SOLON Regional VP and GM of North America Dan Alcombright
SOLON Corp. (4 market/4 overall)
What’s the most important piece of technical advice you would offer your peers?
Standardization. To continue to penetrate the market we, as an industry, must continue to lower costs and improve performance. Let’s face it, electricity is a commodity. Price is the determining factor. I believe the key to continued cost improvements is standardization throughout the process: in products, installation, permitting and financing. Solar needs to be as easy as ordering and installing a cable TV dish.
Where do you see the solar industry in five years?
I see the evolution of solar in three stages. The first stage were the years prior to 2009, which I think of as a “hobby” phase – where solar was a feel good thing that people did, and utilities and IPPs were in a tinkering mode. Now we’re in what I refer to as “Solar 1.0” – from 2009 to 2013. The industry is driven by incentives – either at a government or utility level, and these incentives are fueling the industry growth. The utilities and IPPs have moved from a tinkering mode to a scale-up mode, and developers and manufacturers are becoming more experienced. We are closing in on solar’s tipping point – retail grid parity, and we are beginning to see the start of organic growth. Over the next five years, I believe we’ll transition to “Solar 2.0”– where the business driver moves further from incentives toward retail rates. Utilities and IPPs are moving from a scale-up mode to an exploiting mode, taking advantage of as much of this resource as possible for rate payers; I think we’ll also see a shift from the large-scale systems back to more residential and commercial based systems. And again, the key driving force to continuous growth of solar is standardization.
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