Solar in the Midwest is on the cusp of a major boom. In the first post of this two-part blog, I talked about the evolution of utilities’ attitudes about solar in the Midwest and how the solar industry can encourage utilities to accelerate solar deployment. My comments were based on the discussion I had with native Midwesterner Frank Andorka, a well-respected solar journalist, at the recent Solar Power International trade show in Las Vegas.
In this second and final post, the following edited excerpts focus on my thoughts on the opportunities in the commercial and university sectors of the solar industry. The entire discussion can be heard on the “Live at #SPICon 2016” podcast via Solar Wakeup.
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The most important way to crack into that commercial solar marketplace is to either talk to the business owners or the people running the universities to understand where their pain points are. For most of them, when we talk about energy, they are paying a bill to their utility. At some of these universities, they actually have their own power plants. In that case, they face some of the same challenges that the utilities are facing.
For example, take the University of Notre Dame, right down the road from us in South Bend, where they had an old coal-fired power plant. They recently transitioned over to natural gas, and now they’re really looking at solar and wind.
Same thing at Michigan State University. They had a coal-fired power plant and they got a lot of push from their students and faculty to become greener and to generate their own electricity. (Note: Inovateus and its partners are developing a 13 MWDC solar project at the university.) These universities, because they had their own power plants, they thought: “How do we generate our own power? How do we keep this electricity at our fingertips and stay in control?”
On the business side, I think that a lot of businesspeople and owners are starting to understand, “Hey, maybe there’s a way that I can get electricity where I don’t have to pay the utility every month for a power bill.” I think they’re hearing more about solar and energy storage. The more and more it happens, the more they see the success stories.
I also think a big part of it is the psychology behind the way business is done in the modern era. For instance, you’re on a cellphone now, which gives you so much freedom. I could make a business transaction in Africa in two minutes. There’s a sense of independence that any smartphone user has that we didn’t have 15 years ago or 10 years ago, right?
Solar energy touches that same sort of psychology where, “Hey, I can be in control of my own energy.” I don’t need to rely on this utility to give me power. I don’t need to go through uncertainty if there’s a thunderstorm or a tornado or there’s going to be a power outage. I don’t need to worry about the rates are going to go up 10%, 15% because our utility’s going through a $2 billion upgrade to their nuclear power plant. People want to take energy into their own hands, and the more they see it happening, the more comfortable they are making that decision.
There’s a lot of handholding that goes into working with customers who are going solar for the first time, because it’s this scary thing that they are doing that they’ve never done before. In their mind, putting solar panels on top of a building is so magical, and they don’t quite understand how it happens. Once it does happen, they talk to us that they want to do it again.
We’ve done four projects with IKEA, for example. But IKEA is a little different because they made a statement that “all of our buildings around the world are going to be covered in solar panels because we believe that’s what we need to do and also we want to be in charge of our own energy.” They took a really good approach to it. “Electricity might be really cheap in Ohio or Michigan or Indiana. But it’s expensive in New Jersey and maybe other East Coast states. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to install everywhere, we’re going to take the average price of electricity, and that’s how we’re going to look at it on our balance sheet as a corporation.”
There are a lot of different ways to crack into the business side, but it is happening.
By TJ Kanczuzewski, president of Inovateus Solar
