Ben Fischer, President, Signal Energy
Signal Energy (2 market/2 overall)
What’s the thing you enjoy most about being in the solar industry?
The opportunity to build our nation’s clean energy future. I often think the story of my hometown, Chattanooga, Tenn., as a powerful metaphor for the solar and renewable energy industry’s potential in the United States. Chattanooga was once called the dirtiest city in America, with air quality so bad that families actively sought to leave the city for their health. Decades later we turned our air quality and our image around with a deliberately orchestrated renaissance driven by our public and private leadership. Now, the Chattanooga area is vibrant with a growing sense of community and is successfully recruiting major employers like Amazon, Volkswagen, Alstom and Wacker Chemie. The United States is in a similar position, and Signal Energy is part of that renaissance, helping developers bring large-scale, innovative solar energy projects to market.
What do you enjoy least about being in the solar industry?
Partisan gridlock in Washington and across the country doesn’t foster the certainty needed to fully realize the potential of the solar energy industry. Certainty is needed to continue to attract the billions of dollars of private investment and add to the hundreds of thousands of solar energy jobs already created. But the United States has a strong history of innovation and problem-solving so I am hopeful that we can position ourselves to capitalize on the growing multi-billion dollar industry.
What’s the most important piece of technical advice would you offer your peers?
One of the most valuable tools that an owner or developer of solar projects can have in its planning toolbox is a good preconstruction value-engineering methodology. Developers can realize large short- and long-term economic paybacks if they commit time and resources to value-engineer each aspect of the engineering and construction of a solar project early in the development process. Engaging an experienced design/build contractor at an early stage to perform this value engineering analysis can ensure that a project is designed in a way that maximizes long-term energy production and short-term capital costs for construction.
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