From time to time, we use the Inovateus Solar blog to shine a spotlight on our solar installer partners who transform empty roofs and fields into reliable solar installations throughout the U.S. and abroad. In this post, we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Moore, president and co-founder of Midwest Wind & Solar.
Kevin started looking at solar in 2008, after his full-time job cut back on his hours during the recession. He devoured every course he could on solar photovoltaics (PV), solar hot water and wind offered by the Midwest Renewable Energy Association and then founded his company as a one-man show.
Based in the Chicagoland suburb of Griffith, Indiana, Kevin slowly built up a residential and small business customer base in Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan until about three years ago, when his current business partner, Marc van Dongen, joined Midwest Wind & Solar. They quit their day jobs and began to build the company up to its current size of seven full-time employees and a “go-to team of 50 or so” they can mobilize for installations.
Kevin says the business has evolved from a mix of solar PV, solar hot water and small wind to about 95% PV, and from all residential to at least 90% commercial, educational, municipal and agricultural jobs. He estimates the company has installed more than 6 MW to date and has several more megawatts in its pipeline, including a project to solarize all the rest stops along the Indiana toll road as well as a contract to install a few megawatts of PV on five campuses of an Illinois school district.
Education is at the core of Midwest Wind & Solar’s business, both in Kevin and Marc’s approach and in their business pipeline. “We have found that the most enjoyable thing for us is educating people about renewable energy,” Kevin explains. “It’s not a refrigerator, it’s not a microwave, it’s not something that you’ve likely ever purchased before. Bottom line, it comes down to education of the consumer about renewable energy. That’s what puts the biggest smiles on our faces.”
The education market is also the sector where Midwest Wind & Solar and Inovateus have recently collaborated, namely on three Tri-Creek School Corp. elementary school sites in Indiana. The genesis of this project has a most unusual back story.
“What’s really unique about this particular project is, it was all hatched out of a middle school student project on renewable energy about four years ago,” he recalls. “The teacher thought the kids’ idea was really great, and they presented it to the school board, who really fell in love with it. This hatched the first educational arrays we installed, and when the board and superintendent saw how well they were performing, they said why don’t we take this large scale and do our entire school system. We’ve been working with them for a couple of years on this larger project.”
Another unusual aspect of this project is the financing. The school district will pay for the projects in cash, thanks to the refinancing of existing general obligation bonds. As Mark notes, nearly all schools going solar—and definitely every educational sector project they’ve worked on—use a power purchase agreement, lease-to-buy, capital lease, or other non-cash payment method of financing.
The Tri-Creek PV arrays won’t just be supplying clean power to the schools, they will also offer a platform for educating the kids about solar. In addition to system monitoring data that will be accessible to the classrooms and the community via a portal on the district’s website, Midwest Wind & Solar is providing a certified curriculum package with materials for each grade, including mini solar training kits for the teachers. Kevin and his team have also agreed to come out for guest talks on a regular basis.
The third and “most unique component” of the curriculum package, will be the construction of “small, educational arrays at each of the sites,” according to Mark. “We’re installing 6 or 8 stand-alone solar modules, not in series or grid connected, so the kids can run little mini-experiments out there. It’s an outdoor lab.”
The collaboration between Midwest Wind & Solar and Inovateus on the Tri-Creek project can be split into three segments: supply, engineering, and bonding. Hanwha modules, Fronius inverters and Patriot racking supplied by Inovateus will comprise the main components of the ground-mount arrays, while Inovateus also performed consultative reviews of the engineering plans. But it was the bonding that Inovateus provided that really helped seal the deal.
“It was a really fast-paced bidding process, and we hadn’t had any formal bonding in place previous to this, so we turned to Inovateus to support us on getting bonding for the bid process,” Mark says. “Ultimately, we bonded it ourselves after reaching out to the same people who do bonding for Inovateus. But through the bidding process, Inovateus really stepped up.”
Midwest Wind & Solar expects the permits to be pulled by mid-April, and then should complete construction of the projects in about a month. By early summer, the projects should be interconnected and generating clean power for the Tri-Creek schools.
By Jonathan Zebell, strategic sales executive, Inovateus Solar
