:31:03 GMT

What’s new

I’m going to be testing a plug-in solar system on my house, and as I’ve researched the best way to set it up, I’ve realized that some limitations will have to be solved before this is widely adopted in the U.S.

Yesterday I went to pick up a few panels at my local Green Tech Renewables to test with my new plug-in solar inverter, and we spent most of the time I was there talking about a problem we’re both seeing.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

We interchangeably call plug-in solar “balcony solar,” but at the moment, there are only a few solutions for actually mounting these panels to balconies, and no widely available standard.

That’s a big problem. Solar panels can weigh between 30 and 50 lbs., and they have sharp corners. If people are going to be mounting them on apartment balconies, we need to know beyond any reasonable doubt that they are securely mounted. We don’t want someone four stories below getting taken out by a falling solar panel.

I personally live in a home that has a lot of shade in all areas except the roof, but I’m not ready to commit to mounting the panels on my roof.

There are a few areas I could lean them against things, but then they’re just sitting out in the open, vulnerable to the elements and theft.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Energy costs are skyrocketing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and no one has a good plan to fix it.

You can’t control what the power company charges next year, but you can opt out of the cycle by going solar.

Our customers have told us over and over again that they don’t get mad anymore when the power company raises rates, because it just doesn’t even apply to them.

If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, we’d love to show you the numbers.

Book Your Free Solar Estimate

Eight states have signed plug-in solar into law:

Colorado
Maine
Maryland
Utah
Virginia
Connecticut
Vermont
New Hampshire

Two more states are just waiting for the governor’s signature:

New Jersey
New York

Legalization of plug-in solar is moving way faster than the marketplace.

The products have not kept up. Here are the major problems for anyone who actually has a balcony:

1. Kits you can buy don’t include mounting hardware.

There are kits on the marketplace, but the offered wattage isn’t going to make much of a difference in your power bill, and most of them don’t include mounting hardware.

Bright Saver’s solution is a good example.

The one from Bright Saver’s website shows the panel leaning against a pole, which is totally fine if you live in a home and have a fenced-in backyard.

But if you live on the ground floor of an apartment, that would leave the panel and inverter vulnerable to theft.

I don’t want to knock Bright Saver. They’re an amazing nonprofit that sells these components at cost, and you should absolutely buy from them. But if you live in an apartment on a floor above the ground floor, you should probably wait.

2. There is no standard mount.

If you look for balcony solar mounts on the internet, you’ll see a scattered selection of railing clamps, parapet hooks, and ballasted tripods, mostly built to meet general wind-load guidelines rather than anything balcony-specific.

Why it matters

Plug-in solar is awesome, but the economics of it only work if people are able to buy kits and easily install them on their own. We will only have the privilege of buying kits and easily installing them on our own if there’s repeatable proof that anyone can do so safely.

These are not unsolvable problems. Europe has solved them, and has widely available products on the marketplace that you can buy in big box stores. But these mounting solutions aren’t yet widely available in the U.S.

There’s going to be a big opportunity for companies to bring mounting solutions to market that are easy for people to install on their own.

But if those solutions aren’t available, and people mount panels to apartment balconies in unsafe ways and cause accidents first, it’s going to be much more difficult to standardize this market in the U.S.

Coming soon: Our interview with the guy who fixes these problems for a living in Germany

I sat down with Craig Morris, executive director of Germany’s plug-in solar association.

We got into the mounting problem (German forums are full of people posting photos of their balcony asking what bracket to buy), the one piece of legislation he thinks every US state needs before anything else, his specific worry about what UL might do next, the fix for apartment buildings that solves the condo problem and the electrician-cost problem at the same time, and what a kilowatt-hour from one of these systems actually costs.

He’s also refreshingly blunt that Germany got plenty of things wrong and Americans shouldn’t copy all of it.

Subscribe here on Substack so you don’t miss it.

Sources:

Accelerating plug-in solar adoption with the most affordable balcony solar kit — Bright Saver
Is Plug-In Solar Legal in My State? Full 50-State Tracker — PlugInSolarHub
Safety Considerations for Plug-In Photovoltaic (PIPV) Systems for Residential Use — UL Solutions, IAEI Magazine
How to build a balcony solar kit to UL certification — pv magazine USA
Plug-in solar takes step forward with first national safety certification — Environment America
Balcony solar took off in Germany. Why not the US? — Grist
Plug In Balcony Solar Power Moves from Hack to Household — IEEE Spectrum
Solar Panel Mounting Brackets, Hooks & Balcony Kits — Solar IQ USA
Not All Hook Systems Work for Multi-Unit Installations — WANHOS
DIN VDE V 0126-95 and the German plug-in solar framework — PromptQuorum
New Jersey legislature unanimously passes plug-in solar bill — pv magazine USA

Leaving Big Oil to Build Self-Sufficient Homes: Rob Avis

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:30:54 GMT

Aaron talks with Rob Avis, an engineer and permaculture designer who walked away from a career in the fossil fuel industry to found 5thWorld. Rob and his team design food, water, and energy-autonomous homes, acreages, and farms.

If you’ve ever wondered if you could sustain yourself on even a small plot of land, today’s episode is for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn here.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And starting today, we have a special bonus for This Week In Solar Listeners.

For a limited time (July 1st–August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Expect to learn:

Why Rob pulled a 180 and left his fossil fuel career for good.
How anyone can build food, water, and energy resilience on as little as a third of an acre (and the $2 book that’ll teach you everything you need to know).
What we can do with “waste” heat from data centers.

Quote from the episode:

“We’ve over-educated in the white-collar system and under-educated in the blue-collar system. We’re all really good at working with the bits, but there aren’t enough of us anymore who know how to work with the atoms.”

— Rob Avis

More This Week In Solar episodes you’ll like:

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Rob, I reached out to you because you made a LinkedIn post saying that you were in the fossil fuel industry for close to a decade, and then one day just said, “Enough — I don’t want this to be my legacy,” and left to travel the world before designing something much better for yourself. I’d love to hear you tell that story.

Rob Avis: Yeah — well, it actually starts before the fossil fuel industry. I grew up in a cake factory. I’m Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. And the reason that’s important is that I come from industrial food — that’s what my dad did. We made 100,000 cheesecakes a day. Then I moved to industrial energy as an engineer. And I ended up getting ready to cut down a massive swath of trees to bring in a pipeline.

I felt really conflicted by it, because I didn’t want to cut them down — but I’d driven to work that day, and natural gas heated my house. So how could I criticize the very industry that I’m supporting as a consumer? And as I brought those concerns up to my colleagues, the only answer I ever got was, “We’re never moving away from fossil fuels. This is the forever resource. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.”

As I was getting ready to cut that forest down, I got sent a three-minute video — it’s still on YouTube today, called Greening the Desert. It described a man who turned a five-acre parcel of land in the Dead Sea Valley — the lowest place on earth, hyper-saline soils — into a self-regenerating ecosystem. And I said, “That’s what I want to do.” I took out my calculator and worked out that I had about 600,000 hours of life energy on this earth, and I’d burned through a third of them. What did I want to spend the next 400,000 hours doing?

Nothing against the oil and gas industry, per se — I mean, it’s the reason we’re on Riverside today. It powers so much of the world. It’s really catapulted humanity forward. There’s something like 400 billion invisible energy workers working behind the scenes, which is equivalent to about 100 million barrels a day. So we have a lot to be grateful to fossil fuels for. But the time is nigh. The transition has to happen for about a bazillion reasons, which we won’t have time to discuss all of today — I know you hit those. I loved your post the other day, actually, on the solar refinery versus the oil refinery.

Aaron Nichols: That was this morning.

Rob Avis: I think I saw it up there twice. But anyways — there’s so much hypocrisy in both spaces. We have to find that common ground, which is energy. And energy is the foundational layer of civilization. So, anyways — that’s the story in a nutshell.

Aaron Nichols: So would you introduce yourself to our listeners and talk about Fifth World?

Rob Avis: Yep. My name is Rob Avis. I started Verge Permaculture in 2008. Then I met some interesting crypto investors and co-founders who loved the concept of distributed energy, water, and food systems. They said, “How do we scale this up?” And I said, “Well, if we had the resources of the U.S. military, we could regenerate Earth’s ecosystems in 10 years.” Think about the U.S. military — it’s highly funded, it’s highly coordinated, it’s got tons of equipment, engineers, staff. They deal with some of the most complex issues on planet Earth. And we actually know how to regenerate ecosystems. So they said, “That’s an amazing vision. Let’s start this company.” Fifth World was born out of that idea.

We started as a venture studio, and we’ve done more research than you’d realize just looking at our website — which we can get into in a bit if you’d like. Right now we primarily build autonomous homes, acreages, and farms that are food-, energy-, and water-autonomous. I’d say we’re in the Model S version of our trajectory — we tend to build a higher-end product, with the intention of creating a Model 3 as we go. But the long-term ambition is large-scale ecosystem regeneration, looking seven generations into the future to make sure that spaceship Earth is still intact.

Aaron Nichols: So how long have you been doing this? When was that transformation from the fossil fuel industry into what you’re doing now? And when you saw that video and made the change, how much permaculture experience did you have?

Rob Avis: I had zero experience.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. I love stories like this.

Rob Avis: And I left — yeah, I left when oil was hitting $157 a barrel, which was maybe a bad financial decision. My wife and I were making about $300,000 a year, and both of our parents thought we were committing career suicide. We traveled to Denmark and studied at the Folk Center for Renewable Energy, which was the birthplace of the first Vestas turbine. We learned about small wind, medium wind, large wind, solar, biogas, biomass, biochar, hydrogen, district heating loops. I worked on a project at the Folk Center that’s actually in service today. I’m not going to claim full ownership — it wasn’t entirely my idea; in fact, it wasn’t my idea at all, I just worked on the thermodynamics of it.

At the Folk Center, we built a pure-plant-oil diesel engine as the mimic, or proxy, for the district heating loop systems in Denmark. Most small towns have their own district heating system — they send hot water out to the community and cool water back in, and they can use municipal waste, biomass, even surplus wind energy. So the Folk Center was a microcosm of one of these small communities. We had this pure-plant-oil diesel generator in the middle, which had a combined heat and power operation. We had the small wind field off to the west, a solar array, a biomass combustor, and solar thermal — and all of them fed unified electrical and thermal grids. From there we thermodynamically modeled how Denmark could go to 100% renewable, using the district heating loop as one of the backbones for either improving the Carnot cycle or improving the efficiency of solid municipal waste gasification.

One of the problems with wind — back then especially — was that we didn’t have cheap battery technology. So dealing with the intermittency of renewables was a real issue that nobody had a good solution to, other than pumped hydro and maybe mass flywheels. So Denmark said, “Well, we can just dump the energy into our district heating loops, convert that electricity to thermal energy, so we don’t have to pay Norway.” They were literally paying Norway 40 or 50 cents a kilowatt-hour to send the power north. They still use that concept today — now, of course, they have more grid flexibility with batteries. But Denmark made that decision as a country in the ‘70s: do we go nuclear, or do we invent something that’s never been done before? Vestas was born out of farmer infrastructure turned up into the wind — it was like an Apollo project for Denmark to avoid going nuclear.

Aaron Nichols: And how long ago was all that, when y’all made the switch?

Rob Avis: 2007, 2008.

Aaron Nichols: Wow. Okay, so coming up on two decades. Renewables were in a very different place back then.

Rob Avis: Very different, yep.

Aaron Nichols: Now, your LinkedIn bio says you “design autonomous, regenerative properties for people who want land that produces, protects, and lasts.” What does that mean?

Rob Avis: It can be interpreted in different ways. Some people get a bit defensive about it and say, “Well, why are you creating islands off in the distance that only benefit one group of people?” It’s actually the exact opposite, if you think about it. Because your audience understands renewables — when we look at how the grid’s likely to grow going forward, there’ll be some transmission growth, but probably not at the scale we’re seeing in China. In North America, we’re more likely to see distributed solar and battery systems deployed en masse, which means the grid basically turns into more of a trickle-based system, instead of always providing real-time energy to every structure connected to it. Every structure becomes a bidirectional opportunity to support the grid and itself.

So autonomous buildings, or autonomous properties, take that same philosophy that’s likely to be deployed in the electrical grid and apply it to the food and water space. We also help our clients think about microgrids, which your audience will know a lot about. The food grid is actually almost the same as the electrical grid — we have a very small number of people, less than 3% of the population, that farms. And we’re going to see how fragile that system is this year, as global fertilizer supply gets massively disrupted. Some people are calling for a one-third reduction in food supply this year just due to that disruption in the GCC. So instead of depending on one central source, having lots of islands of production distributed turns the centralized system into a distributed one.

And the benefit is that, as more people do this, the system actually becomes more stable — the chances of a disruption, which a lot of people are concerned about, go down. In the period between right now and when this decentralized future becomes the norm, the folks who work with us can see the fragility in the food, water, and energy systems. They’re putting their money into what I call insurance policies — ones that benefit them when times are great, and benefit them even more when times are not. And as those early adopters do that, and more people follow, the concern about times not being great starts to diminish really rapidly.

The fragility we have in the world right now is because we’ve all become so dependent on a very, very small number of suppliers. That concentrates the economics, and it concentrates the risk — and you end up with Lehman-style failures. Imagine what happens with a Lehman-style failure in the food system. It’s not something people really like to think about.

Aaron Nichols: So to summarize as succinctly as I can: the more resilient people are, the less need there is across the population — and therefore the more resilient the whole population becomes in some disruption or emergency.

Rob Avis: Exactly.

Aaron Nichols: So let’s say the average person — me — doesn’t have a ton of experience growing their own food, lives on a third of an acre, has a small backyard, just put in garden beds for the first time this year and is growing their first crop of stuff. Or doesn’t even know where to start with becoming more resilient. What are some things you recommend to just gain some resiliency in your life?

Rob Avis: You live in Colorado, I think? Whereabouts?

Aaron Nichols: I do — Longmont, north of Denver.

Rob Avis: Okay. So Colorado’s an interesting edge case, just because of the strange rainwater harvesting laws you’ve got there. I think that’s changing a little bit, but it might actually get more strict this year — as the eastern slopes, I think you guys have record-low snow in the mountains this year, which could be very challenging. But one-third of an acre is more than enough land to grow pretty much all your vegetables through the summer, and even have enough to store well into the winter if you’re growing root crops. And it’s way easier than you think to get started.

Where consulting can help is to skip some of the errors — but we live in a time now where there’s YouTube University, there’s so much content out there for somebody who wants to start slow and small. In-ground or raised beds are great places to begin. There’s a book called Square Foot Gardening — it’s had, I don’t know, a million copies printed; it’s $2 at every used bookstore. It takes a super-reductionist approach to planting vegetables, and you just literally follow the recipe. That’s the first place to start with gardening. And ironically, always start small — start with a couple of boxes. Women get this better than men do; they tend to be a little more—

Aaron Nichols: [laughs] That’s — yeah, that’s completely true. I get a lot of justifiable flak from my wife for going way down rabbit holes.

Rob Avis: Yeah. So if you start with, I don’t know, 20 square feet — call it two or three raised beds — and build off of success, have a really great 20-square-foot year, then you go to 40 the next year, and 80 the year after, you’re building off of strength. Versus going straight in with the whole backyard, having it be a disaster, and never wanting to touch it again. It’s better to start with small successes and then build.

Then, if you live in a state where rainwater harvesting is legal, harvest it. If you live in a state where it’s illegal, advocate for it to become legal, because it’s super important — it’s the cleanest drinking water on earth. As we end up in drier periods, we need to be stewarding every drop that falls. About 5,000 liters, or 1,800 gallons, is a really good place to start around a small homestead — typically distributed across a couple of tanks off your downspouts. And if you live in a dry place like California, New Mexico, or Arizona where greywater is legal, that’s a great source of water — especially if you change the products inside your house. One thing that happens to people who harvest greywater is that their personal health improves, because you stop using all the garbage on your body — you don’t want that garbage ending up on your land. So it gets really personal. You start buying soaps that are actually fertilizers for the plants, and you get a second use out of the product: a head of lettuce, or a couple of leaves of kale, every time you take a shower. A nice feedback loop.

But literally — just start growing some food. A couple of quick stats for you: in the 1980s we reached peak global calories per capita. We’ve never had higher calories than the 1980s, so we’re actually going down. There’s about 18 months of food on earth at any given time, and about three days of food in any North American city at any given time. So food is one of those things that shouldn’t be just-in-time just to make it more efficient. The finance math on food should be different from other industries, in my opinion.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Going back to resilience — I was very lucky to be selected for the Peace Corps in Nepal, but I was only there for seven weeks before we were evacuated due to COVID, out of my two-year commitment. And I remember just thinking, “Wow, these people know how to do things. Wow, are they competent.” A lot of that was out of necessity — in what we call first-world countries, you have specialization because you have so many more resources, so the average person specializes in something rather than being a generalist who knows how to build their home and grow their own food. And I remember thinking, “If something happens, these people are going to be okay.” They’ve been growing their own food, building their own shelter, and stewarding their own land for way longer than we have — and they haven’t lost touch with it like we have.

Rob Avis: Yeah. I really think this is one of the course corrections we need to take — and I think AI is forcing it right now. We’ve over-educated in the white-collar system and under-educated in the blue-collar system. We’re all really good at working with the bits, but there aren’t enough of us anymore who know how to work with the atoms. As AI replaces more — I don’t think AI is going to replace our jobs, but I do think there’s going to be less need for junior engineers, for example. As an engineer using AI, it’s equivalent to having probably five intermediates underneath me when I deploy resources there. For my kids, I’m telling them, “You need to get into things where you use your body,” because humanoid robotics is still a ways away. Maybe that’ll change faster than I anticipate, but food production especially is one of the hardest things to automate. It’s going to reach limits in terms of what we can actually do with robots. Maybe those limits will be surpassed 10 years from now — certainly AI has moved very quickly — but we definitely need more people out in the fields, for sure.

Aaron Nichols: And speaking of AI — you mentioned something in your LinkedIn bio called the Atlas Loop. You said: “The Atlas Loop is our most ambitious project to date — a 40-acre integrated development where data center waste heat cascades through affordable housing, a year-round greenhouse, a wellness center, a fermentation facility, and biochar production. One energy input and five outputs.” How did you make this happen, and what can we learn from it as we’re building data centers everywhere now? Also — where is this amazing thing?

Rob Avis: I can’t say where it is, but I can tell you what it is. It actually isn’t yet — it’s in the ideation phase. The property exists. The intention for affordable housing exists. But as data centers propagate across North America and consume the resources of a region, two things are happening. Cultural sentiment is starting to become aware of the consequences of that resource vacuum, so there’s a bit of competition for those resources.

One of the reasons we’re seeing this is that AI is kind of the next expression of how humans develop, and financiers specifically like very simple projects — simple in that you build a box, connect it to a plug, connect it to a pipe, put all your stuff in there, and then treat the atmosphere as a dumping ground. We know where that goes; most of us are aware. You end up with an overheated environment, carbon issues, really expensive power prices, and waste thermal heat. One watt of compute is one watt of thermal energy.

We have a project up here in Alberta called Wonder Valley — Kevin O’Leary is talking about it. It’s a 12-gigawatt data center, and they’re specifically positioning it 100 meters, 100 yards, from the TransCanada natural gas pipeline so they can tie it to simple-cycle turbines. If you do the math on 12 gigawatts of simple-cycle turbines and then 12 gigawatts of compute, you’ve got 24 gigawatts of thermal energy at a minimum. That’s enough energy to heat the city of Edmonton — a million and a half people. We get to minus 40, where Celsius and Fahrenheit are friends — minus 40 Celsius is the same as minus 40 Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods. That data center and its simple-cycle turbines could literally heat all of Edmonton through the winter, just with a district heating system off the heat coming off that compute. It’s more expensive. It’s more complex. But last I looked at the natural gas reserves in North America, at our current rate of consumption, it’s 20 years. So we have to start looking at entropy in our calculations — we have to look at energy flows and reevaluate what waste streams look like.

The Atlas Loop is a concept where the AI data center and humans are not mortal enemies. To the data center, waste is just an unused resource. So how do we capture the waste products of compute and turn them into the things humans actually need, so both parties benefit from their co-location? That requires vision. It requires city planners who want to facilitate both activities. It requires financial risk mechanisms that allow developers to take a little bit of risk. So we’re trying to figure out how that marriage of those two spaces can work. We’re talking to a data center developer, we’ve got the affordable housing developer, we’ve got the property, and we’re looking at using the heat for car washes, for indoor farming. The building façade can be covered in solar-electric. EV chargers — all of this actually meets the climate change plan for that region perfectly. So I think if we can start to reorient how we integrate things at a design level, the world can evolve and work better than it does right now.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah — and like you said, it takes a little bit of imagination and a shifting of what we think is appropriate. Just a little imagination beyond the big-box smokestack, where waste heat gets radiated out and we don’t use it. How does solar energy factor into what you do? I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about solar, considering this is This Week in Solar.

Rob Avis: So I’m a huge advocate for 80% of Tony Seba’s work — there are a few things in there I disagree with. But I’ve been in the renewable space since 2008, advocating for it. On pretty much every project — it depends on the person I’m working with. Some people are more environmentally driven; the environmental conversation doesn’t even need to happen if they’re not. It can be liberty and freedom, it can be any number of motivations. As the cheapest source of energy on earth, and getting cheaper — I call it the software of energy — in my opinion every project should have its own solar generation. And more and more now, as batteries have their precipitous decline in price, it’s about creating the proper energy management system with batteries now, or expandable into the future, and — depending on how aggressive they want to get — possibly adding some sort of backup generator, then connecting that to the grid.

I’m a huge fan. As an engineer — energy is the foundational layer of civilization. So if you’re not thinking about energy in the next 30 years, that’s probably one of the best investments you can make. You use after-tax dollars today to save pre-tax dollars for the next 30 years. You lock in your price today. As we see Hormuz continue to get backed up — five kilowatts of solar in your state, and it’s almost equivalent in mine, is enough to drive close to 20,000 miles a year. So now you’re not just offsetting 16-cent kilowatt-hours, you’re offsetting very expensive fuel. It feels great, it doesn’t make any noise. I don’t see any downside to it.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I joke about this a lot on this show, but I think solar is too good at what it does — so it’s boring. It just lays there and makes power. It doesn’t whiz-bang, it doesn’t flash, it doesn’t move around.

Rob Avis: Yep. I love it when people try to cast shade on solar and I’m in the conversation, because I just go back in time to how the oil industry started. Most people don’t know this, but we literally used to drill holes in the ground, dig ponds in the earth, and just dump the oil in there — and from there it got spilled everywhere. When they first started producing, I can’t remember which fraction it was — whether it was gasoline or diesel — we were producing oil for paraffin, or some other product that comes off the fractionation tower, and we were literally dumping gasoline into the creeks. So how can you criticize a fledgling industry like solar, which is hugely cleaner? People will say, “It’s not recyclable.” It’s like — yeah, it is. We’re figuring that out, and it’s much more recyclable than the 420 ppm in the atmosphere that’s going to take a century or more to pull back out of the environment.

Aaron Nichols: Right — and, you know, we’re actually trying. There’s a difference there.

Rob Avis: Totally. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Rob, I could talk to you all day, but we’re coming up on time. I end every episode with the same question. It has to do with the fact that I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party last year, and while I was speaking I realized that 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where renewable energy as we know it didn’t even exist. She was born before the first PV cell was invented — we knew about the photovoltaic effect, but the only way we knew how to generate electricity on a large scale was to dam up rivers, or dig up fossil fuel, burn it in a central location, and send the electricity outward. So everything that’s happened — everything your career has been built on — has happened within my grandma’s lifetime. So if you’re going to play us out and just moonshot here: what do you think energy is going to look like 80 years from now?

Rob Avis: Such a hard question. I’ll just state my bias: as I watch the solar rampage — in a positive way — across the earth right now, I keep wondering, are we going to overcome the Jevons paradox? Are we going to continue to burn everything that’s in the ground while we also add tons and tons of solar and wind capacity? Or are we going to actually evolve as a species to work within the constraints of what we can capture in a diurnal cycle? I think there’s going to be more—

Aaron Nichols: Can you define the Jevons paradox and the diurnal cycle?

Rob Avis: Sure. The Jevons paradox is easiest to understand in your car. Every year we improve the internal combustion engine by about 1%, and then we add heated seats, or heated mirrors—

Aaron Nichols: Mmm.

Rob Avis: —so instead of benefiting from the efficiency we’ve gained in the combustion process, we find ways of consuming all of that efficiency. So the net energy consumed on earth perpetually grows bigger, as opposed to saying, “You know what, we’re going to have a hundred million barrels consumed this year, and we’re going to start decreasing that amount, and solar is going to fill that wedge.” The Jevons paradox is something we’ve never beaten. Another example: when we discovered coal in England, we stopped burning wood for fuel — but we actually cut more trees down to shore up the coal mines. So wood consumption didn’t go down, it actually went up, even though we were using it for different things.

Diurnal means the daily cycle. One of the issues people love to hate solar and wind for is that they’re intermittent — solar based on the solar cycle and the time of year, wind based on how much the wind blows.

Aaron Nichols: Right.

Rob Avis: That’s being solved with batteries, of course. But that’s the question I ask. And I know there are lots of people working on moonshot ideas, some of which are terrifying — like reflecting the sun from space back onto earth. I think that’s going to exacerbate climate change, because now you have thermal energy entering the atmosphere in a part of the earth where normally it would be radiating back out to space. So even though we can technically cover the whole earth with solar, at some point we’re going to reach a limit to what makes sense—

Aaron Nichols: Yeah — quality of life, too. Imagine a world where you can’t see the stars.

Rob Avis: Yeah. So my question is always: do we have the capacity to evolve as a species? Or are we destined to continually grow and grow and grow, without limits? We know that indigenous people of the past, when they lived on islands or constrained land masses — if you read Jared Diamond’s work, he talks about how the successful indigenous groups who lived for millennia had mechanisms to manage their population. And the question is not just, can we manage our population — but can we manage the amount of energy that we each individually choose to consume on a daily basis? Can we set a limit to that, and continue to live modern lives, without needing to cover the entire planet with whatever energy technology we choose to develop?

Aaron Nichols: Well, Rob — where do you like to be found, if you do like to be found?

Rob Avis: I post pretty prolifically on LinkedIn. You can find me at fifthworld.com, and I’ve got quite a few videos up on YouTube under Fifth World as well.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on today. And for everyone listening — that’s been This Week in Solar.

Rob Avis: Thanks, sir.

Trump Administration Imposes New Tariffs on Solar Materials

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:31:02 GMT

What’s new

The Trump administration just imposed tariffs of at least 15% on imported polysilicon and set minimum prices on many parts of the solar supply chain.

Polysilicon is the ultra-purified silicon (basically refined sand, made from quartz) that gets sliced into wafers, built into cells, and assembled into the solar panels on your roof.

It’s also a key ingredient in the computer chips inside your phone and laptop. Right now, China makes the vast majority of the world’s Polysilicon.

Here’s the Trump Administration’s plan to make sure more solar is made here in the U.S., based on reporting from Reuters and Bloomberg:

Impose 15% or more tariffs on imported polysilicon.
Add legal minimums on how cheaply imported polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules can be sold in the U.S.
A built-in delay before the rules kick in, so U.S. manufacturers who currently rely on imported parts have time to adjust.
Offsets for companies that invest big in American manufacturing.

The move follows a year-long national security investigation by the Commerce Department into where our polysilicon comes from.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Energy costs are skyrocketing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and no one has a good plan to fix it.

You can’t control what the power company charges next year, but you can opt out of the cycle by going solar.

Our customers have told us over and over again that they don’t get mad anymore when the power company raises rates, because it just doesn’t even apply to them.

If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, we’d love to show you the numbers.

Book Your Free Solar Estimate

Why it matters

Energy costs are at an all-time high, solar is the cheapest power source available (and fastest to deploy), and policy will make solar components more expensive.

Tariffs and price floors push equipment costs up. So as families across the country are getting hit by electricity bills, the one choice they have is about to get more expensive.

But a tariff like this only matters if your solar installer hasn’t planned ahead. Exact Solar has.

We’ve already pre-secured a large supply of solar modules and solar components that qualify for domestic content (which won’t be subject to the same regulations).

And because everyone’s finances look different, Exact Solar doesn’t box you into one way of paying for solar. We’ve partnered with organizations like Clean Energy Credit Union and the Amicus Solar Co-operative to make sure we can offer ethical financing that we can stand behind as a locally-owned company.

No matter how you want to go solar, we have a way to finance that will get panels on your roof and lower your energy bills.

Tariffs come and go, but the value of making your own clean power at a fixed cost while everyone else’s bill keeps climbing doesn’t.

If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, now’s the time to contact Exact Solar and see what the numbers look like for your home.

Book Your Free Solar Estimate

Sources:

Trump Readies Tariffs and Price Floor to Help US Polysilicon — Bloomberg
US weighs polysilicon price floor, tariffs to counter China in solar, chips — Reuters
Trump administration to impose 15% tariff in polysilicon probe meant to counter China — Yahoo Finance

How We (Literally) Take Our Power Back: Sean Garren Decray

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:31:17 GMT

Aaron talks with Sean Garren DeKrey, Chief Program Officer at Vote Solar, who leads the state-level solar policy and advocacy work in more than two dozen states.

If you feel powerless when you think about clean energy and how much needs to be done, this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn here.

Learn more about Vote Solar at votesolar.org.

Expect to learn:

Why roughly 70% of this century’s carbon reduction came from state and local policy (not the federal policies we’re so busy arguing about)
How ordinary people can actually sway state legislators and energy regulators (and why it’s a smaller pond than you think)
Why the solar transition is already past the tipping point, and how we’re going to have a “two-way relationship” with electricity in the future.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And we have a special bonus for This Week In Solar listeners.

For a limited time, we’ll pay you $1,000 if you refer a friend and they go solar. (We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please don’t refer anyone outside those states.)

Here’s how to claim the bonus:

Click the “Refer a Friend and earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact info.
Get a check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1,000

Quote from the episode:

“The clean energy economy isn’t a tiny seed we’re still watering. We’re one of the big trees in the forest now, and we’ve got to start playing like that.”

— Sean Garren DeKrey

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Sean, at a conference I went to last summer, I heard a stat I haven’t been able to get out of my head since. Someone told me that 70%, give or take, of the locked-in carbon reduction we’ve seen since the turn of the century has been a direct result of state and local policy. Yet most people are only aware of, and only talk about, federal policy. So why do you think people feel so powerless, when we clearly have so much more power in our communities than we think?

Sean Garren DeKrey: That’s a great question, and one we spend a lot of time thinking about at Vote Solar. I think the reality is that our relationship to our electric utilities leaves us feeling powerless. We don’t have a choice about who provides our power, and that name is a big one — it’s handed to us. We see it on trucks as they drive by, we see it in the news. So we feel like there’s this massive entity making all these choices, and our bills keep going up — that seems to be the choice they’re making on a regular basis. That’s the biggest piece. And one of the most exciting things about solar is giving people a chance — a choice — to take some of that power back for themselves.

Aaron Nichols: Literally and figuratively.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Exactly. The other piece is people’s misconceptions of what gets decided in Washington, DC, versus what gets decided by their state capital, their city council, or their town meeting. The reality is, for energy in particular, most of the decisions that impact your electric bill, where your power comes from, and the quality of the lines that lead to your house — whether they can stay strong through a storm — are decided at the state level, very locally, by state legislators who probably don’t live too many blocks from you. So there’s a lot of need to empower and educate people about the role of state government in energy decisions, and how much they can actually sway state legislators and decision makers. It’s a smaller playing field, and there are a lot bigger fish in it.

Aaron Nichols: Now, for everyone listening, welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today’s guest is — I hope I say this right — Sean Garren DeKrey.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Perfect.

Aaron Nichols: Sean, will you go ahead and introduce yourself and talk a little about what you do at Vote Solar?

Sean Garren DeKrey: Sure. I’m the Chief Program Officer here at Vote Solar, so I oversee most of our folks pursuing our mission across the country. We do state-level policy and regulation around unlocking solar markets and making sure everybody has access to the affordability, the jobs, and the benefits of solar power. We work in state capitals across the country to make sure there’s a runway for solar. I’m based in Boston — I got my start doing our Northeast work, so I cut my teeth in Boston, Hartford, and Albany, building out those solar markets, and moved from there into this national role.

Aaron Nichols: And I think I read on the Vote Solar website that y’all are active in 25 states, something like that.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Yeah, it shifts a little year to year, but around there — somewhere between 20 and 25 or 26.

Aaron Nichols: So across that large of a map, how do you all decide which battleground states get the most attention — where you’re putting your resources, and when?

Sean Garren DeKrey: That’s a great question. A lot of it has to do with what the politics and economics of the state make in terms of an opportunity for solar. We’re looking to use solar to solve climate change, to make our energy bills as affordable as possible, and to grow our economy in smart ways with solar to power it. So we look for places where solar is the right tool to solve those problems and there’s a political path forward — with our help — to unlocking that. That’s fundamentally the decision-making we’re making year in, year out. Now, the reality is you also can’t just walk away from a state and come back five years later and expect to still have influence and make a difference. So we try to stay consistently in a lot of our states, so that year in, year out we’re in front of those legislators, energy commissions, and regulators making the case for solar — so they’re getting educated, building their championship, and those markets continue to grow healthily over time.

Aaron Nichols: What’s one of your favorite stories of a high-impact project you’ve worked on? There are so many benefits to solar — everything from reducing a high-income household’s energy bill to actually lifting people out of poverty. And I’ve been very fortunate that at Exact Solar, we’re a company that really loves working with schools and nonprofits, and we’ve done some incredible projects. I’m curious what some of your favorites are.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Yeah, I love when we get to see the diversity of benefits that can flow from solar. Some of my favorites actually have to do with meeting solar workers — folks who have found a career and a way to earn their livelihood in this space. We were lucky enough to work on building out community solar in New Jersey. Pretty early on, one of the very first projects was by a company, Landscape, and they built a couple of projects in Northern New Jersey and had hired folks who had never been in the solar space. We got to interview a couple of the workers and hear both the difference that a high-quality job and a career with a lot of runway made for them and their vision of their future, and also the pride they had in working in solar — the benefits that were going to flow from this project, making the world a better place. I love hearing those stories and feeling like we’re building a movement that’s having a profound impact on people in a lot of different ways. That’s one of my favorites. Although — our local food shelf here in Boston has a solar project on their roof, and it’s right off the highway, so I get to see it whenever I’m driving to and from my house. That one, on a personal level, feels pretty good.

Aaron Nichols: That is so awesome. If y’all ever want to interview some installers on our team, we love doing that kind of stuff. We have several people who can tell stories like the ones you just described.

Sean Garren DeKrey: I would love that. Pennsylvania is a huge priority for us and a place where we see a ton of potential. But as you well know, it’s not the biggest solar market in the world — there aren’t a million companies there doing good work. So having some local stories to tell would be really powerful, especially in a state where natural gas jobs have been a lot of the discussion for years — whether they’re real or not, who has them, where they are. It would be great to be telling the story about the role solar can play in Pennsylvania’s economy.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we would love that. I had no idea until I started working there that Pennsylvania is basically the original fossil fuel state. It’s deeply, deeply entrenched. And Pennsylvania is 49th out of 50 states — second only to Alaska in terms of solar deployment. So we’d love to work with you guys. We do a lot of our own work in that way, and we lobby a lot on our own. We’d love to have you all as a partner.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Absolutely. I’ll make sure you get connected to our Pennsylvania lead after this.

Aaron Nichols: Perfect. Now, you mentioned in your bio on the Vote Solar website that you worked on campaigns specifically for low-income communities and communities of color. What is the meaningful benefit households like that get from installing solar?

Sean Garren DeKrey: Well, first and foremost, for folks who are low-income or low-wealth, it’s about affordability — the bill savings you can see on your electric bill. As we know, folks are paying a huge percentage of their wages to keep the lights on, and that often comes down to a decision between food, paying rent, or paying your electric bill. Every cent you can save someone is tremendously impactful when you’re facing a severe energy burden. So energy affordability and bill savings — that’s number one, two, and three for a lot of folks. And I think that’s true for most people you’re selling solar to. That’s often one, two, and three.

Aaron Nichols: Certainly. And what’s fun about selling it is that the utilities have spent decades not cultivating relationships. So they’re fun to sell against — they’re a good villain.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Exactly. And that gets at the other major benefit, which is a sense of empowerment — the ability to take some of this crazy energy landscape into your own hands, to have it on your own roof or in your neighborhood. That’s really powerful for folks who are routinely left out of decision-making, routinely ignored by legislators and the powers that be. So there’s a really exciting opportunity for community and self-empowerment here, and the ability to make a choice. We work to not just have that be one customer’s experience, but to build it into momentum — where you’re seeing communities as a whole take greater control over their energy system, and weighing in at the state level on energy regulation and legislation. How do we build momentum to get more people on board and continue this transition to clean energy that we’re going through as a country?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we’re starting to see more homes built solar-ready, and a lot of low-income housing projects built with solar included. We got to work on one for Habitat for Humanity, where they built five row homes, and the people who were going to live in them put in the sweat equity — which is part of the Habitat for Humanity model, as you know — and then our crews installed on them. So these were energy-efficient homes that people get to live in that now don’t have utility bills. They can put that money toward something that matters a lot more, rather than the same product every month that just costs more.

Sean Garren DeKrey: I love that. It’s so powerful. I got to work with a low-income housing developer in New York City who had put solar on one of their buildings, and just seeing the pride and excitement that brought to the community members there — but also what it means for them to save on their electric bills, and the other things they can spend that money on — it’s pretty transformative. It’s a really powerful accelerant to change.

Aaron Nichols: It’s just cool, isn’t it? I’m obviously biased — I work for a solar company — but I’m so all in on it because it’s just so freaking cool. I love camping and I can work remotely, and I bought a solar panel off Facebook Marketplace that someone had ripped off a construction site for like a hundred bucks. I have a battery bank and a Starlink, and I can just drive my Tacoma with my rooftop tent into the woods and have power and internet. It’s crazy.

Sean Garren DeKrey: That is amazing. Well done. It is so cool. I saw a billboard the other day — this is about transit, but I think it’s true for solar too. I think it was in Chicago, and it said no child has ever seen a car share and screamed at the top of their lungs — and it had a picture of a train or a trolley. It’s so true that these technologies are just cooler. They’re so exciting. My two-and-a-half-year-old sees the projects along the side of the highway here in Massachusetts and he’s excited to find out what they are. There’s something we in the solar world need to not forget: we may not be new anymore, but we’re still really exciting and really cool.

Aaron Nichols: And that’s the drum I keep beating — my own mission is that I want solar to be sexier. I think we get caught up in the megawatts and gigawatts and the number of jobs that’ll be lost if this legislation passes, and we miss the forest for the trees — when really it’s like, Jim just bought an off-grid property and now has energy in the middle of the Nevada desert. We miss those stories in the larger conversation.

Sean Garren DeKrey: I think that’s totally true. Vote Solar isn’t focused on solar because we think it’s the only way to make a difference in the world, or the single most important thing in the universe. We’re doing it because we think it has a real keystone role to play — to steal Pennsylvania’s name —

Aaron Nichols: Nice.

Sean Garren DeKrey: — a real keystone role to play in our energy future, and because it’s a brand that works. People love solar. When they hear that solar is part of the solution, they’re more likely to buy in. We lead with that because it’s a powerful brand, if you will.

Aaron Nichols: Now, what’s one myth about solar that you have to fight over and over that you’re so tired of debunking?

Sean Garren DeKrey: I think it’s that the solar transition is in the future — that it’s this thing we’re still trying to get started in the country. We’re seeing that get debunked in real time now, especially with this administration’s attacks on clean energy and the continued success of solar. People are grappling with and understanding that the solar transition is well underway. At this point I think we’re beyond the tipping point at which we could ever turn it back. The future is powered by the sun, and it’s coming every single day. We’re the largest-growing resource in the country, and I think we’ll continue to be for years and years until we’re the dominant source of energy. So it’s really just the idea that this is all a future thing. The clean energy economy isn’t a tiny seed we’re still watering — we’re one of the big trees in the forest now, and we’ve got to start playing like that.

Aaron Nichols: I heard somebody describe it almost like rain buckets the other day. Rather than putting in anything new, it’s basically just putting buckets out to catch rain so you have water. It’s already falling from the sky. It’s already coming.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Right. Exactly.

Aaron Nichols: It’s already a resource that’s not going to run out for — I don’t know how many years the sun has left, like a couple billion?

Sean Garren DeKrey: Let’s call it plenty. Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s also a technology, not just a resource. We’re getting more and more able to use it efficiently, it’s cheaper, and I don’t think we’ll see that slow anytime soon. We’re only going to become more competitive tomorrow than we were today, once we grapple with some of the attacks from this administration.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. It’s unfortunate, but every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. And it’s basically just plot — life would be boring without plot is what I keep telling myself.

Sean Garren DeKrey: There you go. That’s a good way to motivate yourself to go back to work every day.

Aaron Nichols: If there was no conflict, we wouldn’t have good stories.

Sean Garren DeKrey: It’s true. And I love that even though we’re working on powering the world with the sun, there are still people who find some way to oppose that.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah — again, plot. Every good story needs villains.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Exactly.

Aaron Nichols: So, speaking of where the world is going, I ask everyone who comes on this show the same closing question, and it has to do with the fact that last September I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party. When I spoke, I realized that her being 80 years old — actually, this was more than a year ago now; my god, this show is more than a year old — means she was born into a world where what we call renewable energy did not exist. She was born back when windmills basically pumped water. We knew about the photovoltaic effect, but we hadn’t invented photovoltaic cells yet. The only way we knew how to generate energy was to go find things, dig them up, move them to a central location, burn them, and send the energy outwards. Everything that’s happened with renewable energy — figuring out how to generate energy in different ways — all of that has happened within my grandma’s lifetime, all the way to solar now becoming the cheapest power source in the world. So if you’re going to moonshot to take us out here — and I figure 80 years from now, unless science advances, we’ll both be gone, so no one can hold you to your answer — what do you think energy is going to look like 80 years from now?

Sean Garren DeKrey: Well, I plan on being there, so I’ll say that. But it’s a stretch, and who knows what kind of shape I’ll be in at that point. I think 80 years from now, the most important thing is that everything is going to be electrified. The reality — and most of what I’m saying won’t even take that long — is that we’re going to be driving only electric cars, and probably most of them will be shared by lots of other people and autonomous. We’re going to power and heat our homes with electricity, and more and more, everything we interact with is going to have some electric component. With the advent of AI and technologies like that, it’s getting incorporated into everything. So we’ll be more and more oriented around electricity and where it comes from. And I think one of the key transformative components is that everybody’s going to have a two-way relationship with electricity. They won’t just be passive consumers — they’re going to contribute back to our energy system, whether it’s through their roof and a rooftop solar system, their balcony or backyard with a plug-in solar system, or just through time-varying pricing on their electric bills, where they get better at not running their dryer during the peak evening hours when electricity prices are highest. We’re all going to have a much more interactive relationship, and software will probably manage a lot of that for us. But we’re going to be prosumers, if you will, of the energy we relate to — rather than just pure consumers.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, I wonder what role utilities will even have in that world.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Yeah — we’re still going to be wired to each other, and someone’s going to have to go out and upgrade, replace, and fix those things every once in a while. So the CEO of my utility, he’ll still be climbing poles — or maybe by then his whole job will be climbing poles and replacing wires. One can hope.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Sean, if you do like to be found online or otherwise, where would you like to be found?

Sean Garren DeKrey: I do — thank you for asking. You can find us at votesolar.org, and we’re on Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky, you name it — Facebook. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Sean Garren DeKrey. I love to connect there, so I’m happy to talk to anybody about their policy challenges or questions. And we’ll certainly be connecting with you to talk about telling good stories in Pennsylvania.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on today. And for everyone who tuned in, that’s been This Week in Solar — we’ll see you next week.

Sean Garren DeKrey: Thanks, Aaron.

Forget Humanoid Robots. The FCC Banned New Foreign-Made Solar Inverters

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:32:04 GMT

What’s new

You might have seen headlines this week about the Trump Administration banning the importation of humanoid robots. Maybe you even laughed, which is understandable!

But buried in that ban is something far more impactful.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has added foreign-made power inverters to its “Covered List” (the government’s roster of gear they consider a national security risk).

Let us explain what those are. Most people, when they see a solar energy system, only see solar panels and have no idea what an inverter is.

An inverter is the box that converts the direct current (DC) produced by solar panels into the alternating current (AC) your home and the grid actually use.

Nothing on a solar or battery system runs without one.

On Tuesday, the Trump Administration banned any brand-new inverter model built outside the United States from getting approved for sale here.

If you’re shopping for a residential solar energy system or a smaller commercial solar energy system, you can take a breath, because this likely won’t affect you. This ban will disproportionately affect utility-scale solar systems (think systems that cover several acres).

The FCC’s stated reason for this ban is cybersecurity. They argue that internet-connected inverters could, in theory, be shut off or remotely monitored from abroad.

It’s worth noting that a Department of Energy review earlier this year inspected 30 Chinese-made inverters and found no evidence of hidden malicious hardware.

Regardless of why the FCC chose to do this, it comes at a strange time.

Millions of Americans currently struggle to pay their electric bills as power prices skyrocket, and solar is the fastest and cheapest energy we can deploy to help bring down prices.

Data centers are demanding huge amounts of power that has to come from somewhere, so intentionally delaying large-scale solar projects is an odd choice.

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

And we have a special bonus for This Week In Solar listeners. For a limited time, we’ll pay you $1,000 if you refer a friend and they go solar. (We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please don’t refer anyone outside those states.)

Click the “Refer a Friend” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail your check).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact info.
Get a check mailed to you if your friend goes solar!

Refer a Friend and earn $1000

Why it matters

If you’re shopping for home solar, this likely won’t affect you. If you’re looking to put solar on a small commercial building, like a school or township, and you’re working with Exact Solar or another Amicus company, you won’t have to worry.

The real pressure will land on utility-scale solar farms, where foreign makers, many of them Chinese, hold about 60% of the inverter market.

Several things remain to be seen here, like whether this applies only to future inverter models or models that have already been manufactured. We’ll continue to monitor the situation.

If you’re interested in knowing how this might affect your desire to go solar, go to exactsolar.com and fill out our free estimate form to talk with our team!

Sources:

Energy Doesn't Have to Be So Boring: Watts The Tea

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:30:21 GMT

Aaron talks with Zainab Mirza and Hannah Malus, the co-hosts of Watts the Tea, a show that translates clean energy news and policy into the language of Gen Z gossip.

If you want to know why clean energy has a messaging problem, and how you might fix it with a little help from Twilight, Real Housewives, and a healthy disrespect for the sweater vest, this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Follow Watts the Tea on Instagram

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Expect to learn:

Why so many clean energy CEOs are showing up to Washington with a “first-time ask to save their industry” and why that doesn’t work
Why you will never hear the phrase “electrons to the grid” on Watts the Tea
What Zainab and Hannah have against sweater vests

Quotes from the episode:

“Clean energy is so cool. It’s interesting. It’s like more people care about it now than ever… but it lives in this media silo of long form, really wonky, technical, expert level analysis when more people want to be in the conversation.”

— Hannah Malus

“You can learn what a virtual power plant is in three minutes without needing a textbook on it. And so we’re convinced we can do it.”

— Zainab Mirza

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: We seem to be taking a very similar angle in our content. I would consider all of us on this call, you know, nerd whisperers or nerd translators who are trying to get the public interested in the nitty-gritty of clean energy. Now we’ve taken very different angles for doing that. You guys seem to have brought more of a reality TV angle to an industry that normally sounds like C-SPAN. So why are y’all doing, like I have my own reasons for doing this, but why are y’all doing what you’re doing and why do you think it’s necessary?

Zainab: Great question. I can get started with this and I know Hannah has a lot to fill in, but Hannah and I have worked in the energy and environment space for a number of years and I think a couple of things happened in the last year. One, after reconciliation, we learned while being on the Hill, not working on the Hill, but doing some work on the Hill, that so many CEOs were coming to the Hill for the first time with a first time ask to save their industry. And that’s just not gonna work. Think about like building long-term relationships. And so the clean energy industry was doing this, whereas organizations like in the fossil fuel industry had these long-term relationships. And so we’re coming in with a first time ask.

Hannah Malus: So, you know.

Zainab: So that was one thing that we were witnessing. And that really led us to think about clean energy having a messaging problem. You’re competing against the fossil fuel industry, which quite literally built this country in so many ways and shows up in popular media. You think about like Pedro Pascal wearing oil hats in movies and you think about Johnny Cash’s entire album about how families are built on the backbone of fossil fuel industry.

Hannah Malus: Okay.

Zainab: And you’re competing with what you started to allude to, infographics and boring cost curves and just really not exciting information. And so we thought that it could be different and then we thought we could make it different because we think about it differently. So I think that was our first thesis on that.

Aaron Nichols: I thought of a metaphor while you were speaking about that. It’s the difference between, we could nerd out about this all day. I’ve been hammering on this for a year and a half ever since I started here. And it’s the difference between someone showing up at your door that you don’t know asking for $20 and your best friend showing up to your door asking for $20. And except it’s even worse because in the first scenario you show up and you’re like, hey, can I have $20? Also, I have a graph.

Zainab: I’m here to bore you to tears.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, who’s more likely to get help? Anyway, I’m sorry, please jump in, Hannah.

Hannah Malus: No, I totally agree. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I think especially, you know, I think of the politics of it, but also like the mainstream culture of it all. I just feel like clean energy has so much to learn from the fossil fuel industry in that way of, you know, like how Zainab was saying, just like embedding itself into mainstream culture and discourse. And so, you know, also, like clean energy is so cool. It’s interesting. It’s like more people care about it now than ever. The fact that Georgia’s PUC election made like national headlines last year is so wild that it’s just like energy is having this moment, but it lives in this like media silo of like long form, really wonky, technical, like expert level analysis when more people want to be in the conversation. And so I think what we’re trying to do with Watts the Tea is kind of like broaden that base and, you know, allow more people to understand what’s going on.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I keep joking. Like, bathing suit car wash always works in the movies. I feel like we should try that.

Zainab: Come get your solar panels.

Hannah Malus: Yeah, come get your EVs washed.

Zainab: But you joke, but Aaron, these are the things that we should be doing. Like we should stop making things so boring because when you go home and you scroll on your social media, you’re not captured by the boring things. You’re captured by the way that people make sounds or the way that people talk about their lives. People have solar panels on their roofs that are making their homes more affordable and their utility bills cheaper. That is pretty cool. And there’s a cooler way to explain it than infographic.

Aaron Nichols: It is so true. I mean, obviously we’re preaching to the choir and we all agree with each other, but this is something I’ve been hammering on for a long time. And like personally, I’m just so interested in solar’s ability to just give people freedom and sovereignty and like the ability to, I hang out with a lot of sustainable agriculture folks. And so like being able to create off-grid sustainable homesteads. There’s so much cool stuff that isn’t like, hey, if this legislation passes, we’re going to lose one point, however many gigawatts of potential clean energy projects, which no one understands or cares about.

Zainab: No.

Aaron Nichols: But could y’all briefly introduce yourselves now that we’ve riffed a little bit and talk about what’s the tea?

Zainab: Yeah, Hannah, you want to start this one?

Hannah Malus: Sure, yes. So my name is Hannah Malus. I live in Washington DC. Originally grew up in Louisiana and so have a personal interest in the Gulf Coast. But yeah, I think, you know, I most recently I was VP of Strategy and Advocacy at Clean Energy for America where we work to build the political power of clean energy. Before that, I spent five years at the Center for American Progress. I think I had as many jobs as years I spent at CAP. But eventually it was supporting the operations and strategy of the Energy and Environment Department. And then before that, I was at Environmental Defense Fund. And so I come from climate world, which I think in terms of communications is very like presenting the problem, presenting the crisis. And the reason why I really have enjoyed working in the clean energy space is really presenting the solution. Very like action oriented and really hopeful. And so that is the kind of communication, the kind of message that we’re trying to share on Watts the Tea, presenting clean energy news and policy updates as like celebrity gossip, trying to get more people involved in the conversation.

Zainab: You explained it so well, Hannah. So Aaron, my name is Zainab Mirza and I am so lucky that I’ve worked with Hannah over the years. We first met working at Center for American Progress and then worked together again at Clean Energy for America where I was most recently the Senior Director of Partnerships and Policy. Before that, I spent a number of years at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office where I stood up Community Benefit Plan Program and I learned so much about working with the private sector and public-private partnerships. And what it’s actually like to go into communities and have these conversations with the folks that are gonna host large-scale energy infrastructure. But I’m from Ocean City, Maryland, and I take so much pride in that because it’s where I learned about everything when it comes to environmental stewardship. I grew up in a town where we were voting against politicians that were going to be prioritizing conservation, ocean conservation, our tourism industry and energy. And so that nexus was very particularly peculiar to me and something that I’ve been thinking about for a number of years. Like Hannah’s hometown has hosted legacy energy projects, my hometown is actually being approached with an offshore wind project. And so this nexus and these conversations that we’re having in our hometowns is really interesting. And why we’re also bringing it to Watts the Tea, that these are our hometown communities, are communities that deserve to like get into the nitty gritty without getting into the nitty gritty. And so Watts the Tea is really here to explain these complicated concepts and not go into the deep end of it. You can learn what a virtual power plant is in three minutes without needing a textbook on it. And so we’re convinced we can do it.

Aaron Nichols: Well, so I’m excited to pick your brain on this because I’m as someone who has gone into a lot of communities and talk to them about potential projects that we’re gonna go through, like what do you see as the delta between the way we represent ourselves versus what the public is actually interested in?

Zainab: I think that the public, when you think about your community and services, it’s not all of our individual things that we nerd and geek out about, right? Like when you’re at home, you’re thinking about your groceries, you’re thinking about your bills, you’re thinking about furniture, schools nearby, that is what makes your community a community. What you’re thinking about. So when an energy project comes to your town and your community, okay, well, what’s that gonna do for my day to day? Like, I’m not really gonna get involved in something that is quote unquote random to me. Well, maybe I’m in a community that a old energy project actually shut down and there’s a new one coming in. Okay, that might be a new job opportunity. That might be an opportunity to upskill or, especially in the conversation with hyperscalers and data centers, how is it going to impact my utility bill? And thinking through that type of question, the day-to-day impacts, I think that sometimes owners and operators forget that that’s really what people care about and not, you’re going to power 600,000 homes. That’s not a number that’s relatively understandable. And so I think you have to think about the day-to-day impact a lot more.

Aaron Nichols: Hannah, would you like to weigh in on that as well?

Hannah Malus: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. Zainab and I always love to say like, you will never hear us talk about electrons to the grid on Watts the Tea.

Aaron Nichols: Hahaha!

Hannah Malus: As much as we love our like nerdy friends, you know, like we really, we need the scientists and you know, the engineers and the economists to be weighing in on these things, of course. But I think, you know, if we’re really trying to reach the folks that are being impacted by these projects or stand to benefit from them. I think we need to discuss them in ways that, yeah, exactly what Zainab said really resonate. And so I think that is jobs. I think that is lower energy bills. I think it’s avoiding paying 450 at the gas pump because you know, have an EV. I think it’s really trying to connect the dots between these like ubiquitous energy concepts and how people are experiencing energy in their everyday lives.

Aaron Nichols: Zainab, to go back to what you were saying, I just released an interview last week with my friend, Augeray Wyckoff, who’s one of the people I respect most in the world. I told her that at the beginning of the interview. She just has created this beautiful community center on her land and she’s a farmer and she’s a super connector in our community. And she managed to get 1200 people to sign up against the county’s effort to aerial spray herbicide near her land. And so I went and interviewed her about like for anyone who’s coming into a community, how do they connect with super connectors like you and how do they build trust and how do they like actually you know make sure they don’t end up on the wrong side of this kind of wrath that you’re able to bring down from the heavens. And she did mention that the most important thing is making sure that you tell a community what’s in it for me. There’s so much pushback against large solar projects where people feel like they’re just taking up space and they’re powering something far away that has nothing to do with their town.

Zainab: I think Hannah will agree to this and I’ll get to this towards the end, it’s telling your story, right? It’s like simple as it sounds. But when you’re coming into a community, you have to think about being a stranger. I think the analogy you gave in the beginning about knocking and asking for $20 as a stranger versus someone you know, is what it is. So a lot of conversations I had with these large companies at the loan programs office was a conversation they didn’t really want to like have in the beginning, which is trust takes time. You are not going to build trust going to even five community meetings. It’s really going to take years. And think about how long you’ve built your personal friendships. Hannah and I have known each other since 2019. I trust her to build a project with me, right? We trust each other. We want to do this together. And so I think that large companies that are coming to new communities really need to think about one, like truly what are you going to bring to the community? What are you going to be willing to negotiate on? And be open minded about changing both of those things. You might have some ideas of what the community is looking for, but really it’s going to take a number of community meetings and a number of going to coffee shops and the library and the volunteer fire department and every single small business and learning what they want, bringing that all together and finding how your organization is going to support that while you support the creation of new jobs and upscaling opportunities. So I think you can have some good ideas, but you really have to come in open-minded and you have to be ready for the process of trust building because that’s really what you’re getting at. And a lot of these communities in which you’re building utility-scale solar and in larger projects are communities that might have seen energy infrastructure come and go. We worked on a project outside of Pittsburgh with EOS, it’s a battery company and their facility is an old US steelworkers site. And so this is a community that has quite literally been shaped by energy infrastructure forever. Has seen it come, has seen it go, and now is seeing it being revitalized in a clean and affordable way. So I think those are my two thoughts there.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, I also think, I mean how you dress and how you show up is important as well as someone who I grew up in a very small town and there’s nothing worse than city people in suits showing up telling you what you should think and how you should act and how they’re gonna do something good for you. Let’s focus on the sweater vest you guys. I’ve seen—

Zainab: Take off the sweater vest please for the love.

Aaron Nichols: You guys mention sweater vest specifically in your promotional content for Watts the Tea a couple times and you’ve mentioned that like a lot of energy media is spoken by people in sweater vests. I’m interested. First of all, what do you have against the sweater vest as a garment specifically? I have my own reasons. I think it’s a dumb garment, but what do you guys, what does that symbolize for you? And also just like as a larger question, why do you think clean energy is so underrepresented in media?

Hannah Malus: I’m happy to start this one. You know, yeah, the sweater vest, it just can’t make up its mind. You know, is it a t-shirt? Is it gonna warm you? Is it not, you know? I think what the sweater vest represents to me is, again, not to disparage our friends who are, you know, very wonky and technical, but again, coming from like the climate space transitioning into the energy space. There were so many rooms that I’ve entered and I was the only woman in there, you know, and it was pretty shocking actually when I first started. And so I think, you know, the whole ethos of Watts the Tea is it’s not that we don’t need the folks who are already doing this work and the way that they’re doing it, but we just need more people doing more of it in different ways. And so I think, you know, we don’t mean to hate on the sweater vest and those who don it. But I think it’s the whole point is we want to build a bigger table because we know the whole thing. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And so we want to make sure that we have more folks who are in the rooms where the decisions are happening and the conversations are being had.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, the way I phrased it before is I think we have plenty of nerds in dark rooms making things. We need people that people want to look at and hang out with.

Zainab: Thank you. It’s, thank you. You said it, Aaron.

Aaron Nichols: Hahaha

Zainab: I also think that the sweater vest are talking to the sweater vest sometimes and they’ve always talked to each other. But now the energy, the clean energy like industry is impacting beyond the sweater vest, right? And so you need people that are not in that silo to help break it down in a way that’s going to be different. And that’s the thesis of Watts the Tea.

Aaron Nichols: Nice. Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to make this about me. But I think you all will resonate with this. I gave a talk in San Antonio at the Charge Energy Branding Conference talking about three books that I use to write my LinkedIn content, which are Smart Brevity, Made to Stick, and Making Numbers Count, which are all about how to make complicated information simple and emotional. One of the main points that I hammered on is that a lot of times in the energy industry, you have large kind of unwieldy corporations. And when you have large unwieldy corporations and you have people who rise to a high enough level in them that they are controlling the messaging, those people tend to have advanced degrees, which is not their fault. But if you have an advanced degree, you’ve spent a lot of time in academia, which is an echo chamber where you are consistently rewarded for overcomplicating information. And then you go to a culture where you are surrounded by nothing but that, and you create an echo chamber of just relentless overcomplication that is completely out of touch with the public. And everyone wants simple, easy to understand emotional messaging.

Zainab: Yeah, I think about industries that I’m not an expert in, which is every industry and just a little bit of experience in clean energy. But when I am getting my news and most people get their news from social media, including myself, to learn about something that has nothing to do with what I work on. There’s that barrier of entry of this is something that’s unfamiliar to me. And then there’s the next barrier of entry of do I even know what you’re talking about, right? And so if you’re gonna explain medical concepts to me, you’re not using your jargon. You’re not using the words that are in your silos. You have to completely depart that and think about it in a different way. And in a way, I think some of the best exercises that Hannah and I do is talk about these concepts to our friends and family that don’t work in this industry. And I constantly am thinking about my cousin who lives in New Jersey. Have solar panels on their roofs and she was texting me and she said, you know, if I pay $16 for energy in a month, that’s expensive because of the solar panels that our dad added to our roof a number of years ago. And so she is interested because it helps her, but she works in a bank. So how is she gonna relate to the information that we’re conveying? And I think that is who you really have to think about.

Hannah Malus: Yeah, I think from like an advocacy standpoint, if you want political power, you need a social license to operate. If you want a social license to operate, you need a broad base of support. And so I think, you know, the industry, all industries and clean energy really only stand to gain from more people knowing about them and understanding them. And, you know, how are we developing like consumers, maybe like Zainab’s cousin, to like these enthusiastic champions of clean energy. And I think it’s through empowering them by allowing them to feel like they have a say in the conversation and that they understand these things that are happening.

Aaron Nichols: I like the term social license to operate. I’ve never heard that before. The way I phrase that is, if you want to be heard, be worth listening to.

Zainab: Yeah.

Hannah Malus: I like that. Absolutely.

Zainab: The one-liners today are killing.

Aaron Nichols: I sit around coming up with one liners.

Hannah Malus: This is what happens when you get... Exactly. Exactly.

Zainab: Three messengers on a call.

Aaron Nichols: So let’s talk about the power of analogies. Because you all focus a lot of your content on using analogies like, I mean, thank you guys for tagging me in your post on balcony solar. You talked about Romeo and Juliet in that one. And you said, you know, balcony solar and Juliet both love balcony, which I loved. And then you most recently used Twilight to explain virtual power plants, which, as I mentioned before the call, I haven’t seen Twilight. So some of it went over my head. But I think it’s good. So why are analogies important? And why do you guys use analogies in your content the way that you do?

Zainab: Hannah, do you want to start or do you want me to?

Hannah Malus: Yeah, the whole how this project came to be originally is I was scrolling on Instagram and I came across this account that I believe it’s called Public Pool podcast. I have to double check that. But essentially it’s two hosts and one of them explains sports and like news and sports as if it’s like gossip. And I personally don’t care that much about sports, but like listening to that, I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And so I was like, wow, I really think like clean energy needs this kind of like, this like lowering that barrier to entry and providing people with an ability to like map out these concepts onto something that they already understand. And so, you know, for talking about like grid operators, maybe you don’t understand like what a grid operator is, but like let’s talk about it as if it’s the New Jersey real housewives fighting and like finding ways to kind of create those connections I think just allows more people to enter the conversation.

Zainab: I couldn’t agree more. I feel like, yeah, even if you didn’t know who team Edward and team Jacob were, you knew that one was old school and reliable and one was something new. And the dichotomy of old versus new is a tale that’s old as time, but something that can relate to this conversation. And I would say it’s one of the most fun parts of the work that Hannah and I are doing is to constantly be creative in what is new, what is going on in our media right now. We’re really leaning into the fact that Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is like season four is out and people are in it to win it. So okay maybe maybe you haven’t watched it but you’re kind of curious about who’s fighting and a lot of time it’s just explaining tensions between different characters and that is something that is in movies, books, TV, everywhere. And so it makes it really fun to find. What can we relate this to? I’ll never forget when Hannah talked about the solar tax credit as the bill, like the tax provision that lived as the boy who lived in Harry Potter. And she came up with that in the moment. It was hysterical, but sometimes it’s just, yeah, that just makes sense. And it does invite more people to the conversation to have something that is so lighthearted as Twilight or Harry Potter or whatever Real Housewives show you’re into.

Aaron Nichols: This is a fun exercise I like to do with people when I speak is come up to them afterwards at the conference and just ask what they remember about what I said and it’s inevitably tied to a story or tied to something they already know. It is not a number. It’s never a number.

Zainab: Never a number. I will say there is one number that we are haunted by and Hannah compared the size of transformers to two blue whales and it has been repeated to us. So that’s a number.

Aaron Nichols: Nice. That’s an analogy, though, and also connected to something. Well, I love talking to you guys. I didn’t know there was a show called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but me and my wife proudly live under a rock and really don’t watch anything new.

Hannah Malus: You’re missing out.

Zainab: We will make the analogies for you so you don’t even have to.

Aaron Nichols: Fantastic. Well, I don’t know if you all have listened to any of the interviews on This Week in Solar before or just the news roundups, but I end every interview with the same question and it has to do with the fact that last year I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party. And afterwards, I was putting a LinkedIn post together I realized 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy didn’t even exist. Like the only way we knew how to generate energy at the time was to just go find things, dig them up, bring them to a place, burn them and send the energy out. All of everything that we’re fighting about now, like with the invention of solar PV, and I mean that was in 1954, and with Jimmy Carter putting solar panels on the White House in 1979, all of that drama happened within my grandma’s lifetime, all the way to solar now being the cheapest power source in the world. So I’m not very experienced in clean energy yet. I’ve only been here two and a half years. Y’all have more experience than me, but I think we’re a similar age. So if y’all are gonna just moonshot, which everyone does who comes on, and don’t worry, no one can hold us to the answers, we’ll all be gone. This is 80 years from now. What do y’all think energy looks like 80 years from now?

Zainab: In my ideal world or what I think it’s gonna look like.

Aaron Nichols: Let’s, I just, what do you think it’s gonna look like?

Hannah Malus: Yeah, I’m optimistic. I think clean energy is winning the economics of, as soon as it starts winning, consistently winning the politics and the cultural battles of deployment. I think it’s like unstoppable. You know, I grew up in like energy community. My dad worked on industrial and commercial coal fired and gas fired boilers. And you know, he supported our family and I’m so proud of what he did to, you know, really work very hard and provide heat and hot water, you know, along the Gulf Coast. And so I really see an energy future in which like families are still supported by those kinds of career paths that, you know, you can really earn a good living wage building things in America. And I really think clean energy is like the clearest pathway forward. Yeah, if it’s building decarb or solar, wind, like manufacturing, EVs, like there are so many technologies that I think are really, give me so much optimism that, you know, people like my dad today can still build really meaningful careers and support their families. So that is the future that I hope for and also very confident will be delivered.

Aaron Nichols: Nice.

Zainab: I love that and I couldn’t agree with her more. I think in a different direction of true positivity, I do think that we are just gaining momentum all the time in this space. And so something that I’ve thought a lot about and reflected on is I’m first generation Muslim American and my family immigrated from Pakistan. And I see in the news Pakistan come up about new solar and new battery storage projects coming to the country. And to me, clean energy is a type of independence that can be offered to companies, to like large-scale like communities but then also to individual homes and clean energy can be deployed in such large and small quantities which allows for this independence. And so I’m really eager to see that continue and to flourish in communities throughout this country and throughout the world so I am, I am also very optimistic and hopeful.

Aaron Nichols: So where can y’all be found online or otherwise if you do want to be found?

Zainab: We want to be found.

Hannah Malus: Please find us online.

Zainab: Not in person. Find us on LinkedIn and on Instagram at Watts underscore the T.

Aaron Nichols: Thanks so much for coming on today, y’all.

Zainab: Thank you.

Hannah Malus: Yeah, thank you, Aaron. This was so fun. Such a pleasure to talk to someone not in a sweater vest about energy.

Zainab: I know. Sweatshirts not sweater vests.

Aaron Nichols: That’s a beautiful tagline. And for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar.

Your New State-By-State Balcony Solar Update (Plug-In Solar)

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:31:05 GMT

What’s New:

As of July 2026, eight states have signed plug-in solar into law. Two more states have had legislation pass both chambers, and the bills are now sitting on the governor’s desk waiting to be signed.

In today’s episode, we’ll go over where every state stands today.

Quick refresher before we get into the state-by-state list: plug-in solar kits are small systems that don’t require approval.

You mount a few panels wherever the sun hits your property, plug your inverter into a standard 120-volt outlet, and power flows into your home and lowers your bill. No permits required.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Refer a Friend, earn $1000

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And we have a special bonus for This Week In Solar Listeners.

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

States Where Plug-In Solar is Legal (8)

All eight cap systems at 1,200 watts per meter, except Colorado. Every one bars utilities from charging fees or demanding prior approval.

Utah (HB 340): The pioneer. Signed in 2025 and still the model everyone copies.
Virginia (HB 395 / SB 250): Signed April 22, 2026. Allows up to three systems per meter and blocks landlords from banning them.
Maine (LD 1730): Signed April 6, 2026. Systems under 420 watts need no electrician; larger ones do.
Colorado (HB26-1007): Signed May 7, 2026. The national high-water mark at 1,920 watts, and it voids HOA rules that stand in the way.
Maryland (HB 1532): Signed May 12, 2026. Exempts systems under 391 watts from UL certification.
New Hampshire (SB 540): Signed May 28, 2026. Takes effect July 27, 2026.
Connecticut (HB 5340): Signed June 4, 2026. Takes effect October 1, 2026.
Vermont (S. 202): Signed June 16, 2026. The eighth state, effective July 1, 2026.

States Where Plug-In Solar Should Be Signed Into Law Shortly (2)

Both bills passed unanimously.

New Jersey (S 2368 / A 4836): The Garden State Balcony Solar Act cleared both chambers on June 30 with zero no votes. It also protects renters from landlord and HOA bans. It now sits on Governor Sherrill’s desk.
New York (S 8512 / A 9111): The SUNNY Act passed both chambers and awaits Governor Hochul, who has until year’s end to decide.

States where bills are advancing (8 plus DC)

Passed one chamber:
California (SB 868 cleared the Senate 35-1)
Massachusetts (H5175 passed the House 128-27).
Both states are racing session deadlines this summer.
Still in committee:
Pennsylvania (HB 1971)
Ohio (HB 755)
Michigan (HB 5764)
North Carolina (HB 1129 / SB 957)
South Carolina (H 4579)
Delaware (SB 270, notable for a lower 800-watt cap)
Washington, D.C. (B26-0602).

States where bills stalled (11)

These didn’t pass, but sponsors expect to bring them back. Bright Saver files them under “deferred until 2027.”

Alaska
Arizona
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Minnesota
Missouri
Oklahoma
Rhode Island.

Oklahoma came closest. Its House passed HB 4060 by 88-4 before the bill stalled in the Senate.

States where bills were killed (5)

Washington (HB 2296): The plug-in language was stripped out before a larger bill passed.
Oregon (HB 4080): Died in committee in a short session with no carry-over.
New Mexico (SB 157): Postponed indefinitely in January.
Wyoming (Affordable Electricity Act): Failed in committee after testimony came almost entirely from utilities.
Georgia (HB 1304): Held without a vote amid heavy pushback from Georgia Power and the state’s electric co-ops.

In nearly every case, opponents made the same two arguments: they couldn’t be sure the kits were safe, and solar users wouldn’t pay their fair share for grid upkeep.

Once we start seeing these roll out and have a bit more evidence, it will be much easier to overcome these arguments

States with no legislation (16)

No bill has been introduced in:

Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Mississippi
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
North Dakota
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
West Virginia
Wisconsin.

Sources:

Bright Saver Legislation Tracker

PluginSolarUSA

https://pluginsolarguide.com/

https://pluginsolarus.com/states

Every Solar Company Needs a Thought Leader: Kellie Macpherson

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:32:30 GMT

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Aaron talks with Kellie Macpherson, Chief Operating Officer of Compliance and Security at Radian Generation, who leads compliance and security work for hundreds of renewable power plants across the country.

If you want to know what storytelling, reliability, cybersecurity, and human leadership have in common when it comes to the future of clean energy, this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with Kellie on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

Why Kellie started posting on LinkedIn every day after someone told her she should not be speaking publicly
Some of the amazing things that have happened to Kellie from building her personal brand
Why smart companies are putting public faces on their brands in 2026

Quote from the episode:

“Reliability, doing compliance well, cybersecurity well, takes away all of those negative arguments about renewables… and now we actually have the ability to go forward and change the grid and solve some really serious problems that we have.”

— Kellie Macpherson

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Kelly, something I’m really interested in with you is that you seem to have leaned into being more of a public figure. And I’m interested in that because in the energy industry, this is very, very uncommon. So I’d be interested to hear why you’ve done that and why you post on LinkedIn and why you’ve leaned into that.

Kellie Macpherson: Thanks.

Kellie Macpherson: Oh gosh, well, there’s like kind of the funny story behind it. And then there’s like the probably like real intellectual parts of it. So I think it’s probably time I can like tell the story publicly now. I was quiet about it for a while, but I think it tells you a lot. You know, I had someone, an executive a few years ago after RE+, I did a TV interview at RE Plus, and afterwards, you know, this person said, you know, why are you doing this? You know, why are you speaking about this? Like, you know, there’s other people that would be better at this than you. And I was kind of offended because I felt like I killed the interview and like did a really good job, you know, and like represented the company well and, you know, like did all things. And so I was just frustrated.

Kellie Macpherson: So I left RE Plus. I think I was thinking about timeline. I think it was September of 2023. I left RE Plus and I was like, you know what, and I had been watching several folks on LinkedIn, like I love social media, like back in the day, like before I was in the energy business, I did a lot of marketing. And so I just always, you know, appreciated that. I used to do some marketing for a snowboard company. I got a Tweetley award back in the day in the snowboarding category as an influencer, like long time ago, right? But I left RE Plus and I was like, you know what? Like I’m gonna post every single day on LinkedIn between now and the end of the year. So that was like September, it was probably like September 13th or 14th, right? Through the end of the year. I was like, I’m just gonna post it, I’m gonna see what happens. And I have something to say.

Kellie Macpherson: My voice is valuable, my stories are cool. You know, like I like connecting with people. And so I just started posting and I started out with like 580 connections on LinkedIn and just started posting. I think today, I think last week we hit 16,000 connections or followers or whatever we call them on LinkedIn. And I started a LinkedIn wins folder on my iPhone, like on my album, like on my camera.

Kellie Macpherson: And people would send me messages during that like 90 day period and say like, thank you, like that was really helpful. And like, you really inspired me and I’m having trouble with that too. Or, thank you for explaining NERC really easy for me. Like I didn’t understand that or whatever. And by the end of it, like I had over 40 messages from people saying like, thank you for speaking up and all that. And so I just continued on with that, but it’s really interesting. So I kind of did it out of like someone giving me a hard time, but also at the end of the day, like I just think it’s really important.

Kellie Macpherson: I think, you know, I struggle to find mentors, right? Like it’s hard to find mentorship. It’s hard to find people to influence your life, especially as a woman in the energy business, industry, as a mom, as an executive, right? All of that is really hard. Like it’s never been easy. I’ve never really had like a true mentor. I’ve just had different things that I listen to, a book that speaks to me or a podcast that I listen to or people I follow and things like that. And so I just felt like this is an opportunity to create community with people.

Kellie Macpherson: Oh my gosh, I have found people jobs. I’ve connected people jobs. There have been people that have had folks that they’ve lost their parents and they’re going through grief and you get to message them on LinkedIn and create this community and they come alongside them during huge life things. It’s just been a really cool opportunity to create this community because we’re all humans outside of the day-to-day work that we do. Yeah, lots of reasons, but that’s the Genesis story. Yeah, it is really similar, right?

Aaron Nichols: That, it’s, there’s some interesting, yeah, there’s some very interesting parallels there to my own journey. Yeah, specifically the like, I mean, obviously I’m not marginalized and I, you know, I don’t belong to a marginalized group, but I was told very early on that I shouldn’t be posting and that I didn’t know enough and that I was too new and that like my, it didn’t matter.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And there was something about that that really fueled me through the beginning part, because the beginning part’s really hard. In the beginning, very few people care, especially the very, very beginning when you’re not consistent. And this journey that I’ve heard a lot of people go on who have platforms is that there’s a fuel they burn in the beginning that gets them through the consistency part of it, and then the fuel changes. And it sounds like that happened to you.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was really cool. Like, at the beginning, you’re like doubting. You’re like, does anyone care? And I just, I would post and then I would not look, right? Like, I’d just be like, it doesn’t matter. Like, and that was part of the, like, you know, I’m posting every day till January and it doesn’t matter. Even if someone says something bad or negative or people think this is dumb, like, I just don’t care. Like, I’m going to do this. And that fueled me. But, and then it does change.

Aaron Nichols: Right.

Kellie Macpherson: And I think part of it too is I was waiting for someone to give me permission where you were like, oh, I need my company to tell me it’s okay. I had this really cool marketing manager during that season who said, you don’t need permission. You have a great role at this company. You have a story to tell. If you need permission, I’m giving you permission. Go post. But it was that.

Aaron Nichols: No look?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And let’s talk more about that because I was just down at the Charge conference in San Antonio and I was lucky enough to, I got to give a presentation about the value of LinkedIn thought leadership. And there were so many people who hadn’t even considered like not doing a company page instead using their executives or thought leaders in their company to tell the story. And there’s so many companies who are very, very hesitant to do that. So you’ve obviously, you do this at a high level, you’re an executive in your company, would you talk a little bit about like, Radiant’s perspective, things you’ve had to overcome within your company to make that okay, et cetera?

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting. I’m really fortunate to have such a cool partner and our CEO Joe Kastner. He’s always been really supportive. But they, you know, from the beginning, like everyone was like, this is good. And it was interesting because what I started to see from the LinkedIn stuff was I started to see opportunities to speak at conferences and getting more exposure there. And so that kind of translates into like normal. Does that mean like—

Aaron Nichols: Okay.

Kellie Macpherson: So gives us, people are used to like, yeah, we want you to speak at a conference. That’s a good thing. And then it’s like, well, I got the invitation because they saw my LinkedIn posts. And then they’re like, that’s cool. So your LinkedIn posts are cool because they’re bringing something that we know. Does that make sense? Not in a bad way, just like, that was how it started translating. And so really quickly, I really started to get, I have in my own MBOs, I have thought leadership and I have requirements of, you know, like speaking and things like that. And they like, adopted it right away. And it’s really interesting because it brings so much credibility.

Aaron Nichols: Yes, absolutely.

Kellie Macpherson: And, you know, I get leads, you know, we’re a service business. We offer services, like we are technically selling, right? And so I do, like, I get leads, you know, weekly people jumping into my DMs, like, Hey, like, I have a question about that. You know, I don’t know, I need help, blah, blah, blah. And so as soon as that kind of started picking up too, they were really excited about that. But what’s really interesting, and I think this is like the key, and this is where I really got the like, like support or, you know, like acknowledgement was our sales folks would go into the room and employees of the people we’re talking to, prospects would say like, yeah, I follow Kellie on LinkedIn. Like I see your stuff all the time and they create, creates this like familiarity already. And like this affection or does it, you know, maybe that’s a bad word, but, but you know what I’m saying? Like this like comfort.

Aaron Nichols: Right.

Kellie Macpherson: Like, well, we know you, like, you know what I mean? And, and we understand you. And so it just like it makes the sales process easier. And so once they started seeing that, then they were like, please don’t stop. You know, so yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. That’s yeah, I had a very similar experience in San Antonio where I showed up and I believe the term now is a parasocial relationship where like you, someone knows you because of your content, but they haven’t met you in person. And I showed up in Texas and there was all these people who were excited to hear my talk that I had yet to meet in person. And so you’ve done some of the social selling yourself beforehand, which obviously is a huge asset.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And I think as you were saying, like, I joke about this all the time, but people don’t like new things. You know, like we have, we have brains that are designed to help us survive and we’re walking around like, is it going to eat me? Is it going to like trample me? Is it going to jump out of the bushes and grab me? And so like if you’re starting a journey like this and you do have to prove the value to your company. I mean, Kellie’s right. You have to connect it to the things that are coming from it as fast as you can and then, you know, stay quiet when it’s not quite there yet.

Kellie Macpherson: No.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes, totally.

Kellie Macpherson: It’s really funny. My daughter has a really big rodeo. Her social profiles are really big and she has sponsorships and things like that. She actually made friends with this really, one of her really good friends. We joke, my husband and I say that she has a modern day pen pal.

Kellie Macpherson: They’ve been friends for probably six or eight months now and they talk on the phone and things like that. They met for the first time in Vegas last weekend at the Vegas rodeo. But it’s like, we know her, she’s part of our family life, we talk, you know, all these things. But it’s really interesting the way that social media has changed our relationships, you know? And I don’t know, I think it’s cool too, for some of us, for me it’s a great creative outlet, right? My job, I do compliance and security.

Aaron Nichols: You—

Kellie Macpherson: Those are not glamorous, those are not artsy, like nothing, but it’s a cool, it’s kind of like a cool like creative outlet for me. Like I really enjoy producing content. My family is like just always annoyed at me for taking pictures all the time, but—

Aaron Nichols: Hahaha.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, you know, it’s really fun. My husband actually sent me a picture from a solar site this morning and I was super stoked. I was like, thank you. You’re contributing to my content library. So yeah.

Aaron Nichols: That’s awesome. Well, let’s, so now that we’ve thoroughly just gone back and forth in our own little echo chamber about why you should create LinkedIn content. Will you introduce yourself and talk a bit more about your role at Radiant Generation?

Kellie Macpherson: Yes.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, yeah. Well, I joined Radian back in 2019 to build out our compliance and security business. So up until then, Radian was an asset management focused and software focused business. So the idea was you had all these, you know, at the time back in the when Radian was formed in 2012 was mostly solar, right? A little bit of wind. But the idea was that we needed to fulfill on the promise of renewables. It’d be great that you built all these facilities, right? Like you get all these things operational, you figure out where to put them, you build them, and then you make all these promises. And you’re like, oh yeah, like we’re going to make these PPA rates and we’re going to perform a certain way and all that. But then there was like, there was no plan in the industry for like how to handle the assets, right? Like what to do with them after to fulfill on the promises that you made, right?

Kellie Macpherson: And so I joined Radian in 2019 to build out our compliance and security business, because what we realized is that really for renewables to be successful, they need to be reliable and we have to show reliability and how they can solve all the problems on the grid, right? And we knew where the grid was going and how the grid was being shaped that renewables were going to be such a big part of it. And so for me, the ultimate trump card, you know, when we talk about renewables and compliance, reliability is NERC compliance. And so that’s the type of compliance that we do. It’s the federal laws that are required for all of these power plants because they’re power plants, right, that they had to follow for reliability.

Kellie Macpherson: And so I joined the team and yeah, so we have over 150 people now just in our compliance and security business. We have security operation, three security operation centers and managing day-to-day compliance and security for over 300 power plants across the US. So wind, hydro, a little bit of hydro, all renewable, mostly renewable assets. So yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And I have seen you talk about North American Reliability Corporation or NERC, the acronym lovers. I’ve seen you talk about that in your content and I’m not on the utility scale side of the solar business. So would love for you to explain that to me like I’m five, because I target this podcast at the public, not at the industry.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah. It’s yeah. Acronym soup. Yes, constantly. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Totally. Okay. So, if you think about reliability and you think about things that have happened. So the way that this really all came about, it’s really interesting. Back in August of 2003, it’d be interesting to know who listens to this, who remembers this. When I’m in a room with people, I always ask and people are like, oh, I remember that. People are very attached to this event.

Kellie Macpherson: In August 2003, there was a massive blackout for three days across the Eastern seaboard. And so there was, think about New York City, August, 115, 118 degrees. That is not normal, right? Like that’s not a normal thing. So I also like, there was a meeting of the G8, you know, think about the United Nations based in New York City, right? And there were fatalities that came out of this, you know, think about that, like exposure, think about older folks, hospitals that have backup systems but only have a day’s worth, right? Not three days. Three days is a really long time for a blackout.

Kellie Macpherson: So because of that event, Congress said, hey, you guys gotta do something, industry. You guys have gotta fix this. How do you fix this? Gotta be reliable. And so they actually passed Section 205 of the Federal Power Act, which made it legal to actually set up reliability standards, aka laws that power companies had to follow. Previous to that, NERC was actually just a group of, I always joke, I think you’re fun, I think this podcast is fun, so I think I can make the joke on this podcast. We always joke that NERC was a group of DUGs. Do you know what DUGs are?

Aaron Nichols: No.

Kellie Macpherson: Okay, dumb old utility guys.

Aaron Nichols: Hahaha.

Kellie Macpherson: But it’s like a joke. Like my dad is totally a Doug and like he makes the joke about himself. You know, like it’s like these guys that like, you really care about the grid and like we’ll go and sit in a room and drink black coffee, Folger’s black coffee for 12 hours and talk about how to operate the grid reliably. Right? Like that’s what NERC was before Congress passed the Federal Power Act. And so, you know, Congress was like, Hey, NERC, like, hey, DUGs, you guys need to figure this out, get your stuff together and come up with a plan.

Kellie Macpherson: And so that was really how NERC was actually formed. And then they actually became a corporation and they’ve grown up over the last 20 years and developed into this organization. And there’s regional entities, et cetera. It’s gotten really big now, but that’s really the origin story is this group of folks that cared about reliability and then a really serious blackout and Congress saying, hey, you need to figure out how to be reliable, right? And so NERC was formed and now there’s all these laws that we follow and then they audit you and they hold you accountable to following those laws. And so we talk about, there’s civil penalties and fines and things like that if you’re not following the laws. So that’s the origin of NERC.

Kellie Macpherson: So, you know, think about this. If you’re driving down the road and you’re taking your kids to school or you’re going to get a cup of coffee and you see those transmission lines on the side of the road, right? And you’re like, have you ever done this? So you’re driving down the road, you see a transmission line and there’s a tree on top of the transmission line. Have you seen that before? And you’re like, there’s a tree on the transmission line. Like this could not be a good thing, right? Like I feel like this is a concern or maybe this is just me because like I think about this all the time, but you see that, you see that line. Guess what? That’s like, maybe technically probably a NERC violation because there’s actually a NERC standard on vegetation management that transmission owners and operators have to follow, but they actually have to cut the tree. You know, they have to manage the vegetation and cut the trees and like, it’s not cool. They’re not supposed to just have a tree hanging out on a transmission line. Right. And so, you know, it’s things like that. Like there are things that are actually impacting, like really impacting your day to day.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, I just read the book California Burning. I don’t know if you’ve read that one.

Kellie Macpherson: Oh yes, mm-hmm.

Aaron Nichols: That fire in Northern California was started by something falling onto a tree.

Kellie Macpherson: Yep, it was. Yeah, it was. And there’s a serious investigation and audit going on still around that. And there’s going to be NERC penalties and fines because of that. And that’s why it’s so important. And that’s where NERC really cares about reliability and how you keep the grid reliable. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And by the way, the owner of our company is named Doug. I don’t know. I don’t know if he will listen to this, but we’ll see. Yeah, I remember when I read that book, yeah. When I read that book by Gretchen Bakke, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. She had this section where she talked about like for years and years, utility profit was guaranteed.

Kellie Macpherson: Sorry Doug, I didn’t mean you personally.

Kellie Macpherson: Now we’ll know. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: And so utilities generally weren’t recruiting top talent or like very innovative or creative talent. They kind of just went and recruited rubber stampers from the bottom of classes at colleges all around the country. And then there was just, they just kind of went around and the pitch was, hey, like, do you want to just do what you’re told for 40 years and then retire? And there’s a certain kind of person who was just like, yeah, of course. And then all of a sudden in the last, yeah, in the last like decade or two, we’ve been like, you guys have to innovate now. And they’re like, nah, they told me that if I just stamped things for 40 years, that I’d get paid. I’m not ready for this.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: That’s easy.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Well, you were also recently elected to the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association. I don’t actually know if you were elected. I don’t know how the process works. I don’t know much about boards.

Kellie Macpherson: It would work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, I was elected. Yeah, I’m pretty lucky. So thank you to everyone who voted for me. I’m yeah, kind of cool. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: I doubt you were lucky. You are known and you are charming. So I think those were probably two big qualifications. But I mean, so you were elected to the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association, SEIA again, all you acronym lovers out there. What are you planning to tackle in your tenure there? What do you want your mission to be?

Kellie Macpherson: I don’t—

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: I’m really excited. It’s kind of really cool to actually get to be on the board because so far a lot, historically, the board has been really focused on developers and construction companies, things like that, or big IPPs, right? And so I’m really excited to talk about reliability and cybersecurity and bring that at another level.

Kellie Macpherson: I think the thing that’s really interesting about where we’re at in the industry right now is that we need renewables because we have an electron crisis on the grid, right? Like we don’t have enough electrons to keep up with the AI race, keep, you know, to keep up with data centers, to keep up with what is going on. So we are going to have, we are so close, if not there with, we’ll see what happens this summer. It’s going to be really telling, right? When we started hitting in these hot, hot summers coming, but we’re in an electron crisis. We don’t have enough electrons on the grid. We also have an affordability crisis. Electricity is becoming not affordable for folks. Those are two really big problems.

Kellie Macpherson: Well, guess what solves those problems? Renewables. Renewables solve those problems, right? We can’t build a nuclear power plant fast enough, minimum five years. Can’t build a coal plant fast enough. You can’t build a natural gas plant fast enough. All the generation that we can build, outside of renewables is four or five years best case scenario permitting is super easy. Renewables, you can get electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months, no problem, really fast. So we’re talking about that and then we talk about affordability. Renewables is the only way to keep electricity affordable.

Kellie Macpherson: Well, here’s the thing, people are scared. For the last five years, people are scared of renewable, 10 years even really, that proliferation of renewables, they’re scared about that because they think that renewables aren’t reliable. They’re like, you’re going to break the grid. You’re going to mess everything up. So this is where I’m really passionate. This is what I think is so cool about what I do every day with compliance and NERC is that it’s the ultimate trump card. When you follow the NERC standards, you have to be just as compliant as the coal plant down the street.

Kellie Macpherson: It actually, reliability, doing compliance well, cybersecurity well, takes away all of those negative arguments about renewables and it fixes it. And now we actually have the ability to go forward and change the grid and solve some really serious problems that we have. And so I’m really excited about being at SEIA and actually having a true voice for reliability and cybersecurity sitting at the table.

Kellie Macpherson: And my most purest interest is that reliability. And so being able to have exposure to some of these folks that are doing some really big things in our industry and being able to set the table with them and talk about reliability is really freaking cool.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. And you’re talking about the very, very big solar plants as well, which is something I don’t have a lot of experience. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been doing news updates on the journey to get balcony solar legalized, which has been happening in a couple of different states. And that is something, probably the most immediate energy affordability solution. And it’s the first time the public has been really interested in solar in a long time. There’s, I mean, the episodes we’ve done on it have three to five times the traffic of anything else we’ve ever done.

Kellie Macpherson: I know.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Who we are.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, right.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, it’s so interesting, but it’s a real solution, right? Like it actually fixes problems. You know, 10 years ago when you were like, well, what’s the benefit of a solar facility? It’ll create 5,000 jobs while we’re in construction, while we’re building it for 18 months. And then it turns into actually like three field techs on site. And maybe there’s some environmental impacts that we don’t love, right? Like it was really hard 10 years ago to tell, I think, in my opinion, a good story about what solar does. The list is infinite right now. It solves so many problems for us.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and in so many ways the industry is still stuck in that mindset and we love to say things like, you know, it’s going to create X number of jobs or we’re going to lose X number of jobs as the legislation passes and we’re not as good at humanizing it. I think energy moves slowly in terms of media or public interest.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think that’s where you have to remember the human stories, right? Like, you know, for some of us that are from the West Coast, you know, we remember the brownouts of the energy crisis in California in 2001. You know, I was an operator at the California ISO during the energy crisis. You know, I was, you know, sitting at midnight, 18 years old, interning at the generation desk, looking at, you know, the hour ahead generation and realizing we didn’t have enough generation for the next hour.

Kellie Macpherson: And all of our pumped hydro was turned on and there was no more electrons to grab, right? And so you ended up making this call and you say, okay, what are the two largest loads that we have in the next oncoming hour? And it was like, it’s two hospitals. So you pick up the phone and you’re calling the hospitals and you’re saying, hey, you I need to trip you offline. You know, have you checked your backup generators? Like, are you ready to go? And one of those hospitals was like, yes, absolutely.

Aaron Nichols: Wow.

Kellie Macpherson: You know, we just tested our backup system two weeks ago. Like we’re good. You call the next hospital like we can, but we’re in the middle of a heart transplant. You know, if you could not trip us off for three more hours, that would be great. And you’re like, okay, like I’m going to not trip that hospital off and trip the other one off. And like, these are the stories that are so important. Like this is why reliability matters. You know, like this is why we have to get electrons to the grid because it actually like it truly every single day affects people’s lives. And it’s like people don’t think about that, you know? Like it really matters. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: That is so interesting. That story you just told was so gripping. And why do you think the industry is so bad at this as a whole? Me too.

Kellie Macpherson: I don’t know, but this is why I post on LinkedIn. Do you know what I mean? This is why like, I have to be a storyteller because these stories matter. And once you hear the stories, then you’re like, oh, it changes your whole perspective, you know? Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Me too. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: In the talk I gave in San Antonio, I had a diagram of like a meat grinder of a typical corporate creative department where it’s like, you know, it, someone has a good idea and then goes to legal and then it goes to review and then it goes to the executives. And then like, it comes out the other side and it’s like, we create innovative synergistic solutions that materials and advanced technology. And you’re like—

Kellie Macpherson: Huh. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: What are you talking about? What is interesting about the thing? Not that. I think you muted yourself.

Kellie Macpherson: I did, the dog was barking so I was trying to not ruin your recording. Sorry about that.

Aaron Nichols: Okay.

Aaron Nichols: Okay, cool. But yeah, and like I am so fascinated by how many companies in the space just seem to take the least interesting thing about what they do and put that in the public eye and ignore all of the lives they’ve changed.

Kellie Macpherson: Right. I mean, it really matters. Like it’s really affecting that day to day, you know, and it makes, really does make a big difference. I mean, we have here outside of Reno, we have a solar facility that is powering the Apple data center. You tell me you don’t care about that. You know, can we pause for just a second? I’m so sorry.

Aaron Nichols: Right.

Aaron Nichols: It was surprise.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, of course.

Kellie Macpherson: I’m so sorry about that. Can we clean on the edit? I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize the dog got out. Sorry about that. Someone did not lock the gate. Okay, let’s go back.

Aaron Nichols: All good. I can edit anything.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: OK.

Kellie Macpherson: So the lives, yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, so the joke I used in my presentation, my talk in San Antonio, I was just like, I understand the desire to go, well, if we don’t say anything, no one can actually sue us. I understand that. But people are crying out for clear messaging and clear leadership right now.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yes. Yes.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah. I think like, we’ve taken like safety so far, right? Like so far where you’re just like afraid to do anything and you’re like, well, if you’re so afraid to do anything, then why do anything at all? Like if you’re not going to stand for anything, like what’s the point? You know, and I think the other thing like our culture, like the flip side of it is also like, and I noticed this even just like in human relationships too, like take this, you I think this is true like in the boardroom and one-on-one managers to peers. It’s true at my dinner table, right? Is we are not good at apologizing and we’re not good at mending relationships, right? It’s so easy. You’re like hands down in your phone all the time, social media, like we’ve taken the human element out of things and we’ve gotten really bad at being like, shoot, I’m sorry. Like I didn’t say that as well as I should have, right?

Aaron Nichols: Right.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: And that just like, we’re not good as a society at doing that anymore. You know, I noticed that as a parent even, you know, where it’s like, like I need to be liberal with the use of my apologies because I don’t have it all figured out, right? But that’s the thing, like we’ve gotten so safe in corporate messaging and the way we’re interacting with the world that like, then, and I think part of that is because then we’re like, what do we do if we mess up? And I don’t want to deal with, you know, confrontation.

Aaron Nichols: You—

Kellie Macpherson: So.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I—

Kellie Macpherson: Sorry, I threw you for a loop with that one.

Aaron Nichols: Well, you broke up a bunch. I’m not sure why, just then.

Kellie Macpherson: That’s not good. Oh no.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, but it’s usually okay. Riverside records really well, even if the— So your recording will be fine when I look at the recording.

Kellie Macpherson: Okay, it’s all good on my end, so... Shoot. I’m sorry, I’m causing you a ton of edits.

Aaron Nichols: Okay. But yeah, it’s all good. But that another, yeah, I mean, Kellie, I think like one thing I’ve noticed too, I haven’t gone to many conferences, but the few that I’ve gone to, seems like there’s, there’s an uneasiness at the beginning. And then as soon as someone like displays humanity, everyone’s like, thank God. We don’t have to, we don’t have to be this core.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah. Yep.

Aaron Nichols: The one I was at in San Antonio, I walked in and this woman made, she just like made this kind of graphic inappropriate joke and we were all like, my God, a person. Thank God.

Kellie Macpherson: Oh no.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, it’s but but it’s true. Yeah, but it’s true. And I think that’s where you get the authenticity, you know, like for us, we’re services business, like, don’t you want to have a partnership and work with somebody who’s like an authentic human being who can be like, recognize like, like, you’re having a really bad day, like, let me adjust for you, you know, like, let me meet you where you’re at. And I don’t know, I just and also, like, we just—

Aaron Nichols: Like someone we can talk to.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: I don’t know, it’s interesting for sure. Like we’ve lost a bit of humanity, I think. And I think that’s where I hope the tides change and I hope that, you know, the work that you and I both do out in the industry like makes a difference. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Kellie, I end every episode with the same question. And it has to do with last year I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party.

Aaron Nichols: And as I was speaking and as I was reflecting on it for writing a LinkedIn post afterwards, I realized that 80 years means my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy did not exist. So like back then we didn’t have solar PV. Like we knew about the photovoltaic effect, but we didn’t invent solar cells until 1954. And then they were this fringe technology for a long time that was used on spacecraft. And then like everything that’s happened with the whole development of solar panels to now, to them becoming the cheapest power source in the world, all of that happened within my grandma’s lifetime. So to take us out here, if you’re just gonna moonshot, which is what I ask everyone to do who comes on, what do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kellie Macpherson: Yeah, I mean, it has to be clean and it’s going to be innovative, but I think it’s going to be something we can’t even really imagine now because I think it’s going to be the combination. I think it’s going to be this hybrid approach of, you know, what’s the best use of a small part of land, right? And that’s going to and what’s going to give you 24/7, you know, capabilities to produce generation, which means it’s probably not one type of generation. It’s going to be clean and it’s going to be affordable and it’s going to be easy to deploy and quick to deploy. And I think there’s some combination there. And I honestly, I can’t imagine what that looks like, but it’s going to be really cool, I’m sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: I think so too.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Kellie, where do you like to be found online or otherwise if you do in fact want to be found?

Kellie Macpherson: Yes.

Kellie Macpherson: I love that question you always ask. It’s so awesome. I would love to be found. I’m on LinkedIn. That’s really the best way. And I really truly, I’m in my DMs all the time. If you shoot me a DM over there on LinkedIn, I will really actually get it and respond to you. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Well, thank you for coming on today, Kellie, and thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Kellie Macpherson: Absolutely. Thank you for having me and thank you for all your support. I really appreciate it. You’re doing some amazing work and I love following everything on there that you share. So thank you.

Aaron Nichols: Thank you.

Upper Dublin Township Goes Solar

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:30:36 GMT

When a community decides to invest in clean energy, it sends a message that they care about the future. When they invest in clean energy while rebuilding after a disaster, it tells the world they’re coming back stronger than ever.

Upper Dublin Township began rebuilding its municipal campus after the devastating tornado caused by Hurricane Ida in 2021. Starting from scratch, the Township had a unique opportunity to do much more than replace what had been lost. They could instead build a modern facility designed to serve the community for decades to come.

As part of that vision, Upper Dublin incorporated a commercial solar energy system into its new Township and Police Building and Public Works facility. The result is a 519.2 kW DC solar photovoltaic (PV) system that will generate clean electricity for decades while helping reduce long-term operating costs for taxpayers.

Exact Solar was proud to serve as the commercial solar contractor for this project, designing and installing a system tailored to the unique needs of a modern municipal campus.

Projects like this demonstrate how commercial solar can help municipalities invest in resilient infrastructure, manage rising energy costs, and lead by example for the communities they serve.

Rebuilding Stronger After Hurricane Ida

In September 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought severe weather across southeastern Pennsylvania. One tornado caused extensive damage to Upper Dublin Township’s municipal facility, ultimately leading to the construction of a brand new Township and Police Building, along with an addition to the Public Works facility.

Rather than simply replacing what had been lost, the Township took the opportunity to invest in infrastructure that would better serve residents well into the future.

Incorporating solar into the project was a natural fit. By generating electricity on-site, the Township can offset a significant portion of its energy usage while protecting itself against rising utility costs for years to come.

The completed facility now serves residents from a modern, energy-efficient campus powered in part by the sun.

Why More Municipalities Are Choosing Solar

Across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, municipalities are increasingly exploring commercial solar to reduce operating expenses without sacrificing services.

Unlike many building improvements that simply add costs, solar produces electricity that offsets energy purchased from the utility. Over the life of the system, those savings can be redirected toward other community priorities.

Commercial solar can also help municipalities:

Lower long-term electricity costs
Create more predictable operating budgets
Demonstrate environmental leadership
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Improve the sustainability of public facilities
Take advantage of available federal incentives and funding opportunities

For communities planning new construction or major renovations, incorporating solar during the design phase is often more efficient than adding it later.

Upper Dublin Township recognized that opportunity and made solar part of its long-term vision for the new municipal campus.

Project Overview

This installation is among the largest municipal solar projects in our region.

Project Specifications

System Size: 519.2 kW DC
Location: Upper Dublin Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
Facilities Served: Township and Police Building and Public Works Facility
Solar Panels: 944
Commercial Inverters: 10
Rapid Shutdown Devices: 378
Installation Areas:
- Multiple sloped roof sections
- Flat roof areas
- Solar carport canopy over a portion of the parking lot

Rather than concentrating the entire system on a single roof, the design uses multiple building surfaces and a solar parking canopy to maximize available space and energy production.

Every kilowatt-hour generated by the system is consumed on-site, helping power the offices, police facilities, and public works operations that serve Upper Dublin residents every day.

Engineering a Complex Commercial Solar System

Commercial solar projects rarely involve a single, unobstructed roof.

Large facilities often include multiple roof elevations, varying roof pitches, rooftop mechanical equipment, parapets, access pathways, and structural considerations that all influence system design. This project was no exception.

Each roof section had distinct characteristics, requiring individual engineering analysis before being integrated into a coordinated commercial solar system.

“Each solar energy system on each surface was modeled separately for orientation, tilt, and shading before being integrated into one coordinated system with unified production estimates.”
– Stanislav Kvochak, Exact Solar Project Engineer

Because different portions of the array receive sunlight at different times throughout the day, careful production modeling was essential to optimize performance across the entire campus.

This detailed engineering process helps ensure the system performs as expected over its lifetime while making the best possible use of every available square foot of rooftop space.

Projects like this are a great example of why commercial solar engineering involves far more than simply placing panels wherever they fit.

Making the Most of Every Available Surface

One of the most interesting aspects of this project is how many different installation areas were incorporated into the overall design.

Instead of relying on a single roof, the solar arrays were distributed across traditional sloped roof sections, flat roof areas, and a dedicated solar carport structure.

This approach allowed the Township to maximize solar production while working within the architectural design of the new campus.

For commercial facilities, every building presents unique opportunities and constraints. An experienced design team evaluates each usable surface independently before determining how they can work together as one integrated system.

The Benefits of Solar Carports

The solar carport installed at Upper Dublin deserves special attention.

Solar carports are becoming increasingly popular for commercial properties because they transform existing parking areas into productive assets.

Instead of allowing a parking lot to simply absorb heat throughout the day, a solar canopy generates electricity while providing additional benefits for employees and visitors.

Solar carports can:

Generate clean electricity without using additional land
Provide shade during hot summer months
Protect vehicles from rain and snow
Improve the appearance of parking facilities
Create opportunities for future EV charging infrastructure

For municipalities, businesses, schools, and other organizations with large parking areas, solar carports can significantly expand available solar capacity when rooftop space is limited.

Why Experience Matters on Municipal Solar Projects

Municipal construction projects involve significantly more coordination than many traditional commercial installations.

In addition to designing an efficient solar system, contractors often work alongside architects, structural engineers, electrical engineers, construction managers, inspectors, utility companies, and multiple government stakeholders throughout the project.

These projects may also include:

Prevailing wage requirements
Public bidding processes
Security clearances
Multiple permitting agencies
Layered inspections
Strict construction schedules

Solar is only one component of a much larger construction project, and coordination is critical. Exact Solar worked closely with the project team throughout design and construction to ensure the solar installation integrated smoothly with the broader municipal campus while staying aligned with the overall construction schedule.

As a turnkey commercial solar contractor, Exact Solar manages every phase of the solar process, including design, engineering, permitting, utility interconnection, procurement, installation, commissioning, and long-term service.

That integrated approach helps simplify complex commercial projects and provides a single point of accountability from start to finish.

Environmental and Financial Impact

This commercial solar installation is expected to generate approximately 611,000 kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year.

Over the coming decades, that production will help reduce electricity purchased from the utility while providing meaningful environmental benefits.

Estimated annual impact includes:

Approximately 611,000 kWh of clean electricity generated each year
Enough electricity to power roughly 58 average homes
Approximately 433 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions avoided annually
Equivalent to removing about 94 gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year
Comparable to the annual carbon absorption of approximately 210 acres of forest

Over a 25-year period, the system is expected to avoid nearly 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to planting roughly 166,000 trees and allowing them to grow for ten years.

These figures are engineering estimates based on expected system production and regional solar conditions. Environmental equivalencies are calculated using standard U.S. EPA conversion factors.

Commercial Solar for Municipalities and Businesses

Every commercial building is different, but the goals are often the same: lower operating costs, improve long-term budget predictability, increase sustainability, and make better use of existing facilities.

Whether you’re planning a municipal building, office, warehouse, manufacturing facility, nonprofit campus, school, or public works building, commercial solar can often become an important part of your long-term energy strategy.

The earlier solar is considered in a construction project, the more opportunities there are to optimize the building’s design for future energy production.

Commercial solar projects are rarely one-size-fits-all. Every property has its own energy usage, building layout, structural considerations, and financial goals. That’s why every commercial project begins with a feasibility review and detailed engineering analysis.

At Exact Solar, our commercial team works with municipalities, businesses, nonprofits, schools, and other organizations throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey to evaluate opportunities for commercial solar installations.

Whether you’re planning new construction, renovating an existing facility, or simply exploring your options, we’re happy to help you understand what’s possible.

Connect With Our Commercial Team

This project was led by Joe Tarzia, one of Exact Solar’s Commercial Sales Engineers. Joe works with municipalities, businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations to evaluate commercial solar opportunities, develop customized system designs, and guide projects from initial feasibility through installation.

If you’d like to discuss your project or explore whether commercial solar is a good fit for your facility, Joe would be happy to help.

Joe Tarzia
Commercial Sales Engineer
📞 (267) 623-6729
✉️ joe@exactsolar.com

Frequently Asked Questions About Commercial Solar

Is my building a good fit for commercial solar?

Many commercial buildings are excellent candidates for solar because they typically have large roof areas and significant daytime electricity usage. During an initial feasibility review, we’ll evaluate your roof, electrical infrastructure, energy usage, and site conditions to determine whether solar is a good fit.

Can solar be incorporated into new construction?

Yes. In fact, new construction is often the ideal time to plan for solar. Early coordination allows the building, electrical systems, structural design, and roof layout to be optimized before construction is complete.

What if my building has multiple roof sections?

That’s common.

Commercial solar systems are frequently designed across multiple roof elevations, orientations, and building sections. Each area is modeled independently before being combined into one integrated system, just as we did for Upper Dublin Township.

Can a parking lot be used for solar?

Absolutely.

Solar carports allow organizations to generate electricity above existing parking areas while providing shade and weather protection for vehicles. They can also support future electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

How long does a commercial solar project take?

Every project is different, but most commercial installations move through several phases:

Site evaluation
Engineering and system design
Permitting
Utility interconnection
Equipment procurement
Installation
Inspection and commissioning

Exact Solar manages the entire process and coordinates with all project stakeholders from start to finish.

What does “turnkey” mean?

A turnkey commercial solar contractor manages every stage of the project, including design, engineering, permitting, utility coordination, procurement, installation, commissioning, and ongoing service.

Instead of coordinating multiple vendors, you’ll work with one experienced team throughout the project.

How do we get started?

The first step is simply a conversation.

We’ll discuss your facility, review your energy usage and project goals, evaluate your site, and help determine whether commercial solar is the right fit for your organization.

Every project starts with understanding your needs and designing a system that makes sense for your building.

40-Year Cleantech Investor Shares What He Looks for in Entrepreneurs: Dave Kirkpatrick

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:30:57 GMT

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Southeast PA and New Jersey.

We’d love to pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar (We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $500” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name and address.
Get a $500 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!
Refer a Friend and Earn $500

Aaron talks with Dave Kirkpatrick, a co-founder and Managing Director of SJF Ventures. Dave is a 40-year veteran of clean energy investment whose firm backs cleantech companies that make an impact.

If you want to know what the people who fund the energy transition look for in great companies and entrepreneurs, this is the episode for you.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Connect with Dave on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

How Dave evaluates whether he wants to invest in a clean energy startup
Why the solar industry currently earns a “D-minus” in public relations
Which entrepreneurs are worth investing in (according to Dave’s 40 years of experience)

Quote from the episode:

“I'm more focused on companies that have really engaged with the customers and are clearly solving a customer problem and are not spending too much time in the skunkworks before they actually encounter the market.”

— Dave Kirkpatrick

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning back into This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today we have Dave Kirkpatrick joining us from his solar greenhouse that’s attached to his house. He just showed me around a little bit on his phone. And Dave, I would love to hear a little bit more about the solar greenhouse before we get into who you are.

Dave Kirkpatrick Sure, sure, happy to be with you. And so I’m in Durbin, North Carolina, and we’ve had solar in our home for a number of years. But during the pandemic, I built the solar greenhouse. it’s basically on my LinkedIn. I give all the specs for the solar geeks. But there’s 7kW of PV above that wooden roof.

And then there’s glazing on the south side with the first few feet having glazing. So you’ve got passive solar with growing space as well as the workspace, tied like a microgrid to my home with a battery. That’s phase change material for folks who really want to geek out. So in the old days with solar greenhouses, you would have to use barrels of water for thermal storage. The phase change actually freezes at 72 degrees. It provides kind of a thermal buffer to heat up in the

On sunny days in the winter, it never gets colder than 50, low 50s in here without supplemental heat. I do have a mini-split heat pump if I need to boost a little bit for working in here in the summer or the winter. But yeah, it’s certainly been fun to be able to have two EVs and be able to be mostly net break even for home and mobility, except for right in the worst part of winters and summers for a couple of months.

Aaron Nichols That’s very cool. I know that you’ve been doing this a long time, so if you wouldn’t mind just giving the industry an intro on, well I’m sure many people in the industry already know you, but if you wouldn’t mind giving the audience an intro on who you are in the solar industry and what you’ve been doing.

Dave Kirkpatrick Sure, sure. So currently I’m co-founder and managing director of SGA Ventures, so we invest in positive impact companies and have at it 26

Aaron Nichols Hey guys, it’s Aaron. We need to talk about Exact Solar. This weekend Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your friendly, locally owned 20-year-old solar installer here in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And if you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or know anyone who does, even if you’re not an existing Exact Solar customer,

We would love to pay you $500 if you refer a friend and they go solar with us. As energy prices get out of control, going solar is the best way to take control and lower monthly bills. Now, if you send us the information of anyone in New Jersey or Pennsylvania and they go solar with us, we will pay you $500. It’s that simple. There’s a link in today’s Substack email if you go to This Weekend Solar on Substack.

If you just click earn $500 for referring a friend, enter your information and your address so we can send you a check if they go solar. If you select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative who referred you and then put in your friend’s information, as soon as your friend goes solar, we will send you $500. It’s that simple. You don’t even have to live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania as long as your friends do. Now, back to the show.

Dave Kirkpatrick But going back further, my first venture was called Sunshares. It was an early sort passive solar thermal company here in North Carolina in the 80s.

All the way back when Reagan was elected and the tax credits came off, we moved also into recycling. So it became one of first recycling companies serving curbside recycling in the country, actually, here in the Piedmont or North Carolina. But out of that experience, I co-founded SJF Ventures. we carried forward, SJF stands for Sustainable Jobs Fund, so the connection of sustainable ventures creating great employment opportunities.

which certainly the solar industry demonstrates, that we carried that forward into a set of solar investments.

Aaron Nichols So you’ve been doing this for more than 40 years, is that fair to say?

Dave Kirkpatrick I guess if you counted up, yes.

Aaron Nichols That’s amazing. I’ve been here two and a half years, so I’m impressed. What was the industry like back when you first started?

Dave Kirkpatrick Well, we go, I mean, in the thermal era, mean, there it was more, I mean, this is 80s period, there was more, it was more passive, passive solar heating design, passive solar designs and thermal for hot water or space heating. But of course, moving closer into the PV era here at SJF Ventures, our first investment was in gross solar out of Vermont back in 2006. And that, at that time, solar was still

a luxury at the residential level, right? You’re buying solar because you believed in addressing climate change and instead of the jacuzzi or whatever. But gross solar expanded. We eventually sold a residential division of Solar City in the east and then the EPC division to EDF renewables. So it was the beginning of the ramping of PV solar and therefore the dropping in prices of solar.

So that was the first. The second investment was Community Energy, which was a solar developer utility scale. We did that in 2010. And Community Energy, were wind developers first, and then large scale solar. And we developed the first 100 megawatt projects in a number of states in the east and midwest. Eventually, Community Energy sold to AES to become their utility scale solar plant.

So it was in an era where we’re getting into the point where CleanTech 1.0 and lot of Silicon Valley VCs invested in solar way back 15 years ago. We were more focused on deployments and we basically assumed that Asia and China were gonna be driving down the price of modules and more focus on deployment integration programs.

Aaron Nichols So in that time, you’ve obviously seen so much growth and change, and you’ve invested in so many different companies. I mean, you’ve sent me the list of companies that you’ve invested in. Many of them have gone on to become largely successful ventures. I’m curious, what are some commonalities you see in the winners that have been able to thrive in such an uncertain space?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, no, that’s a great question, Aaron. And I think for me, the pattern that has worked well for us, especially in solar and clean energy, has been teams, has been repeat co-founder teams that have done it before and understand the complexities of utilities and the energy markets and interconnection and supply chain, all of those challenges. So the community energy team was that way. Actually, one of the former co-founders is now the chair

the PUC in Colorado, and they had a depth of experience on the energy markets, already done wind development, sold the E-Madralla. Our next investment was Nextracker, which is now NextPower.

But that team also, Dan Sugar and the team there had executed a power light and sold to SunPower. So they had that repeat experience. So that was in 2014, we invested in the next tracker, which was sold to Flextronics or Flex, and then became quite successful IPO and quite successful public company.

utility scale solar space. Before we invested in Next Tracker, most all utility scale solar was fixed tilt. And now as you know, most of it is single axis tracking globally, Next Tracker being the leader.

So that, I’d say both, know, policy’s a part of it. We’ve had to look at policy federal and state, but repeat teams, and we’ve done best in utility scale, I must say. We’ve had more challenges than residential and smaller CNI, but in terms of utility scale, our next deal in...

2020 was TerraBase. TerraBase is really software and they’re well known for automation, the TerraFab. Basically, if we’re going to build gigawatts of solar, how do you do it robotically with these huge modules, with the breakage issues, especially in really tough, hot, and windy environments? How do we construct more efficiently, more safely?

And that team also was a repeat team. They spun out a SunPower and six co-founders that all worked together before it set successfully. So I’m rambling a bit, the team mapping to teams that have worked together in this challenging, complicated industry has worked for us.

Aaron Nichols So to generally summarize, you’re often betting on the people rather than on the technology itself.

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, I would say it’s a combo, if it’s one or the other, it’s the people more, I would say. mean, certainly most of these companies have intellectual property. They’ve got patents. They’ve got technology. But fundamentally, it’s an execution play. It’s, as Diggertall would say, a deployment play. We hear that a lot.

I think we’ve been more focused on the technology is available. We can innovate on it, but it’s really thoughtful teams on how to go to market, how to finance, how to scale. It’s a challenge.

Aaron Nichols So let’s say that there’s someone who hasn’t executed yet. mean, obviously you always want to be betting on people who have done the thing before, but let’s say there’s someone who hasn’t done it yet, but there’s, what are your indications that that person might be able to go the distance when you’re investing in someone who’s not a repeat team?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, well, one of the things I would mention is that we are there’s an ecosystem of funds. And so we are series a B type investors investing five to 15 million at that stage usually coming as a few million revenue scaling. So there are a bunch of funds are earlier in seed stage that might be more appropriate for for an earlier stage opportunity. I would refer folks to sightline climate has a really nice list of all the

active in climate and climate tech. So we’re part of an ecosystem after us, for example, in much bigger funds like Nextracker had TPG Rise invest in before their IPO. So one thing I’d say is just find the right match, but in terms of the type of capital that’s a fit for your stage is primarily it. think, you know, we do see, you know, there’s a bit of a hype cycle in some folks who raise money in Silicon Valley and

I’m more focused on companies that have really engaged with the customers and are clearly solving a customer problem and are not spending too much time in the skunkworks before they actually encounter the market.

Aaron Nichols So you’re generally looking for some kind of evidence that there’s a customer cycle that’s actually been built, that there’s like a certain type of customer that has repeatedly used the product already before you would be willing to give someone money to go scale something.

Dave Kirkpatrick The first, if that’s right. Yeah, I mean, our most recent investment just last year, a year and half ago was New Edge Power. And they were there at grid scale storage developer and community source developer. But they had developed a set of projects. had some early project sponsors that were building a team. And so we were backing them for acceleration. So we are more, you know, there is some early traction and how do you accelerate rapidly?

that’s the fit for us. Even at Next Racker, they were already scaling. Actually, at that point, it on Edison projects around the world. But our financing of the Series B combined with some debt really allowed them to continue that acceleration onwards and then eventually combine with flex.

Aaron Nichols Let’s switch gears a little bit, because I want to talk about, while I have you as someone who’s been doing this for more than 40 years and has seen just like the whole growth of the solar industry, there’s a couple things that I selfishly want to ask you as someone who is much more involved in marketing, PR, and sales. How do you think, if you were to give the solar industry a grade on public-facing messaging, how do you think we’d do?

Dave Kirkpatrick D minus.

Aaron Nichols And what are the things that you think need to be improved?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, I mean, I think that...

I mean, we have to acknowledge that our industry, the solar and clean energy and renewables industry, that we have the opposing industry, the fossil industry, that is basically funding opposition in a variety of ways. A lot of this sort of ask for opposition to solar storage projects, et cetera. So we have acknowledge that there is a battle in this energy transition. I think just like the idea of popularization and even your

as you mentioned, you had a lot of viewership on the kind of solar appliance approach. And how do we democratize, make it easier for folks to scale up? I think some of the challenges the residential solar industry has had is the bad actors, right? We’ve had sort of door-to-door bad actors as well. So I think, I know I just saw Abby Hopper with the former CEO of SEA, the Trade Association, and she’d done work to try to raise the bar on the quality of sales.

and marketing in the industry. So I think, yeah, it’s funny, I was just talking to a friend who’s in Australia now, and they have such much higher penetration. And I think things like the solar app approach to be able to scale and deal with the inefficiency with these we have in permitting and local ordinances, et cetera. So we’ve got a ways to go. mean, that said, I do think that as solar starts popping up on folks’ roofs and the economics

neighbors talk to neighbors or companies talk to companies. I think we’re on the winning side of history here. But it does feel that we have a ways to go in looking at how do we get higher penetration and make it more attractive, not only visually but financially, and deal in a tough way with the political headwinds we’re facing too.

Aaron Nichols I think Abby definitely did some good work bringing humanity to it. mean, she’s been on the show as well. She’s a wonderful human being and I was lucky to get to talk to her. I’m curious about, I mean, I’m very much into the democratization of energy. It’s one of my favorite topics and I personally, you I work remotely and...

I have a Toyota Tacoma set up with a Facebook Marketplace panel and an old Chinese battery bank and I can just go take that to the backwoods and use that to work from there with a Starlink. So I’m very much on board with the off-grid and the democratization. I’m curious, is there...

a player right now that you think is going to be ahead in the market if plug-in solar and balcony solar and all that stuff gets legalized.

Dave Kirkpatrick You know, it’s a good question. I don’t... You know, you think about...

Who are the consumer players? mean, obviously, Tesla, can’t avoid Tesla, right? But it has had sort of the higher end brand and despite what Elon has said, I’m skeptical on their scaling up really sales of solar module and popularizing the way they have with EVs. When you look at a Generac or other types of folks who are selling energy appliances, it’s hard to say. It feels like at the utility scale,

It’s like NextPower, we have some bigger companies that are really becoming unique brand names. But other than Sunrun, we’ve had a lot of failures of the Resi-SENI space over the last decade. So it feels like it’s still to emerge. You’ve got the platforms like EnergySage and others to help people find solar and get it on their homes, like Angie’s List type of approach.

And then you’ve got attempts to sell through the Costcos of the world, et cetera. So I’m not sure what the path is. It definitely feels like local regional installers are key to the puzzle. But in terms of building compelling national brands, feels like it’s a ways to go still.

Aaron Nichols I’ve puzzled about that really the whole time since I’ve been in the solar industry.

the struggles that we’ve had to build a national brand or it seems like national excitement around solar as a product. I mean there’s obviously niche communities that are very excited about it. Like DIY people love it, off-grid people love it, overlanders love it, but there’s a ways to go in terms of just like national passionate branding and I don’t know if that’s because...

It’s boring because it’s too good at what it does. It just sits there and makes power and doesn’t whiz-bang and doesn’t move around. I don’t know if it’s because of that or what are your theories on that?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, yeah, I know your point’s well taken. I do think we’re getting...

I mean, when you look at additions to the grid, you know, it’s 85 % of the grid additions were solar plus storage last year. So it’s happening, it’s happening at the utility scale. So I think that the bigger players, the hyperscalers, the utilities, they understand that solar is by far the cheapest way to generate power in this country for the most part, in most places. So I think it’s happening at the grid scale, whether at the CNI and RESI scale,

I don’t know that I have a good answer. I think partly because we don’t have, we yielded the module in cell manufacturing to Asia, and despite all that we’re doing with Teroz.

that train to me has left the station. And I think it’s OK. China is just helping to decarbonize the world. They’re exporting like crazy, right? Low cost solar, EVs, batteries, et cetera. So looking for next stage businesses that can deploy. So Nxtracker was an example of that, et cetera. I think it’s a great question to think about how to generate more excitement at the consumer level, because it’s not

probably going to be the OEM brand typically. so, yeah, I think it’s still an open question. mean, I think Sunrun has tried, you know, with the financing vehicle. And of course we have the tax credit regime that is going to force folks into leasing fundamentally at the Rezzi level. So it could be building brands on that, I guess, at this point.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, bathing suit car wash always seems to work in the movies. We could try that. It doesn’t seem like that’s been tried yet.

Dave Kirkpatrick All right. Right, right. I think any new approach is welcomed at this point. But yeah, I I think the other thing we’re having too is just the whole self-reliance that a lot more folks are going to become interested in off-grid or sometimes being off-grid because the grid is going to get less reliable with hurricanes, storms, et cetera. And so you’re seeing attach rates of batteries with solar scaling. And that’s just, when you have a neighborhood with three-year neighbors have the lights still on, everybody else is dark.

to show up and that is showing up in a lot of communities too. So I think it’s all of those pieces of the puzzle. I I don’t think this happening is all heat pump electrification push. So anyway, it’s not happening fast enough, but it’s moving for sure. A long ways from when I started.

Aaron Nichols So what do you think the next iteration of the industry looks like?

Dave Kirkpatrick You know, I can’t say that I know. I mean, I do think...

Storage has become critical with the deployment of data centers and the stress on the grid. And so I think VPPs, virtual power plants, and storage alongside solar are going to become more and more a piece of the puzzle. Even here in North Carolina, there are a lot of 5 to 20 megawatt solar projects that are 10 to 15 years old. There’s a discussion of adding storage to a lot of those to add for a more resilient grid.

So I think those, the big wave of data center build out, how that’s stressing the grids, how that’s affecting affordability, I think that plays to solar plus storage pretty well, right? You’ve seen it in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races recently, and the legislation just passed, it’s passing in Virginia as we speak. So I think the affordability, the climate risk elements, all of that are playing to the strengths of distribution

solar and storage and they’re going to continue to be the solution because otherwise that gas is you can’t unless you’re going to just repurpose an inefficient gas turbine there’s just no other solution for a lot of places the power is needed.

Aaron Nichols So another selfish question. If you were someone like me, who has been here two and a half years, is just starting their career, or you were someone who had just entered the solar industry, and it’s the time of tremendous upheaval and change and the most demand we’ve seen in years, but also a time of just an unsettled feeling, what would you be doing right now?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, you know, I think...

I mean, over the time for me, I think it’s partly going to gatherings of smart folks working in the field. So I think when I, even starting SJF, our fund, and before that, it was really going to venture fairs and going to some of early solar power internationals. was really talking to folks in the industry, understanding where I could fit, my best expertise mapped to the needs of the industry.

So that’s what I mean there’s, and now with the online opportunities like you’re providing, Aaron, I think there’s that. So think absorbing, connecting, and looking for where your skills match and your passion matches what’s needed in the industry. I think there is a dark cloud coming out of DC these days for solar and renewables for sure, but that will pass. And fundamentally, the economics

they’re still working, even with the policy blowback we’re seeing. So I think if someone who’s younger and wanting a long-term career, I think this is the industry to be in. that’s the best I can say is that getting out there, walking the exhibit booths at any of these shows, talking to the folks, trying to get where you’re excited, where you can align, where there’s a gap that you can plug in.

But marketing’s a big piece of it. think folks like yourself and a few others that have done a better job at helping to begin to popularize solar and discuss it’s been great.

Aaron Nichols Dave, we finished the show with the same closing question for everyone who comes on. And it has to do with the fact that last year I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party. She was born in 1945. And...

As I was reflecting on that afterwards and writing a LinkedIn post about it, I realized that that meant that my grandma was born into a world where what we now call renewable energy didn’t really exist. Nothing like in the form we have now. I mean, the first PV cell was invented in 1954, so she was nine.

And then the whole story arc of PV just getting better and better and better and cheaper and faster and more efficient and all of that leading up to it becoming the cheapest power source in the world has all happened within her lifetime. And so if you were to moonshot to take us out here, what do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?

Dave Kirkpatrick Yeah, I admit I’ve watched some of your podcasts, but maybe not all the way to the end. So I don’t know that I heard the question to wrap it up.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. Well, mean, you know, 80 years will probably both be gone. No one can hold us to it.

Dave Kirkpatrick Hey, yeah, now I hear you. Now, it’s interesting because you hear Elon Musk’s latest bit about kind of sustainable robotic future where no one will have to work kind of thing.

I don’t think that’s the future I foresee. I I think that what I hope we get to is that we have addressed climate change and reduced emissions, that we do have kind of sustainable communities and employment that is livable and we’re going as you’re suffering in the ways we see folks are suffering these days. And then I think that solar and storage, wind power, ocean power,

I think the existing energy sources that are safe and effective are the primary sources of energy. I think we can go to nuclear power, and I think we’ve invested in companies helping existing plants operate efficiently and safely. And so there are moonshot technologies, whether it fusion or fission, et cetera. I still like renewing on that fusion reactor that’s eight minutes away from us better.

I do think it’s more distributed, safer, less centralized. When you look at Africa and the rest of the world, it does not have power. It’s the best way to help them get there. That would be the hopeful future that we’re working for, and I’m hoping for it here.

But who knows? Yeah, let’s hope our kids and grandkids can see that world because the current direction is challenging, especially with respect to climate risk.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. Yeah, thankfully it’s not unprecedented. I I don’t want to get too philosophical, but I love reading history and there’s just always that tension between progress and wanting things to stay the same and wanting things to revert back. And I mean, this is one of my favorite jokes, but like you don’t have a good story without plot.

Dave Kirkpatrick Yes, yes, we were in the middle of some drama. Let’s hope it ends, even though we’re talking a few days after our country has launched another war in the Middle East. So let’s hope we move towards a more peaceful, sustainable future.

Aaron Nichols Okay. Absolutely. Dave, where do you like to be found online, if you do like to be found online or otherwise?

Dave Kirkpatrick Oh yeah, sure, no, I’m happy to be. LinkedIn’s the best place, so you can find me there. And we’re always, we’re excited to look for the next solar storage, clean energy come to invest in. So anyone raising capital from five to 20 million, we’d love to speak to them. I’m also often at trade, I’ll be at RE plus for example, so often connect with folks for the big trade shows as well. All right.

Aaron Nichols Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today, Dave, and for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar.

Dave Kirkpatrick Thank you.

Several Companies Want to Deploy In-Home Data Centers

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:30:17 GMT

What’s new

Several companies want to install tiny AI data centers in people’s homes. It’s not as crazy an idea as you might think…

AI needs more computing power, but Americans are beginning to loathe data centers and oppose them almost anywhere anyone suggests putting them. Homes already have power, internet, and space.

Some homes already have solar panels, batteries, and smart electric panels, making them perfect candidates to host small computing devices. This is a concept called “distributed computing.”

So, just like our episode two weeks ago (where we talked about how several solar and other technology companies are considering pulling from solar and battery systems when data centers need power), these companies are considering pulling compute from home-hosted computing devices when people need queries answered by A.I.

A quick message before the rest of the story:

This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And we have a special bonus for This Week In Solar Listeners.

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Here are a few examples of distributed computing plans:

Sunrun is testing AI computer systems in homes that already have Sunrun solar panels and batteries. Homeowners would be paid to host them, and Sunrun says they plan to start rolling them out while they test how well they work.

NVIDIA and Span are testing GPU cabinets that attach to the outside of homes. These connect to smart electric panels and backup batteries. Span’s XFRA system would place liquid-cooled NVIDIA computer systems next to homes. Span is starting with pilot projects before trying to grow.

Akash’s Homenode is a different version of this concept that helps people who already own powerful gaming or work computers sell extra computing power.

Why it matters

AI has two big problems right now: not enough computing power, and not enough electricity to run it. A home with solar panels and a battery can help provide both the space and the energy for a small amount of AI computing.

This could be much faster than building new data centers, which can take years to plan, approve, connect to the grid, and build (a process made much slower by the fact that Americans tend not to want them anywhere near their towns).

There is also a strong financial reason for people to opt into these programs: Computing power is currently worth much more than electricity, sometimes 10-20 times more. So someone with their own solar-powered computing device, where the sun creates compute that they can sell, could make some extra cash down the line.

The technology isn’t available for the mass market yet, but in the next few years, we could start seeing this become more common for homeowners to host equipment like this and get paid.

Sources:

XFRA

The Home Is the New Datacenter: Two Visions for Distributed AI Compute

NVIDIA Distributed AI Data Centers: What Residential GPU Nodes Mean for AI Infrastructure

The newest AI boom pitch: Host a mini data center at your home

Sunrun Launches Distributed AI Data Center Pilot Backed By Existing Home Energy Generation

How Off-Grid Hippies Kick-Started the Solar Industry: Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:31:16 GMT

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Aaron talks with Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, seasoned solar industry veterans and filmmakers who are about to release the documentary Solar Roots.

They’ve spent nearly 10 years filming and editing this documentary to capture the wild, off-grid stories of the pioneers who built the foundation of the modern clean energy boom.

You can check out the documentary and watch party here.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

Expect to learn:

How the modern solar industry was built by back-to-the-land, herb-growin’ hippies in Northern California.
Why these barefoot farmers could afford solar at $50/Watt (it’s hilarious).
When and where the Solar Roots watch party will be (and if you’re invited).

Quotes from the episode:

“The hippies started the PV industry. I really was curious to understand, was that true? And that was the basic premise of the film... at the end of the film, we take this story and I think we answered the question.”
— Jeff Spies
“The vast majority of energy on this planet 200 years from now will be generated from the sun. It’s just it’s just that simple... Sand is an incredibly, incredibly abundant resource. We’re not running out of that.”
— Jason Vetterli

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today I have Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli here to talk about their upcoming film, Solar Roots. If you guys wouldn’t mind introducing yourselves, talking about who you are in the industry, and then talking a little bit about the film.

Jeff Spies My name’s Jeff Spies. I don’t know if you want to start over.

Aaron Nichols Okay.

All right. And did I get yours right, Jason? Okay. Hello, everyone. And hello, everyone. And welcome back to This Week at Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today I have Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterlion, who have filmed and are about to release a film called Solar Roots.

Jason Vetterli You nailed it, yeah.

Jeff Spies This one’s easy.

Aaron Nichols Now, I’m very excited for this because I love wild, off-grid people, ⁓ and I have for a long time. So, Jeff and Jason, if you guys wouldn’t mind just introducing yourselves and talking a little bit about who you are in the industry and then what started this process, how did this film come about?

Jeff Spies My name is Jeff Spees and I am the president of Planet PlanSets. We’re a solar plan drafting company working nationwide for solar and storage contractors. And Jason and I worked together years ago at Quick Mount PV. We started one day apart from one another and became good friends early on. And I roped him into helping me make this documentary film, which started because we had a party called the Solar Pioneer Party, where we got together a lot of the original

really influential ⁓ movers and shakers in the early years of the solar PV industry, just as a fun get together. And that turned into a second Solar Pioneer Party and that turned into a third. And in the process, Jason and I had this idea to make a documentary film to capture these stories before these people were no longer around. And I’m glad that we did because several unfortunately have already passed away and ⁓ we were successful at capturing.

some really amazing stories, but it wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for Jason’s talents as a filmmaker and editor to make this story come to life.

Jason Vetterli ⁓ kind of got an intro there already, but my name is Jason Betterly. I work, ⁓ in the, racking space, ⁓ residential and commercial for, ⁓ quite some time in this industry, 15 years, maybe not that much time when you consider, ⁓ who we’re talking about in our documentary. ⁓ but yes, had a, a modicum of, ⁓ video, ⁓

and editing experience in my past and ⁓ so got roped into what was supposed to be a little 20 minute project and here we are ⁓ almost 10 years later trying to finally release ⁓ this film that we’re both proud of, really comes from the heart, really tells some amazing stories. So happy to be here.

Aaron Nichols I love

how y’all started that process. It reminds me when my best friend, when I had just turned 18, asked me in high school gym class if I wanted to go skydiving. And that’s how I ended up going skydiving the first time. As I mentioned in the intro, I love wild, off-grid people. And I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to 30 countries. I spent four and a half years out of the country in my 20s, just going to as many places as I could. And one thing that I have always been blown away

by is the hardiness of people who choose to live a different way. And that’s one reason I got so excited when I heard about this project is because there’s so many people in this film who years and years ago decided to live off the land and just opt out of society and use solar energy for that. So if y’all wouldn’t mind just giving a bit of an intro about the cast of characters and some of the stories that people can expect to hear in the film.

Jeff Spies I describe it as the who’s who of who made this technology into an industry. And I differentiate the start of the technology from the start of the industry in that, you know, photovoltaic or photogalvanic effect was discovered in middle of 1800s by Edmund Becquerel in France. And then you had the discovery that selenium, you know, had photovoltaic properties in the later 1800s and the first selenium solar modules were the late 1800s. And then Albert Einstein explained the photovoltaic

photovoltaic effect in the ⁓ early 1900s won the Nobel Peace Prize for that work. But it wasn’t until the 50s that Bell came out with a practical silicon solar battery that was so expensive it could only be afforded by the government for, you know, satellites. And so what we saw was, as we were interviewing these pioneers of the industry, is there was a progression where

The technology moved from space into what was termed terrestrial PV, mostly remote mountaintop telecommunication sites. Sometimes railroads would have telecom sites in these remote areas. And it was there where the transition took place from these very expensive mountaintop solar photovoltaic systems, power and telecom, into people’s homes. And that’s where I felt...

where the industry was born is when these solar panels started to get brought into regular people’s homes to power lights and music. That was the start of the PV industry. And the question we asked at the beginning of the film is because when I first started in PV, I was told and I distinctly remember the story that David Katz told me as we were walking through the streets of San Francisco at the 2007 NECA show. And he told me how he got into PV. And I was like, this is a frigging great story. And ⁓

And it really just, what I heard over and over again from those folks that I started working with when I worked at AE Solar was that the hippies started the PV industry. And I really was curious to understand, was that true? And that was the basic premise of the film is, you know, did the hippies start the PV industry? And ⁓ at the end of the film, we take this story and I think we answered the question because it really got into defining what is a hippie.

And so we interviewed in 50, I think we had 45 interviews where we interviewed, or maybe it was 55 interviews where we interviewed 45 people, some people we interviewed more than once. And, you know, over those interviews, we got a very diverse group of perspectives from the really significant individuals that made this technology into a viable industry.

Aaron Nichols Nice.

Jeff Spies And ⁓ my favorite story really was when the oil industry was making these modules behind me. That was made by an oil company, Arcosolar, this module here. It was the 162000 module, was one of the early famous modules for the home power boom of solar. And when the sales representatives for Arcosolar started traveling around trying to figure out why these solar panels were being sold into these remote off-grid places in Northern California,

Aaron Nichols Wow.

Jeff Spies They walked into David Katz’s business in Brysling, California and saw these dirty hippies walking through the door with fistfuls of cash to buy super expensive modules. And they were blown away that these modules that they couldn’t find a practical market for were being bought by hippies with cash that smelled like marijuana. That’s the story right there. was the moment.

where in my opinion I consider the PV industry was born that day.

Jason Vetterli So when I got into this, I was told, let’s go up to Humboldt County and have a party with all these quote unquote hippies that started the industry. ⁓ What I quickly found out though was, yes, first of all, we go into a bit of detail at the end of the movie ⁓ pointing out how complicated the definition of a hippie actually is. ⁓ What I quickly found out

was that my preconceived notions of a hippie as probably being somebody that had tuned out a society and was maybe really into music, and nature and like organic foods doesn’t really cover the full scope of, of who these people were, or doesn’t even remotely cover who these people were. For the most part, ⁓ we talk a lot about the back to the land movement, which was a, a thing that was coming out of the colleges.

in the early seventies where after the, ⁓ the kind of consciousness revolution in the sixties and all the stuff that was going on in the late sixties, ⁓ the next step for a lot of kind of deep thinkers and progressive minded folks was like, well, maybe we should go try to make this a reality. for a lot of them, that meant getting out of the cities, ⁓ to the degree of even getting off the grid and kind of building their own kind of

hopefully utopian ways of life. And you know, these things went in all directions. ⁓ Some of them were successful, some of them were not. But many of the folks that ended up starting the businesses that were kind of precursors to the big home power industry that we see today ⁓ were subscribers to this Back to the Land.

ideology for sure, but they were also, ⁓ many of them were scientists and or, or they had, or they had developed their own, ⁓ understanding of, ⁓ of kind of science and do it all by doing it yourself. You know, you’re out there, you have to learn to farm, you have to learn, ⁓ how to, and they were using electricity out here before they had the solar.

and we should talk about that, but it was in, it was in very rudimentary ways with car batteries and, and that’s a huge part of how this started.

Jeff Spies driving your car around every day, driving the car to charge

your house battery.

Aaron Nichols Ha ha!

Jason Vetterli There was

a point in there somewhere I was trying to get to. It’s that these people are, these people were so much more than hippies to me after I met them and had the fortune to stay at many of their homes and witness what they had done over the years. It’s interesting because a lot of these folks were older than me and kind of coming into the sunset. I don’t know if I should say that, but you know,

they had lived full lives. And it’s interesting to see what they had done, what they had built, an off-grid home looks like after being lived in for sometimes up to 40 years, know, 30, 40 years. So yeah, this was a, I learned so much about this off-grid. I wish I was an off-grid. You said you love.

Aaron Nichols Wow.

Jason Vetterli stories about people tramping around through the backwoods. That’s not me, but I feel very fortunate that I was able to leave Oakland, California, where I’m sitting right now and experience some of this very eye-opening and very beautiful people, man.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’m sure. And you mentioned the nuance and the challenging of that definition. That’s been one of my favorite things that I’ve experienced through traveling the world is just the endless nuance you discover in people that you thought were one dimensional that you wrote off because your brain didn’t have space once you go meet them. That’s probably one of the best things that travel can give you. I’m interested in... ⁓

Jason Vetterli Absolutely.

Aaron Nichols I’m interested in music because you both mentioned music as being a big part of this story and people using solar power to make sure they had music in these off-grid places. I would love to go down that rabbit hole with you guys.

Jeff Spies Well, here’s the thing. could get, you know, so these folks that were living in these remote areas, and there were three hot spots of the early development of the industry, Northern Mendocino County, Southern Humboldt County, and Grass Valley, California. And I’ve really thought long and hard for years about why these particular locations. I have my theories on that. But in these backwoods locations, you had dirt friggin’ roads.

You didn’t have TV or radio stations that could even get a signal back in that area. You had to chop your own wood for your own heat to burn in a wood stove. You had no refrigeration, no electricity. Lighting was done with kerosene lanterns. It was very primitive by modern standards. And the interesting thing is you could get lighting with kerosene lanterns.

but you had no way of listening to music in these backwards locations without electricity. And ⁓ unless you had your own instruments, and that certainly was popular for folks that knew how to play a guitar or whatever the case may be. But most people had that desire to listen to music. For goodness sakes, it was the 70s. And obviously, many people that kind of think about hippies think about hippies and rock and roll music. And that was a big driving motivation for people to want to have electricity. And what they did, as you would imagine, is pretty obvious. They had a

They had an ⁓ eight track tape, this is before cassettes, an eight track tape deck in their car. And they would say, well, let me just take the speakers from my car in the house. Why don’t I take the stereo in the house? And why don’t I just plug it into the battery in my car and I can listen to music in the house? And what that grew into was people that were looking to install a second battery just for home power in their car. And indeed David Katz, who was the founder of AEE Solar, my first employer in the PV industry, he

was an auto repairman. He actually was an electrical engineer, worked for the Department of Defense. And then he moved to Humboldt County and couldn’t make a living as an electrical engineer. And he went back into his business of fixing Volkswagen Beetles and eventually started to realize that he could help people convert their cars to a two battery charging system so that when they got done driving, they’d drive up to their house, plug the house into the car battery, and now they’d have power for music. And that was life changing for these people who lived in the back country.

It made life so much more fun and enjoyable to bring music into these back country locations and lighting. So it was music and lights, music and lights. We hear that over and over again. Some people think, well, these hippies were using solar power to power grow lights for marijuana. No, no, no. That’s insane. Yeah, they didn’t do that. They, well, they grew marijuana outdoors.

Jason Vetterli That’s the biggest misconception.

Aaron Nichols Well, you probably didn’t even need them.

Jason Vetterli No, you’re growing them outside

up there and these big, you clear some forests and you plant a bunch of plants and the sun does all the work. It’s really the same thing with solar, I guess, but they were, they were using, they were rationing and being very, ⁓ ecological about this whole approach because they had very little power. This whole charge the battery. How often are they even driving to town? Some of them. ⁓ but when they would be able to charge a battery through a car or.

perhaps not too long after that folks were looking at this battery model and going, maybe I can hook up a windmill or, or, or a micro hydro system to a stream. If you were fortunate to have water and that water was running at certain times of the year, you could, you could net a little bit of, of stored energy in that battery. you know, also battery technology wasn’t where it’s at today. And, ⁓ so it was the same back to the land mentality of, ⁓ of, ⁓

of doing much, much more with very, very little. ⁓ so yeah, they had, they had to find the right type of early led lights that would not, that would not use that much energy and, and, a radio was not going to take too much, but they had to be very, they had to conserve their, little power they had, but they learned to live like this. And, ⁓ so by the time this kind of, they started smelling this, ⁓ solar

Option in the air. It was like they already had the system set up. They already had the the home electrification model set up They just didn’t have a way to really supercharge it until Until a few folks started sticking these solar panels very expensive solar panels on their homes and then man, it was like a wildfire at that point and You you had to be able to afford it. I don’t know if you want to speak a little bit on that Jeff

Jeff Spies Well, yeah, just to give some perspective, today you can buy solar panels depending on where you’re at in the world for as little as maybe 10 or 15 cent a watt. Here in the US, maybe it’s going to be more like 50 cent a watt. If you look at the money they paid back in, let’s say, 1980 when this really started to take form, people were paying at that time about $13 to $14 a watt. In 1980 dollars, when you adjust for inflation, it’s like $50 a watt today. And these were...

Barefoot hippies that were buying the most expensive form of electrical power generation that probably existed up until that time outside of like building nuclear reactor and and and they were and the reason that they bought these solar panels was interesting because at At $50 watt adjusted for inflation today It was still cheaper than driving your car around all the time to charge your home battery So solar was bought back then because it was cheaper

Aaron Nichols Well, just really

for some context as well, I know that we love to talk about price per watt. There’s a decent amount of people who listen to this who are past customers of Exact Solar who don’t think of things in price per watt. They’re not in the industry. So let’s just say for context like that panel behind you, if we’re talking about $13 a watt, like how much would that have been?

Jeff Spies So just to do the math, that’s a 33 watt module. It’s a ARCO 162000 from Atlantic Bridgefield. So was 33 watts times... It was about $14 a watt. That would be $462 in 1980. And adjusted for inflation today, I could go to the Consumer Price Index Calculator and run that. But effectively, it’s about 100 times more expensive.

Aaron Nichols Okay.

Jeff Spies ⁓ So it was an incredibly expensive way to generate electricity, but it was still cheaper than driving your car all the time to charge your car battery.

Aaron Nichols Nice.

Jason Vetterli These

back to the land folks had a network of communication before the internet that was basically printed publication based. You have the whole earth catalog, you had a mother earth magazine, and then you had magazines that were starting to come out that were specifically. ⁓

being built around this new kind of off-grid home power, like the magazine Home Power, for example. ⁓ And so everyone that was out here living off-grid was already kind of in the loop with these publications because they’d go in the store to buy their chicken wire and their kerosene and their water, everything you need to live off-grid and that publication would be sitting right there on the counter. So it wasn’t long before ⁓ when I said it spread like wildfire, it really happened.

very quickly and then it just became how are we going to afford it? ⁓ When we talked to some of these, one of our Arco sales guys that Jeff mentioned who had gone up to Humboldt and seen these people paying for modules and cash, he noted that it was often around harvest time ⁓ when a homeowner would buy their

an off-grid homeowner would buy their first module because maybe they were growing some plants in their backyard and maybe they did just come up on a handful of cash ⁓ at the beginning of November because they had maybe sold these plants. So ⁓ that was a key ⁓ mechanism in allowing this very expensive ⁓

Aaron Nichols you

Jason Vetterli technology to be purchased by just the right people who knew what to do with that technology. mean, ARCO had been selling this stuff, as we spoke on to the railroads to, it was going to their own oil rigs. ⁓ ARCO used to dry fly a helicopter out with a giant battery to the oil rigs. think it was like every two months and they pushed the old battery into the ocean. I mean, I don’t want to slam the oil companies too hard, but that’s what they do. They just dump that one in.

Jeff Spies Yep.

There was a big pile of lead acid batteries at the bottom of all of these marker buoys.

Jason Vetterli and then drop and land a new one. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And then they drop a new battery. so they, they pretty quickly figured out, this technology that we’re having trouble selling, ⁓ we could be using on our, on our own oil rigs, but it, was the industrial complex that was, you know, the industrial complex has a lot of, a lot of capital. And so they could find these remote applications for it. But, ⁓ it was when the power, when it got in the hands of some very clever.

people that wanted to change the world is really when home power was born. And that’s another real semantic, ⁓ kind of thing here too. We talked about that, the hippies, the industry, what’s the industry and, and what is the home power industry? ⁓ but the home power industry has certainly grown to influence the entire commercial and, and utility scale industry. They’ve all cross pollinated for sure.

Jeff Spies Yeah,

my opinion that if it weren’t for this technology get into the hands of regular people and homes scattered in these remote communities, our technology would have been much further behind because it was those individuals that convinced people in the commercial business world and in the utility sector, this technology actually worked. It was expensive admittedly, but there was that belief that as time went on and as we’ve seen, the price would come down. And now

Jason Vetterli Absolutely.

Jeff Spies Solar kilowatt hours are the cheapest kilowatt hours that you can make, which makes me feel really good.

Aaron Nichols Yeah, I also, one of the coolest things I noted in the trailer was that a lot of these systems that these people installed are still producing electricity and it’s been like 45 years or something like that.

Jeff Spies Yep.

Yep. That module right there is a workhorse. I know people that have had module like this that are 40 years old and they’re still producing over 90 % of the rated power.

Aaron Nichols That’s so cool.

Jason Vetterli That’s the amazing part about it.

Jeff Spies Now, these

modules were bulletproof. Not bulletproof, but these had thick cells, thick glass. You can see the glass wasn’t that big. They were really high quality manufacturing components. Obviously, there’s a lot of modules today that are junk and have really thin glass and thin cells that microcrack all the time. And there’s a whole bunch of quality problems. But these old ARCO 162000s were

Aaron Nichols You

Jason Vetterli Yeah,

these were made to last, dude. These are the great generation.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Jeff Spies incredible modules. Plain and simple, the most iconic module from those early years in my opinion.

Jason Vetterli But even with the new modules, mean, I forget who it was. Someone in our documentary said, there’s no moving parts. mean, unless you’re talking about a tracker system, but there’s no moving parts. It doesn’t need to be oiled. There’s no gears that are going to break down. They said it so beautifully in the movie. God, who was it? It might’ve been Mark Morose. He said, really? It’s just glass molded in such a way. mean, what’s the silicon wafer made out of? It’s glass molded in such a way.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Jason Vetterli that it captures the sun and, you know, most solar panels are up high on a roof or unless we start experiencing tremendous like meteor storms, I think a lot of these panels are still gonna have a long lifetime. ⁓ So anything that’s really gonna take it out is a rock flying from space, maybe a missile, but.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Yeah, I joke about this all the time, Jason, the no moving parts thing. mean, it’s I think like the the uphill battle we have to fight in solar is that it’s it’s so good at what it does that it’s boring. It just lays there and makes power. Yeah.

Jason Vetterli Mm. Sure, yeah.

Jeff Spies It’s magic to me. If you understood

that that flat piece of black glass that’s sitting motionless in the sun is generates pumping on electricity. How does that happen? It’s amazing to me. And I’ll just say, Aaron, the favorite part of the film, and it always will be for me, is the last 15 minutes. And I don’t want to give it away. I think that you need to experience it firsthand. we

I think, address the human part of our story, because we certainly talk about the technology, but in a way that I don’t find boring. I think it’s interesting. But the end of our story, we’re talking about, we’re answering the question of did the hippies start the solar industry and really had the opportunity to get just some heartfelt commentary from our main characters that was beautiful.

Makes me choke up when I think about how beautiful it is, what they said, what we were able to capture and the message that we can deliver to the world about the importance of this technology and the importance of sustainability, which I consider crosses a lot of boundaries, but sustainability at its core means that we are able to keep life healthy and moving on this earth and not, you know, essentially cut our own throats. It’s like the goose that laid the golden egg.

You want that goose to keep laying golden eggs over time. You don’t want to kill the goose to get the eggs in their side because they’re not there.

Aaron Nichols Yeah.

Jason Vetterli If you got people that think the technology is boring, not to put on my marketing hat here, ⁓ just tell them to come watch our movie. Or they don’t, we’re going to give it to them for free anyway, so just tell them to type in the URL.

Jeff Spies Yeah.

Aaron Nichols Amazing.

Jeff Spies It’s a people story. It’s

a people story is what it is. It is a documentary and it is a technology, but at its core, what makes it good is that it’s a human interest story with really fascinating, smart people who you can feel what they’re like through the movie. And I’m so happy we were able to capture that because...

Jason Vetterli Absolutely.

Jeff Spies I was fortunate when I came into the industry and I didn’t get started early. I had my first job in solar in the 80s, but I did not get into PV until the mid 2000s. And when I came in, I was fortunate to meet these amazing people. And my one of the great accomplishments in my life is I was immersed in a community of the most amazing people I’ve ever known in my life. The smartest, most visionary, compassionate, and, ⁓ you know, socially out.

They’re looking out for the benefits of the world as a whole. And so to be surrounded by those people and to work with them for so many years and then to help tell their story, it’s true privilege. I think Jason and I have been given to help make sure that this story continues on for future generations to know and for folks that don’t work in the industry that need to be ⁓ inspired to embrace a life of sustainability. That’s my goal.

Jason Vetterli Yeah,

I’d like,

Aaron Nichols Well, I’m very excited to watch it. I mean, so I ask everyone who comes on the show the same closing question. And I think you guys are pretty well poised to answer it after these experiences and the people that you’ve worked with and met through this project. But last year, I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party.

And when I was reflecting on that afterwards, I realized that 80 years meant she was born into a world where what we call solar PV or even home PV didn’t exist nearly in the same way that we think about it now. Like we knew about the photovoltaic effect, but we didn’t have commercial cells. Everything that’s happened, all of what you guys have mentioned, have happened in the last 80 years, all the way down to solar becoming the cheapest power source.

and the exponential growth curve we’re on now and the interesting story we’re living through with the transition to more solar. So if you guys were to just moonshot having talked to these people who were there on the front lines, where do you think clean energy is going? What do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?

Jason Vetterli I start with that. mean, I’ll just lift a quote from ⁓ someone in the movie that he said ⁓ he doesn’t care what the politics is. He doesn’t care for being, you know, being whoever’s running this planet and whether people are happy or not. One thing we know for sure is that the vast majority of of energy on this planet 200 years from now will be generated from the sun. It’s just it’s just that simple.

Aaron Nichols you

Jason Vetterli Sand is an incredibly, incredibly abundant resource. We’re not running out of that. And it’s just so fast to deploy and so easy to deploy. And as you spoke on the price, the price is just right. I don’t really see anything stopping it from doing exactly that.

Jeff Spies Well, the way I’ll answer that question is, first of all, it’s all nuclear energy. The sun is nuclear energy. It’s just that we have that reactor sufficiently far away from Earth to not make it as dangerous as it would be if it was here on Earth. But keep in mind that all energy that we have in this planet outside of nuclear power reactors is solar energy. Oil, coal, natural gas, that’s all embodied energy from the sun. It’s just that fossil fuels are very inefficient, dirty form.

of capturing the energy of the sun. And when you can just take a flat piece of glass and aim it at the sun and get kilowatt hours without all of the horrible environmental consequences that come from fossil fuels, that’s magic. And so the future I’ve thought of in the, if we looked at how many years did you want me to predict? 100 years into the future? 80? I’ll start with it. I think that, you know, certainly solar PV is going to be a massive

Aaron Nichols 80, 80 years.

Jason Vetterli I

went 200, sorry man.

Jeff Spies component of the worldwide power grid in 80 years. That’s my opinion. I think that we may very well see ⁓ nuclear power reactors come back if fusion reactors can be made safe and reliable. But I think that it would be a blend of fusion nuclear reactors and PV where PV can be deployed anywhere. But fusion nuclear reactors you don’t want next to a earthquake zone on the ocean, Fukushima, if you know what I’m talking about. So

Effectively, think that solar PV is here to stay. think it’s going to power the world for many decades to come. And I think that the question is probably more one of resources, because while we can generate more more electricity with solar power, there still is an environmental impact to mining all the materials necessary to make the solar modules. I feel that, yes, storage and realistically, we have to, I think,

Jason Vetterli storage.

Jeff Spies embrace the concept that you should not. You can, but you should not extract more from the world around you than you put back into it. This is a fundamental tenet of farming and gardening that any farmer knows is that if you don’t invest back into your land, it gets depleted. And I think that while we can generate more and more electricity, the question is how do we do that in a way that doesn’t extract the resources from the environment

in a way that we can’t invest back into the environment. So I hope people, when they see our film, start to think a little bit more high level about their impact on the earth around them and trying to make sure that they’re putting back at least what they’re taking out. I would like to think that people that come and see this film and get inspired to do good with their life will try to put more back into their environment than they take out. That to me is a successful way.

Aaron Nichols Well, guys, where do you like to be found online or otherwise if you do like to be found? And where can people find the film when it’s ready?

Jeff Spies ⁓ Well, the

Jason Vetterli I don’t

like to be found. I’ll go first. don’t really like to be found unless ⁓ I want you to find me and then you’d already know. But you can find me on LinkedIn, Jason Vetterli, ⁓ V is in Victor E-T-T-E-R-L-I. ⁓ That’s my kind of connection to the business side of things. So, yeah, if you know my Instagram, you do. I’m old, so all I use is Instagram. ⁓ But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at.

Aaron Nichols Okay.

Jeff Spies Yep.

Aaron Nichols Great.

Nice.

Jeff Spies Yeah, I think.

Jason Vetterli Come to

our party and you can find me in person. ⁓ We should give a plug to that. We will be having a, all the details may be better left to ⁓ Jeffrey here. ⁓ Halloween.

Aaron Nichols Yeah. When and where.

Jeff Spies Yeah, I was just going to have

a website set up for it. It’s solar-roots.com. That’ll tell you about the documentary, about the party. That’s certainly a way you can connect with us to get your messages through. But I’m like Jason on LinkedIn, Jeff Spies, spelled like Spies, S-P-I-E-S. And I’m on Facebook too, but I probably am more active now on LinkedIn. And of course, my day job, which has taken up a lot of my time. Thankfully, we’re

continuing to stay busy even in an uncertain market and you know, I think this this coming year is going to be a active one as we make that transition into the what the industry will now be looking like with all the expiration of the residential tax credits.

Aaron Nichols So for everyone who’s listening, go to solar-roots.com. All the details you need to see the film will be there. And thank you for listening. That’s been This Week in Solar.

Jason Vetterli Thank you, Aaron.

Jeff Spies Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Nichols Thanks, guys.

New Jersey Unanimously Legalizes Plug-In (Balcony) Solar

Aaron Nichols — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:31:01 GMT

What’s New:

Earlier this week, New Jersey lawmakers unanimously passed the Garden State Plug-In Solar Act, a bill that would legalize plug-in (balcony) solar across the state.

If signed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill, the law will let residents use systems up to 1,200 watts (roughly 3 modern solar panels) that plug into a standard outlet and lower electric bills, without needing a local permit or utility approval first.

The bill also protects access for renters, condo owners, and people in apartments by blocking landlords, HOAs, and condo boards from banning plug-in or balcony solar outright, though they can still set reasonable rules for size and placement.

Once she signs it, the new rules will go into effect in January of 2027.

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!

Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Why It Matters:

Electricity prices in New Jersey are some of the highest in the nation.

High energy bills force many families living in poverty to make hard choices, like choosing between paying for power and buying as much food as they need.

New Jersey’s new Plug-In Solar legislation will help.

In what’s become a rare event in American politics, every single legislator agreed that plug-in solar was a good thing for New Jersey. In the state Senate, the vote was 40 to 0. In the General Assembly, it passed with 79 votes in favor and only one skipped vote.

To keep things safe, lawmakers drew a line based on power limits.

If a solar device makes 400 watts or less, it does not need any extra testing papers. If it makes between 400 and 1,200 watts, it must be certified by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to meet the UL 3700 standard.

(Don’t worry, there will be pre-certified kits; this is not something that the consumer will have to do themselves). Once these kits hit the market, they’ll come with these papers.

Plug-in solar is not a full replacement for rooftop solar. These systems only make enough energy to save people a few hundred dollars a year. But this legislation opens the door for many people who don’t normally have the opportunity to use solar energy, like renters and apartment dwellers, to save money on their electric bills.

Right now, about 40 percent of households in New Jersey rent their homes or live in apartments. The bill also offers legal backup for people who do not own their homes. Landlords, building managers, and homeowners associations can no longer ban these systems.

They can set fair rules about where you put them, but a total ban is now illegal. If you rent, you only need to give your landlord written notice and your safety papers 14 days before you set the gear up.

New Jersey’s new law removes electric utilities from the process completely.

In the normal process of going solar, homeowners have to:

File paperwork to connect a solar array to the grid.
Deal with complex local regulations.
Wait for grid operators to inspect your system and give you permission to operate it once it’s built.

Now, when we’re talking about larger grid-tied solar energy systems, there are many good reasons to have these kinds of regulations. But plug-in solar energy systems are small enough that we can safely skip all of that gridlock.

Plug-in solar allows regular people to take control of their own power and bypass the big utility companies entirely. It’s power to the people in more ways than one.

Sources:

New Jersey lawmakers say ‘yes’ to plug-in solar

New Jersey legislature unanimously passes plug-in solar bill

New Jersey passes plug-in solar bill, deployments exempt from utility approval

New Jersey Passes Legislation to Cut Utility Bills with Plug-In Solar

Building Hurricane-Proof Off-Grid Solar In a Box: Meghan Wood

Aaron Nichols — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:31:35 GMT

For a limited time (July 1st-August 31st, 2026), we’ll pay you $1000 if you refer a friend to us and they go solar.

(We only install in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, so please do not refer anyone outside those states).

All you have to do is:

Click the “Refer a Friend and Earn $1000” button below.
Fill in your information (we need your address to mail you a check if your friend goes solar).
Select Aaron Nichols as the sales representative.
Add your friend’s name, address, and contact information.
Get a $1000 check mailed to you if your friend goes solar with us!
Refer a Friend and Earn $1000

Aaron Nichols talks with Meghan Wood, CEO and co-founder of Raya Power, the first plug-and-play solar and battery appliance.

Listen to this episode on:

Connect with Meghan: Find her on LinkedIn, visit her website at rayapower.com, or follow the Raya Power Instagram account for behind-the-scenes content.

Expect to Learn

Why treating solar like a piece of IKEA furniture or a standard household fridge removes the need for homeownership, roof repairs, and long construction timelines (which have kept thousands of people out of the solar market).
How Raya’s system connects directly to essential household loads (like a fridge or Wi-Fi) without backfeeding the grid, completely sidestepping the need for interconnection agreements and electrical permits.
Why Puerto Rico is the perfect primary market and testing ground for Raya (think frequent outages, high electricity rates, and abundant sunshine).

Quotes from the Episode

“When we thought of how can we actually get this [solar power] to more people, we thought ‘this needs to be an appliance.’ It needs to be something that’s as simple as getting a fridge or a table at IKEA or your wifi. Something as a renter you would get normally, something you could replace without too many hurdles.”
— Meghan Wood
“80 years from now, it’d be really cool if it was like, ‘of course my home is self-powered and that’s like the norm,’ not a contentious fighting point.”
— Meghan Wood

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. As always, I’m your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And my guest today is Megan Wood. Megan, will you explain who you are and what Raya power is?

Meghan Wood: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. Really excited to chat. I’m Megan Wood, CEO and co-founder of Raya Power. So Raya Power, are, or we have designed the first integrated solar and battery appliance. And the goal is to get residential solar and storage to everyone who needs it in a more accessible way. So reducing a lot of those barriers that exist today to actually getting a solution. My co-founder is Nicole Gonzales and we’ve been working on this for over a year, but officially a year. I come from Canada. I am the business side and Nicole is leading the technical side of the company.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. I would love to zoom in on the word appliance there, because that’s not normally something you hear around solar energy.

Meghan Wood: Yeah, it’s an important word to us. So when we started looking at this space, what I love so much about solar is this, you know, physical panel that you could put outside and make energy. Like that is so cool. And making energy means it can make money because now you’re not buying from the utility, you’re saving on your bill. And so I got so enamored by solar that we could make energy where you used it in an affordable way, but realized there was all these barriers to it. And so we talked to everyone we possibly could about residential solar to understand why didn’t people have it and what was excluding them from it. And the main reasons are you have to own your home, you need a newer roof, it’s a big upfront cost and it can take a really long time. So you’re kind of setting up for a construction project with not a lot of people can always access. So when we thought of how can we actually get this to more people, we thought this needs to be an appliance. It needs to be something that’s as simple as getting a fridge or a table at IKEA or your wifi. Something as a renter you would get normally, something you could replace without too many hurdles. And so we use the barriers of an appliance to design our system. So we wanted there to be an aftermarket. So kind of one size fits all, you could sell this to someone afterwards. We wanted you to be able to bring this home and install it the same day within a few hours. We didn’t want any home modifications required. We wanted it to be renter friendly. So we kind of looked at an appliance and thought, you know, how simple can that be and can we apply that to solar and storage? And those were all the design parameters that led us to our solution.

Aaron Nichols: So to summarize and based on what I’ve seen about your company on your website, you can buy one of these units, you can bring it home, you can put it down anywhere that you get direct sunlight and somehow plug it into your home. The average person can plug it into their home and it will start saving you money on your bills basically immediately.

Meghan Wood: Exactly.

Aaron Nichols: So how does that work?

Meghan Wood: Yeah, so how our system works is we actually connect directly to the core appliances that you want to run. To avoid needing an interconnection agreement, which is something that requires you to be a homeowner, requires a timeline, requires you working with a utility. Right now that’s a requirement to backfeed electricity through your home. So we didn’t want to have that requirement in our system. We actually flow the electricity towards the appliances you want to run. So you’d plop our system down. I actually have a... Here’s a mini version of it, our little model version. So you plop these down. Right now we start with three of them as our base system. Each one has a 450 watt solar panel on it. So you add up that base system to 1.35 kilowatts. And they also have integrated battery, inverter, communications, electronics, everything you need in there, as well as a ballast. So you plop it down. Once the ballast is added, it has the weight for up to a category three hurricane. So it’s not going anywhere.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing.

Meghan Wood: and then you connect it to those appliances. So you’d have a smart strip, think where you could put a bunch of 120 volt plugs. Imagine that being cabled into your kitchen, into an elegant place where you’d then plug in your fridge, your fan, your wifi, stuff that you want to make sure will stay on if there’s an outage. Now that will be automatically on in an outage. So they’re now running on Raya, but Raya also has one connection point to the grid. So let’s say you unplugged your fridge, you’d plug Raya in where your fridge was and plug the fridge into Raya. Now Raya can actually pull grid power towards it. So you can charge the battery on the grid and you can run the grid through our system to run that fridge if there was a few cloudy days. But as soon as there’s sunlight available, you’re going to be running that fridge on Raya’s solar and reducing your bill that way. And as soon as the grid’s gone, that fridge is now running on the Raya battery.

Aaron Nichols: This is very exciting because I’ve been thinking about doing something like this with just bootlegs, Facebook Marketplace, solar panels and batteries for such a long time. So to hear that you guys are actually doing something like that is incredible.

Meghan Wood: Yeah. So it’s funny you say that, that is exactly the inspiration for our product. When we started looking at this and thought there’s gotta be a better way, we went right to the do it yourself market and all the solar forums and we followed them, we put together our own system and it was hell. Like trying to figure out what size solar panel do you connect to, what battery and how does the inverter work and what are the codes and where would I put it and is it safe and. Where do I set up the panels and they look weird just hanging there. And so all of those barriers were very clear that it was not a simple DIY product, but the core pieces existed. And so it was clear to us that someone needed to package that into an appliance and make that a very easy choice so that you could do the DIY version even if you weren’t an expert and didn’t have the time to figure it out.

Aaron Nichols: Thank God for the DIYers, they’re really just canaries in the coal mine, aren’t they?

Meghan Wood: 100 % they’re awesome, but you could get deep in those threads for a long time.

Aaron Nichols: yeah, I’m aware, trust me. So I noticed looking at your website that Puerto Rico is a pretty important testing ground for you guys. Obviously your co-founder is Puerto Rican and you guys have, I’m sure, deployed quite a few units down there. Why is Puerto Rico such an important testing ground for this technology?

Meghan Wood: Yeah, so as you mentioned, for Nicole, it was really important as a mission to go back there. And for her, the first realization that she really needed to solve this problem was Hurricane Maria when she lost contact with all of her family and just, you know, since then has wanted to create a solution for everyone there. My first time there was this past year. We went for an accelerator called Parallel 18. And when I got to the island, it was pretty immediately clear that it was very different than the rest of the U.S. right now. In the fact that malls have generator stores and your Uber drivers talk to you about solar panels and how many panels they have on their roof and it’s really part of daily life because there’s such frequent outages that you’re worried about your fridge going off and losing thousand dollars of food in there that you just bought for the week. There’s this weird thing you don’t notice if you don’t live in that environment but when I was there for a while you’d go to the grocery store and instead of buying for the next you two weeks you’d buy for the next few days. Because you didn’t want to prepare stuff and put it in a freezer if you were going to lose it. And we actually just got off a call with one of our pilot customers and she was like, the weight off my shoulders of not having to worry about the food in my fridge being gone when I get home because I wasn’t there to solve it or put it somewhere else or do something else about it, now having the riot do that is incredible. So it’s so much more of a daily problem and... It’s not just the outages, their bills are also quite expensive. Their prices for electricity is like 27 cents a kilowatt hour. I think the average in the US is closer to maybe 15 or 17. So it’s much higher than the rest of the US in a place where purchasing power is much lower and average incomes are much lower. There’s also an affordability crisis there. At the same time, it’s super sunny. It’s an island with beaches. And so it’s like the perfect place for this type of solution. And we just, that was very apparent that people needed it, people wanted it, and we got so much support from everyone there that that’s just kind of catalyzed our first market and our ability to grow there. And just to maybe what I mentioned before on like the fridges, the other main aspect on the bill side is like your air conditioning. you know, it’s really hot to sleep there without air conditioning in certain parts of the island throughout most of the year. And so being able to actually run your air conditioner on Raya, and not feeling like you’re having this expensive bill all the time for the next however long is really important as well.

Aaron Nichols: It’s such a cool technology. Yeah, I mean, you guys have obviously done such a good job, but yeah, mean, solar just makes sense and we just continue to put just ridiculous hurdles in front of it for no reason, specifically in the US.

Meghan Wood: Thank you. Yes, I remember sitting at Stanford in my, my I did an MS in sustainable energy and just listening to all the next gen things we were coming up with, right? Like really cool things, but that needed to be in the lab for the next 10 years. And I was like, we have solar panels, they exist and they’re on, you know, and they’re still broadly nowhere. Like we have four or 5 % of us homes have them. when there’s so much solar potential that could have them, we just need to get out of our own way, as you said.

Aaron Nichols: Right. And you were, I mean, I have been a fan of and proponent of Plugin Solar for quite a while, even though you were very clear before we started recording that this is not Plugin Solar, this is something different because you’re not islanding, you’re not backfeeding, and you’re not endangering anyone who’s working on the lines during an outage, which is amazing. One thing that I’m interested in as well as a Coloradan who has had a couple bikes stolen out of his garage is when I was looking at pictures on the website, you know, have these beautiful pictures of Raya sitting in front of homes, but I thought, you know, someone with a truck could probably just pull up and just take one of these and drive away. What is the solution for that? Is there anything built in that helps prevent that?

Meghan Wood: Yeah, it’s a great question. So one is the weight. Once the integrated ballast is there and the way the system is connected, that thing weighs hundreds of pounds. So someone would have to know how to take it apart in the way to get that all out to actually move it. And we’re also integrating ways to make certain parts of it like untamperable. So you’d have to be able to move the full thing at once, which means you’d have to move hundreds of pounds. So the weight itself kind of makes it non-movable in the current design. At the same time, we’ve designed it in a way that if you do know how to take it apart, you can move it to your next home, you can set it up yourself and take it down. So that’s kind of the creativity there in the product design. then maybe just quickly on the plug-in solar part, we also, so I actually got into this space first looking at plug-in solar and I think it’s so cool that you can send electricity back through an outlet. Like I remember when I first looked at this a few years ago, having to convince people who are you know, really smart on home wires that you could send it backwards because it’s like, well, electricity doesn’t really flow that way. But yeah, it’s just a totally new concept for people. And I ran at that for a while. I plugged my own in, ran my meter backwards, and then kind of came up against all the regulatory barriers that you talked about on your last news podcast. And that’s what really shifted us to think outside the box of how could we create something today that’s scalable, that doesn’t need to wait for regulation to change. What we love about our system is it does provide that automatic backup because it’s not backfeeding the grid. So you’re connected directly to those appliances. When the grid goes down, now you just don’t have a grid input into Riot, but you can keep running the appliances on the solar and battery. So we love that. It’s also can become larger in size because we’re not backfeeding. So there’s no sort of size limitation on that element of it. But The hurdle we still face is smaller balconies. So if you go to large apartment buildings, we still have a hard time serving them with our larger systems. And it would be so awesome for balconies to be able to have a small plug-in system. But we’re still kind of watching, as you spoke about in that news article, the different rules around UL and National Electric Code with the requirements for dedicated circuits, like how that’s going to move. Because I think it’ll be challenging until you really can plug it into any outlet for this to take off. because those hurdles just make it really hard to make a smaller panel make sense.

Aaron Nichols: Right. I’m sure you’ve either been to Europe or just at least heard of just how much plug-in solar is everywhere in Europe.

Meghan Wood: Yeah, absolutely. think, I mean, especially Germany, so cool to see how fast they’ve done that. My understanding of the market there is because they were able to push a certain amount of solar, of current that could go back into any outlet, it kind of opened the flood gates for people to plug into any outlet. So I would imagine if we had something like that in the US, then that’s when you can really see it take off.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and there’s, I wasn’t aware of how contentious of a battleground this is until actually last Friday when I started, you know, researching and people messaged me about the article I had put out. Like there’s 24 states currently considering legalizing Plug-in Solar, but Wyoming actually just struck it down. I was doing a follow-up piece that we’re going to release Friday and read that today.

Meghan Wood: Yeah, I’m honestly not in the ins and outs of the detail now, but we’re following along while we build our product and we’d love to be able to offer a backfeeding product in the future. But at the moment, I mean, what the benefits of our product for places like Puerto Rico are that resilience and that’s really core to our product versus something like a plugin model. But it’s really neat to watch and Very cool to see how many more people are talking about it now than three years ago when I was looking at this and no one had any idea what balcony solar was then.

Aaron Nichols: That’s kind of how it has to go. I’m learning. You have to feel crazy for a little while and then eventually everyone’s like, we knew you were right the whole time.

Meghan Wood: Yeah. yeah the amount of people who send me stuff, have you seen this thing plug in solar? i’m like yeah, of course! i’ve been like looking at this forever!

Aaron Nichols: Well, so from reading that Canary Media article about you guys, I noticed that you’ve also recently partnered with Grid Alternatives. I don’t know how recently, but I’m a Grid alumni myself. They’re how I ended up in the solar industry and how I got my first job. So I’m a big fan of them. Can you talk a bit more about that partnership you have going on in Puerto Rico?

Meghan Wood: Yeah, I love it. was reading on your LinkedIn as well how you got started in this industry and it’s so awesome. I similarly did, I mean similar and different, but I did a rooftop solar volunteer installation in California when I started in this space and it’s just really cool to actually see how it all comes together. But on the grid alternative side, they have these awesome programs in Puerto Rico where they’ve been training local women, men, kind of everyone, but they do have an emphasis on training more women for the solar workforce. And so we’ve been working with them to try to get more women helping us assemble our systems and install the systems. We’re at small scale right now, but the goal would be to work with them to grow out that program so that we can take people that they’ve trained and then place them in roles and continue to kind of expand that workforce on the island. And what’s neat about our product is that there are different roles. So it’s not all no one’s on a roof yet. We’re still focused on the ground ballasted systems, although we are planning to get to roofs. but it gives different opportunities for different types of roles for people, which seems like a nice alternative than just kind of the typical rooftop solar installation if that doesn’t fit your exact skill set or interest.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, thank God you guys are doing that. Crews with women on them tend to be so much safer, but it’s often hard to find and hire women for the trades who want to be outside installing solar all day.

Meghan Wood: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Megan, I end this show for everyone who comes on with the same closing question. And it has to do with the fact that last year I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party. And as I was reflecting on that afterwards, I realized that 80 years means that my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy now didn’t even exist. The only way we knew how to make electricity was to go dig things up, move them to a central location, burn them and send the electricity one way. So this is all everything that we’re talking about right now and these problems we’re trying to solve have all come about in my grandma’s lifetime and solar not only being invented but becoming the cheapest power source has happened within my grandma’s lifetime. So if you were to just moonshot And don’t worry, mean 80 years from now we’ll probably both be gone, no one can hold us to this, but what do you think clean energy will look like 80 years from now, or just energy in general?

Meghan Wood: One, your grandmother’s young. Two, I love that. What a great reflection and a cool thing to just think about for a minute. That’s really awesome. What do I think it’ll look like? So for me, I went and sat in a class called Understand Energy at Stanford. That was the first real entry I had into the energy world. And I remember being just amazed at the supply chains in effort to get a light bulb to switch on, right? Like no one thinks about that, that we’re like digging things where like just the amount of stuff that goes on to get your lights to turn on to me was crazy. But yeah, to that point, I don’t know, I think it would be really cool in 80 years if they laughed at us using oil and gas to power things in our homes. If it was like, what a ridiculous thing. Why would you possibly do that when you could make it on site? Like that would be such a cool thought if everything became, you know, I think everything being decentralized right now is like really hard to think, to imagine because we really rely a lot on the centralized grid and it provides so much benefit to so many people. But 80 years from now, it’d be really cool if it was like, of course my home self-powered and that’s like the norm, not a contentious fighting point of why would you possibly want that? But just like, of course that’s what happens. Yeah, so maybe like Generation Produce where did to the amount it’s needed in a way that’s on site and doesn’t require us digging and shipping and doing all these crazy things. And to me that includes like geothermal and solar and battery and wind and like how do we just yeah use all these cool new technologies to make it make a lot more sense.

Aaron Nichols: We definitely share the same hope there. For clean energy and also for so many other social causes, there’s so many things that we fight about now that I hope have just become so ubiquitous that we don’t even think or talk about them.

Meghan Wood: Yep, yeah. mean, and I think like what we see in Puerto Rico with anyone talking about solar, regardless of their political views or any other aspiration, like it’s just a part, it’s a better solution for daily life. That’s when it starts to happen. We saw it happen in Pakistan as well with their rent solar revolution from a distributed point of view. And yeah, I think when it just becomes the better solution, it doesn’t become a contentious point.

Aaron Nichols: Well, Megan, if you do like to be found online or otherwise, where do you want to be found?

Meghan Wood: Great question. So our website’s ryapower.com. We do have a contact us there and I do my best to answer everyone in timely manner. You can also reach me at info at ryapower.com and also follow my LinkedIn. We share stuff there. Maybe finally our Instagram is kind of fun. We have some videos of our installations. We do some more fun upbeat content. So if you want something outside of the business world, follow our Raya Power Instagram account.

Aaron Nichols: I only want things outside of the business world, Megan. I’m so tired of the business world. I’m so tired of corporate messaging. I’m so tired of brands weighing in on things. So I’m very excited to go follow the Instagram.

Meghan Wood: Thanks. Yes, go watch us build things. Watch us sweat in Puerto Rico installing those systems. I like still have back pain from it.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Well, Megan, thank you so much for coming on and for everyone listening. That’s been This Week in Solar.

Meghan Wood: Thank you so much.

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