Owen Barrett: Lets Take That Attitude to the Rooftop

Today we're excited to bring you our conversation with Owen Barrett. Owen is the founder and CEO of Shine solar, which builds solar solutions for commercial and large residential buildings. He's also the host of of his own Podcast called "Less Talk More Action" about what it's like on the front lines of decarbonization and a cleaner net-zero Future. Let's get to work! 

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're going to skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help, and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Bryan Potter. I'm a senior product designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristin Shaw, is the head of growth for a consulting agency and the national marketing chair for a clean tech accelerator. Each episode, we're going to be talking with someone in the field doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in, too, because we're going to need you.

Welcome back, Team. Today, we're really excited to bring you our conversation with Owen Barrett, who is the founder and CEO of Shine Solar, a solar installation company based in Utah, that focuses on commercial and large apartment buildings. He also has a podcast of his own called Less Talk More Action, which dives into the front lines of decarbonization and a cleaner net zero future.

So, let's get to work.

We're here talking with Owen. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?

Good. Good. So for starters, just tell us how work is going, and a little bit about your day today.

Well, work is going great. I think we're trying not to get too dissuaded by Trump's big bill. It's got a lot of interesting implications to the solar.

I think the way that we look at it could have been a lot worse. It's not good, but it could have been worse. So I think we're just dealing with it as is.

My day today is great. We're building a house in Part City, my family and I, but we're on the road for the summer because it's not done yet. So I had to fly into Part City just to make sure that the contractors weren't slacking.

Nice.

Being a contractor myself, I know how it is. Things can go unnoticed for a couple of days.

Nice. So obviously, your hat is advertising for Shine. You want to talk a little bit about Shine and what they do?

Yeah, so for the last, man, I think eight years, I've been working to try and decarbonize the multifamily industry with on-site solar. And I think our big differentiator is that we are intellectually honest enough to acknowledge that solar installations on common area meters are more greenwashing than anything. Ninety to 95 percent of electric consumption at multifamily properties is from the tenant load.

So for solar companies trying to install common area meters for owners' marketing, common area meter installations, it's just a whole lot of noise, but there's not really any impact. We wanted to try and figure out, how do you install solar on the tenant meters? And that's complicated.

And it's complicated because in 47 states, so the exclusions are California, Colorado, or Massachusetts. When you install solar or try to install solar on the tenant meters, you have to install one small solar system per apartment unit. So if you have a 250 unit apartment building, that's 250, call it 3kW systems.

That installation is a little bit more complicated, but the real complications come post installation. How do you build 250 tenants? How do you do measurement, verification, and maintenance on 250 small systems?

And the answer is you can't. There is no easy way to do it without our software platform that we kind of purpose built to tackle this problem. So now we're just, I mean, we're super excited because it's, you know, it's an entire industry that has not been penetrated with solar.

And we're just getting a lot of traction and positive feedback from customers. So we're really excited about it.

So I have a question. So why do you have to build them out individually? Is it a policy driving them?

Or is it actually like functionality or billing that's driving that?

No, it's policy. So in those three states, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, there's something called virtual net energy metering, VNEM. With VNEM, you can install one larger system into like the common area meter and virtually allocate the benefit to the tenants.

But in utilities without VNEM or states without VNEM, you cannot do that. You can't just install one system and assign the benefits. All the systems have to be behind the meter, which means they have to be behind the tenant meters, which means you need one system per tenant meter, one system per apartment unit.

And that will never, ever change. That's like that's trying to ask utilities to become more solar friendly, which is just we're seeing the exact opposite.

Yeah. Interesting.

You're obviously very passionate about solar, very knowledgeable about solar. Tell us, walk us into how you got started.

Well, how long, how far back do you want to go?

Wherever you like.

So I started my professional career in finance. I'm a self-proclaimed Excel nerd. I love spending time in Excel.

I do not like the finance industry, so I wanted to take my Excel skills, my financial acumen to something that I actually cared about, which for me is the environment. So I worked in finance for a couple of years. I went to grad school at UC Santa Barbara for environmental science and management.

That launched me into a career as a corporate energy manager. So at like 26 years old, I was overseeing $10 million clean tech projects with really no real world experience. It was kind of a shocker to me.

I was like thrown to the wolves right out of the gate. Just kind of forced to learn quickly, right? It's like you either figure it out or probably get fired.

Fortunately, I figured it out. Four years into that, I had gotten exposure to every cost-effective clean technology that there was. So HVAC optimization, onsite solar, fuel cells, storage just started to get cost-effective right when I left.

LED lighting upgrades. I mean, you name it. I got exposure to it.

And I always kind of have this entrepreneurial bug, I guess. So four years into it, I decided to leave that job really with not much of a plan and not much thought into what I was going to do. I tried to start an LED lighting company.

It really struggled for about 18 months. I had never tried to sell anything before, so I was a terrible salesperson. Fortunately, that changed about 18 months in.

Kind of morphed into like a niche Esco, an energy services company for rural school districts in California. Went from zero to eight figures in revenue in like another 18 months. So it's just this wild growth that was totally unexpected.

I sold that company. I started investing passively into multifamily apartments. At this point, I was like 30.

I thought I was retired. And then I saw how much energy apartments use and just how out of touch the multifamily industry was when it came to like energy management and renewable energy. And I just have this personality where I can't unsee something.

Like once I've seen something that doesn't make sense, I have to try and figure it out. I just I don't have the personality trait that lets me ignore it. And so that kickstarted this eight-year journey of really trying to figure out, how do we get the multifamily industry to take on-site solar seriously?

And it goes back to that problem of you have to do bigger projects, which means you have to get outside of just the common area meters.

Would you say you had some mentors along the way? Were there some good advice you got?

So I've sort of been a lone wolf. That's probably one of my whatever the opposites of like a positive personality trait is. It's a negative personality trait, I guess.

I had one piece of advice that I'll never forget. This is when I was still working as an energy manager. And I had all kinds of different side hustles.

At the time, I was working on a business model called Wat Tito, which is like Little Watt in Spanish. And my idea was just to replace the lighting and parking structures. So parking structures all across the US, before LEDs, they were compact fluorescents for the most part, and they were on 24-7.

Like no parking garages had any type of lighting control. And so I was like, man, this is the easiest use case for an LED upgrade. And so I was trying to figure out how to launch this business called Wat Tito.

I was working as an energy manager during the day. I was actively pitching investors, even though I had like no business plan, no traction, and one angel investor, Bill, I can't remember his last name, asked me, you know, what are you doing to pay for your lifestyle? Like how are you affording to be an entrepreneur?

And I said, I've got a full-time job that pays the bills. And he said, I don't invest in part-time entrepreneurs. And yeah, that's stuck with me.

It hit hard and it stuck with me. And probably within three months, I quit the corporate gig and I had officially become a full-time entrepreneur. I went back to Bill.

He passed on investing again. And so it wasn't just that, but you know, it was a really important lesson to me, which is like, if you don't believe enough in yourself to take the leap of faith, you cannot expect other people to take that financial leap of faith in the form of an investment.

I think a lot of, we'll call them climate startups, for lack of a better term, founders are like that. I was at an event in San Francisco, and we were going around the room, doing those moments for positivity or something like that. And this investor said he likes to invest in climate founders because they are so passionate and so driven that they will exist with 30 days cash for a year and a half, and they will not.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, it's true. I mean, I've been posting a lot about this on LinkedIn. It kind of ruffles some feathers, but I do think it's true.

It's like, and it's not as easy as I sort of make it seem, but if you can align a passion with your business, with your startup, it's so much easier to push through like all the ups and downs and potential burnout that you'll face as a founder, regardless of what you're working on, but if it's something that really hits home that you like care deeply about, I do think you're going to work a little bit harder and push a little bit longer than if you're just chasing dollars.

So on that note, were there things you feel like you had to unlearn moving from corporate world into climate entrepreneurship? Yeah.

I mean, you have to learn how to be your own IT department. That was like and accounting department. And just about everything else.

I didn't have to unlearn anything, but I had to learn a lot of things. The most important thing that I could tell any aspiring entrepreneur is get a job in sales. Like face rejection early on because it's like a hard thing to learn.

If you've never done it before, it's terrifying, it's hard, it's frustrating. So I think the sooner you can kind of bust through that rejection in trying to sell anything, like anything, it could be anything. I just think that goes so far because you can't be a founder and not be a salesperson.

Well, you can, but your business will fail.You talked up top about one of the big challenges that have just recently come up, but what else is a big obstacle?

I mean, for us, specifically commercial real estate is like the oldest, whitest, least innovative, slowest moving industry that I have ever seen. And so the sales cycle in our industry are insane. It's like 12 to 18 months to win a client from the first point of contact to when we're actually start signing up contract.

And I'm of the perspective that time is the one variable we do not have. We don't have the time for indecisiveness, long sales cycles. So that part of it is super frustrating for me.

I think if you're a founder, patience is usually not one of your personality traits. You can't be a patient person and a founder because everything just happens too slow. So that has been really frustrating for me is just sort of the headwinds that we deal with on a day to day basis within our specific industry.

I have a question about the sales cycle. So when you're finding, you know, you've started this company, probably the people that work with you are incredibly passionate about the same topic. Jeff and I are as well.

But when you're selling your product, are you selling the benefit to, you know, climate change or impact to climate change? Or are you selling costs efficiently? What is the kind of driving factor that is driving kind of your revenue?

In 12 years, I think, of being in sustainability and clean tech, I've talked about environmental like units or attributes zero times. Yeah, literally zero people. It doesn't move the needle.

Like, it's not the reason anybody does projects, which is unfortunate. But again, that's a really important lesson to be learned for people getting into clean tech or sustainability. I am wildly passionate about protecting the environment, but I'm also honest enough with myself that I know 99 times out of 100, the person that I'm pitching doesn't care.

The only reason that they're going to adopt the project is because it makes them more money. And so if you can align environmental impact with financial impact, I know and we know that we're doing the right thing, but we're also trying to speak the language in a way where we have the highest success of implementing our projects.

So what kind of goal does your organization have for this year, for two years, whatever piece of time is meaningful to you?

Yeah, I mean, we, for whatever reason, 2030 just sounds like a nice target. It's just a good round year. You know, so we're trying to decarbonize 100,000 apartment units by 2030.

And that is an incredibly aggressive goal. But we went from zero units. So again, I've been in this industry a long time, but we developed the software to sort of unlock this whole problem.

In 2022, we developed the software. 2023, we got our first customer. There was 81 units.

Oh, sorry. 2023, we developed the software. 2024, we got our first customer, 81 units.

2025, we're on track to do, I think, close to 1,000 units. And so if I don't, I haven't actually done the math to know if we just continue doubling while we hit our target, I don't think we will. I think we need to go a little bit faster.

But the good thing about our industry is that most owners own really large portfolios. So when they see success at one property, scaling is actually simpler than getting your foot in the door. So we're optimistic that if we can sort of showcase the impact of what we're trying to do on a multifamily property, then going from one project to five or 10 or 20 per year is a pretty achievable goal within one single customer.

And are you staying like in one location? Are you in a specific region?

We're nationwide.

Nice, very nice.

So we are right now, we're doing projects in Colorado, Texas, we have one in South Dakota, we're looking at some in New Mexico, we're looking at some in South Carolina, Florida. I mean, we can do projects anywhere where the numbers make sense. And that's sort of the wrinkle in this, is like, there's not, without doing the analysis, it's hard to know, like, does it make sense in a new market?

So it's a little bit challenging in that regard, because there's no good data set of like, what's the avoided cost of electricity in every single utility in the US, sort of like, you have to do the analysis for a project in that utility to figure out how do the numbers look. So, you know, we're slowly building out an internal data set that's going to make life a lot easier, but that takes time. There's a lot of different utilities in the US.

From that completely capitalist point of view, you would say there's money to be made, and you would say that there's a good living to be had.

I would say I'm absolutely shocked that multi-family owners have not figured this out sooner, because they're the most profit-driven industry I've ever experienced. I mean, they will know exactly how much more rent you can get if you upgrade a laminate countertop to quartz versus granite, what three-tone paint will do versus two-tone, what adding a dog park will do, or covered parking. I mean, they're so systematic and analytical about what can we do to these properties to increase rent.

But all of that stops once you get to the roofline. They don't ever think about how could you optimize your roof space. And so that's what we're trying to push for is like guys, gals, you guys are thinking about every square inch of the inside of your apartments and the amenities on the outside.

Let's take that same attitude to the rooftop because that's the most underutilized asset in all of multifamily.

And then the benefits to the tenant. So I'm going to switch away from the money making for a second. The benefits to the tenant, like do they have lower bills?

Is like lower utility bills? Do they have, like let's talk about like the benefits to the user. Because then once you've done this, it's not really a choice.

So someone doesn't have to be climate conscious to now be having a positive impact. You know, what's kind of the benefit to the end user with your product?

So ultimately, the benefit to the tenant is up to the owner because that's just not something that we can control. I'll give an example. For an average apartment unit, tenants may spend $100 per month pre-solar.

That's what they're paying the electric utility. We come in, we install solar into every single apartment unit. Post-solar, those tenants are now paying $50 per month to the electric utility.

So they're saving $50 per month. Depending on how greedy the owner of the apartment building is, they'll take $0 to $50 of those $50 savings. Because they're having to justify the capex expense in the first place.

If it costs a million dollars to install solar, and I need to hit an IRR of 18%, then I need to charge every tenant $45 of those $50. So in almost every... Say that again?

They would add it to the rent?

Yeah, so technically, tenants are leasing the solar equipment from the property owners, but that lease fee is less than the energy savings. So there's always net savings to the tenants, which is super... I mean, that's great.

That's the best case scenario. How big those net savings are, are entirely up to the owner. But the other piece that is a little hard...

It's really important. It just takes more time to see. Utility costs are one of the, like most...

They have had the biggest impact from inflation. Like the inflationary burden on utility costs for homeowners and tenants is insane. Utilities are increasing their prices like 5 to 10 percent.

That's probably going to accelerate now because of Trump's big bill. So owners have the ability to limit the growth of cost from solar electricity. So where the utility may be increasing the cost per kilowatt hour 5 to 10 cents per year, the owner may not be increasing the cost per kilowatt hour at all year over year, or maybe it's 3 percent, but it can be substantially less than the utility.

So it takes off some of that inflationary burden within your utility budget.

I think that's... I don't want to get too in the weeds with the numbers. I'll move on, but maybe I'll ping you after.

I don't want to bore you.

I mean, the important part is every owner we've worked with, there's net savings. I think that's the takeaway. They all want to structure it so that there is some level of savings to tenants.

But what is the magnitude of those savings? Changes owner to owner.

Are you interacting with the boots on the ground, so to speak, in your organization? Are you kind of, is there kind of a layer in between?

The boots on the ground like the installers?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Data on a daily basis.

And so are you at job sites and that sort of thing, checking in?

Let's take a quick break.

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That means your experience might already be more relevant to you than you think. If you're curious about diving into climate work, here are a few ideas to get started. Research and apply for roles in rapidly growing sectors like renewable energy, EV infrastructure, and carbon markets.

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Eighty-five percent of jobs are filled through connections. Communities like My Climate Journey, Work on Climate, and Terra.do are fantastic slack communities to meet like-minded individuals and learn from others already in the field. You can find the links in the episode notes.

So I do less of that, but my co-founder, Earl, who's our COO, I mean, that's all day, every day of his job.

What's your kind of thoughts on sort of mentorship? And eventually, there's going to be another Owen Barrett, and a third and a fourth that are starting these companies. You know, do you feel like you're able to mentor your people?

You mean like employees or other entrepreneurs, or both?

Both, both and?

Both and. Other entrepreneurs, I love having impromptu phone calls, meetings with like early stage entrepreneurs that are kind of in college or coming out of college, because I feel like our higher education system like sugarcoats a lot of things. And so I think it's really important for people to get the real information as fast as possible, because they think that will ultimately make them more successful entrepreneurs.

If that's the path that they want to go down. Or employees, you know, we have an interesting organization. Obviously, everybody has kind of roles and responsibilities, but we're also still very much a startup.

So I encourage all of our employees to go after different things that they're passionate about. An example of that is like AI. We have someone on our team who's just really interested in AI, loves like new technology.

And so he's trying to figure out how can we implement more AI into sort of our day to day operations. And I love that he's leading that. So I think it's a combination of like freedom, not micromanaging.

And then, yeah, I mean, mentoring when I can. But I do it as much as I can. I think it comes in different forms than like a traditional mentorship.

I want to go back to the boot. So, you know, I read a lot, probably like a year ago, this might be old news now, Owen, but there was a real skill shortage in solar installation in the US for a period of time. Like there just wasn't the skill set and there weren't enough people that could do it.

Were you impacted by that at all?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's specific to solar installers. I would say there's a massive shortage in the skilled trades. And then like within that electricians, there's just not enough electricians.

I think now what you're going to start to see is as all of these tech companies build out their AI data centers, they're going to gobble up a lot of the skilled trades, which is going to put a huge burden on the renewable energy or the renewable energy industry, because people are going to be competing for skilled labor. And we've just, we collectively, the country, have done a terrible job at developing the skilled labor pipeline. It's just been kind of like forgotten about.

There's stigmas about it. I've tried to work with public school districts in the past to develop these project to career pipelines. And it's impossible to develop anything with school districts.

Just the level of bureaucracy is like, it's out of control. So I think it's a huge opportunity. I think it's a huge challenge, but it's also a massive opportunity, because as the cost of college continues to inflate, there's a shortage of skilled labor, and there's an opportunity to basically graduate from high school, start like an apprenticeship program, and start getting paid without taking on six figures of debt.

But it's hard work. That's the downside, right? It's not skilled laborers.

It's really hard work. So it's not for everybody, but it's super important. It's really rewarding.

I know a lot of electricians, and they do really well, like right out of the gate. Yeah.

Are you doing the hiring? And if so, what's a big question that you like to ask?

We are doing the hiring. I think, well, yeah, I do. Sorry, I do do the hiring.

I mean, to a certain extent, I think it's really, again, because we're a small team, it's really important to me that we have good chemistry. So even if I think someone's a good candidate, I want to make sure that everybody thinks that they're a good candidate because we all work together in different areas. Yeah, I think it's important, especially because we're all remote.

So that presents its own challenges and advantages. But I just think it's really, especially when you're small, you just want to make sure that you have a really cohesive team. I think the biggest thing that we look for is just grit, just the ability to work hard.

Because you can teach anybody anything in our industry. I can teach someone project management. I can teach someone the level of financial analysis that I need to be done.

But if you don't have that innate ability to work hard, you can't teach that and we won't hire you.

I think it's grit and the desire to learn. You can't teach the desire to learn. And I think that's something I always look for when I'm hiring as well.

I agree with that.

Jeff, I'm sorry. I keep jumping in. But yes, I think a lot of people that listen to our podcast are like, we call them climate curious, right?

Like they feel strongly about climate solutions. They want to make an impact, but their career has not been in the climate sector. You know, one of the things we're trying to highlight here, and you kind of just briefly touched on it, is the skill sets are the same, you know?

So I would love for you to kind of just outline, like, who works on your team? Like, you mentioned financial analysis. You mentioned project management.

Like, what are the kind of the skill sets you'd be looking for or potentially willing to hire someone who didn't have a background in renewable?

I'd prefer that they don't have a background in renewables. I think getting a degree in sustainability is like getting a degree in underwater basket weaving. I just think it's a huge waste of time.

I feel like it's way more valuable to get a really strong skill set in financial analysis and then apply that to environmental projects. Or project management is so... I mean, every clean tech project requires a project manager, every single one.

So if you want to get involved in clean technology, don't go to school for a four year sustainability degree. Go get like a degree in business administration and then get your PMP certificate. I'd hire that all day long.

But yeah, I think that when people want to get involved in clean tech or sustainability, it's easy to think that a degree in sustainability is the right pass. I think our colleges are doing students a disservice. I don't think that should be allowed to be a major.

I think it should only be a minor.

That's the thing that we try to get across here is, the businesses that are having a real significant impact are businesses. They're for-profit businesses, and they need accountants, they need attorneys, they need project managers, they need integration specialists, they need marketers, they need all of, you know, they need salespeople, they need all of those things. So one more question, then I'll give it back to Jeff.

So I think we gloss over what your technology is, right? Like you said that you've kind of come up with this solution, but we kind of glossed over what that is. Do you want to take a step back and kind of walk us through that?

Yeah, so I mean, at our core, we're a solar contractor. We're a niche solar contractor. We only install solar on multi-family properties, and we only do installations that affect the tenant load.

Now, we'll incorporate common area load into our installations, but we'll turn down work if someone says, you know, we just want to install 100kW on our common area meter. Like, okay, go talk to every other EPC out there, because that's all they do. But again, in order to install solar on tenant meters, you need an automated way to bill all of the tenants, because they're all getting different amounts of electricity on a monthly basis.

So you need an efficient and an effective way to bill them. And then you need an automated way, post-installation, to monitor all of these small solar systems and to troubleshoot issues so that you can facilitate maintenance. And so that's the software platform that we've built is being able to, number one, build tenants, which is super important because that's how owners justify the CapEx investment from the first place.

But then number two, it's making sure that these systems produce the amount of electricity that we've modeled for the next 25 years. Because that's a big knock on the solar industry is, I just got this thing installed three years ago, it's not working. The inverter manufacturer went out of business.

Who do I call? And so we stay with our systems for the life of them. Awesome.

Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting because it's, I think you're going to see this a lot, whether it's the solar industry, the HVAC industry, you know, EV charging, you're already seeing this, but it's like these tech enabled hardware deployment vendors. But the hardware needs to get deployed to have a real impact on climate change.

But oftentimes, there's software solutions that can sort of accelerate the hardware deployment, and that's kind of what we've done within the Multifamous space.

I'm guessing you don't really encounter this. But you have your own podcast, which I wanted to make sure we mentioned. The name of it escapes me at the moment.

Can you mention that really quick?

Less Talk More Action.

Yeah, as we talk about it. The pushback, the negativity, the disbelievers, where's your head at around dealing with that kind of the haters, so to speak?

I don't waste my time with them. If you're one of those people that doesn't believe in climate change. Well, if you don't believe in climate change, fine.

Do you believe in more money? Usually, right? So it's like, I don't get into arguments with people about does climate change exist?

You know, does solar have a higher carbon footprint than coal? Like all these stupid things that people say. I just, I used to, and it just took up so much of my bandwidth.

And I was like, man, I cannot, I like, I can't get into these internet kerfluffles. And so now it's just like, if we pick up on a sales call that someone is a climate denier, we'll quickly shift all conversation just to financials and economics. And if it still seems like they're so caught up in climate denial, that they can't let the financials overcome that belief, it would just end a call early.

It's like, whatever, do your thing. There's plenty, this industry is big enough. Yeah, that we don't need to, I don't need to waste my time trying to convince someone.

It's a smart thing to do.

Yeah, that's generally where I'm at these days now. Like, great, we can talk, you know, we can talk all day about how it doesn't exist. But like, I don't have time for it, you know.

Yeah, I mean, we just got, we just had a call with a private equity group that told us our business models all backwards because they expect to see the cost of electricity specifically in Texas decrease over the next five years. I mean, I can't wait to go back to those people in five years and be like, you guys could not have been more wrong. I mean, it's probably going to quadruple, especially now with the big bill.

It's like...

How's that going for you?

Yeah, exactly. It's just, you're on the wrong side of history if that's your opinion.

Even without the bill, the increase in demand is going to drive...

Yeah, I agree. I don't think... If I were the president, I would be encouraging every form of electricity humanly possible, and I still think you will not keep up with demand.

And instead, he just got rid of 90% of all the new electrons coming online.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, why not? Like, rodent powered on a little hamster wheel.

Everything. Yeah, do it all. Do it all.

We need all of it.

Right. What's the most fun about what you do?

The most fun by far is the before and after job site visits. Going to an apartment building, just your regular apartment building. Going back four months later and seeing 600 kW of solar on the roof.

Just knowing that probably would not have happened without us. And also trying to explain it to my three and six-year-old daughters. That's a...

Because they're always like, dad, what do you do? And I try to explain it to them and I'm like, man, I have not figured out the right way to connect it. The six-year-old is getting there.

The three-year-old, I mean, it's like, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Do you think there's the validity in waiting? Like, no, I'm going to wait another year or whatever.

Look at what just happened, right? I hear that all the time. All the costs of solar has come down 70 percent in the last 10 years.

I'm going to wait for it to come down another fraction of a percent of, or the efficacy of solar panels just went from 550 watts to 555. I'm going to wait for it to become 600. Okay, great, now the tax credit's gone, and you just lost 40 percent of your investment.

I was like, how's waiting working out for you? I was like, that's the worst. I hate that excuse to not move forward, probably more than anything, because anyone that studies the price per watt or the efficacies of panels, it's clearly asymptotic.

You're not getting, it's not linear. We've experienced the big drop in price and the big increase in efficacy. Yeah, they're both going to get better over time, but it's incremental at this point, unless AI figures out some new way to do all this.

Like to build the hardware better or something.

Yeah, like a new material to use in solar.

I want to see what you think about this. There's gotta be a way, and I don't know what it is yet, to make jokes, to make it funny, to make fun of the renewables and solar power, and wind, and things that aren't... that doesn't make it sound dismissive.

You know what I mean? Do you have things like that? Do you make it funny?

Do you make it fun?

Oh, I mean, yes, to a certain extent. My co-host Joel and I have a huge beef with the reporting industry within sustainability. There's almost nothing that I hate more than hearing the words, I can't evaluate this project right now, because it's reporting season.

I don't know if you guys have come across this, but there's a reporting season within corporate sustainability or ESG teams that usually takes up a solid three to six months, where literally the ESG teams who are supposed to be responsible for implementing projects to reduce carbon emissions, don't have the bandwidth to do anything because they're busy filling out ESG reports to Gresby or Energy Star or a bunch of the weed. And so we poke fun at that industry all the time because I don't know how reporting became like the gold standard within our industry. But somewhere along the last ten years, people forgot, like they forgot we're actually supposed to be doing projects and not just writing pretty ESG reports.

Yeah, that might be a way in. Okay. Yeah, that's great.

I know we got to let you go in a second. I have a silly question that I always try to end in. If your job is a workplace sitcom, who plays you?

Workplace sitcom, who plays me?

Oh, man. Or a character from something.

I think there's a little bit of Larry David in me. Yeah. Not the awkward part, but like I was just flying to Salt Lake City today, I was just watching one where he goes to this doctor's appointment and he uses the phone in the doctor's office and doctor comes in and is like, you're not supposed to use that phone.

And he just couldn't let go of the fact of like, why? Like, why can't I use the phone? Why is there this rule that I can't use this phone that's in the room?

And the doctor doesn't have a good answer for it. And like, I have that same personality trait where, like, never stop asking why. Always ask why to get to the root.

And if you ask it enough and you get to the point where it's like, well, it's just always how we've done it or it's always, it's just the way it is. But that's not an answer. That just means that no one's, like, pushed hard enough.

So even though, like, I love it and I hate my answer at the same time, but I think I got to go over there, David.

No, that's perfect. Yeah, whatever the first thing that came to mind was, is usually the right, you know, that we can leave it there. We got to let you go.

Kristen, did you have anything else you wanted to mention?

No, this was a great conversation. I might follow up with some, like, dorky math questions about what you're doing just to understand it a little bit more. But I think it's amazing.

I think I love your attitude towards it. I love that you're project focused. I'm also a very pragmatic person.

Great job. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Owen, for your time, and thank you for everything you're doing. Thanks for listening to Team Climate.

We hope you enjoyed this conversation. We are not professional podcasters, just passionate about sharing these stories. So, your feedback means a lot as we learn and grow.

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