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Market Parity for Solar & an Expansive Future with Darryl Parker

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Power Flow Podcast:

Episode 2.02 on Market Parity for Solar & an Expansive Future with Darryl Parker

In this podcast, Power Flow Podcast host Amy Simpkins speaks with CEA’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Darryl Parker.

An experienced and highly motivated business leader, Darryl Parker’s work in 57 countries makes him a leader in driving innovation across a global, matrixed organization and developing and executing strategies for complex organizations. He brings a strong entrepreneurial mindset, business acumen, passion for innovation, and a true commitment to developing the talent around him to every role. He also designs sales and marketing programs that achieve financial targets and deliver beyond customer expectations.

Quotables

“The grid has always been an amalgamation of multiple types of energy generation.” – Darryl Parker

“It’s so interesting to watch the evolution as people start to transform their knowledge from one form of energy generation to another.” – Darryl Parker

“You know when the ‘go big or go home guys are getting involved that the industry has real momentum.” – Amy Simpkins

“It’s just power. It’s just electrons running on a wire that helps us run our daily life. And how we get it the fastest, cheapest, most economical way- whatever. Let’s just do that! And make it available to everyone.” – Darryl Parker

Podcast Transcript

Introduction

This is the Power Flow Podcast, amplifying diverse voices in the energy revolution. Here's your host, Amy Simpkins.

About Darryl Parker

Amy Simpkins:

Hello, and welcome back for another episode of the Power Flow Podcast. I'm your host, Amy Simpkins. And today, my very special guest is Darryl Parker from Clean Energy Associates.

An experienced and highly motivated business leader. Darryl Parker’s work in 57 countries makes him a leader in driving innovation across a global matrix organization and developing and executing strategies for complex organizations.

He brings a strong entrepreneurial mindset, business acumen, passion for innovation. You know, we love that around here. And true commitment to developing the talent around him in every role.

He designs Sales and Marketing programs that achieve financial targets and deliver beyond customer expectations.

Now, Darryl shifted to renewable energy, specifically solar, from other high growth industries, like high tech information systems and communications leveraging the skills of guiding and growing organizations for his current role, which we're going to hear about at Clean Energy Associates prior to joining Clean Energy Associates, Darryl held the role of Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amped, a PV power electronics business, where he oversaw the global sales and field application engineering team, delivering significant customer value and 10 times sales growth over the past five years, he holds undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Global Management.

Darryl, welcome to the show.

 

Darryl Parker:

Thank you, Amy. It's a pleasure to be here today.

 

Clean Energy Associates, it’s mission and clients

Amy Simpkins:

I'm so happy that you were able to come on and I'm very excited to hear about Clean Energy Associates. You know, we got a lot about your background and your skillset in that introduction, but I'm really curious about what Clean Energy Associates does. What's it’s mission in the world and what you're bringing to that mission?

Darryl Parker:

Sure. Just for starters, Clean Energy Associates is a technical advisory firm that supports our customers growth in solar and storage and we strongly believe that in helping them implement their projects we are making the world a better place.

Amy Simpkins:

That is very near and dear to my heart, because that is what I do also, kind of, at muGrid analytics. I have definitely been bit by the solar plus storage bug. It is the future and, you know, getting multiple technologies to work together is the future. So, who are Clean Energy Associates’ clients? Are we looking at like utility scale or large commercial? Like where are you kind of working in this space?

Darryl Parker:

That is a great question, because CEA as an advisory firm, our customers actually span a broad gambit across the solar industry. I would say our largest customer segment would be asset owners, the ones who are going to have a long term vested interest in the PV projects, following that would be the developers, the people who are actually bringing those solar projects to fruition on behalf of the asset owners. But yet we also have a strong influence, with utilities as those utilities look at the energy transformation and they're motivated to do more renewable energy. They come and turn to CEA, and we also are looking at a number of private investments, private equity firms that are looking to purchase assets in solar and storage and help them become a part of the whole clean energy army that becomes the renewable energy space.

Amy Simpkins:

Yeah, that's quite a wide variety. That's a broad swath of client base. And again, very familiar, to my experience. So, you know, I think this is going on all over the industry of trying to figure out, how all these pieces fit together. So, I'm curious from your perspective, like seeing this broad swath of users, of investors, do you see that there is a way to get all of these pieces to work together? Or are we still seeing a lot of fragmentation among those different groups?

Darryl Parker:

Well, it's interesting because they work together in almost a serial fashion, right? There's a source of money, funds to invest in it. There are people who are experts’ expertise at developing it and there's people who actually put together the marketplace for it to do the buying and selling of the energy. So, they actually line up very well. When we're talking to a developer, they're explaining to us who their plan on selling their actual, finished product or their finished PV site too. They're talking about the off takers that they have. And they're looking at who the actual builders of the site, the EPCs will be. So, it really does line up very nicely and come together. And what I'm actually seeing is this congealing of the solar space into extremely credible and broad based, not only marketplace but industry especially here in the United States.

Evolution of solar industry and reaching grid parity

Amy Simpkins:

I think that's a great observation about the evolution of the solar industry. That like, it's always good to take a step back and say, look how far we've come. You know, look how far, from the days when it was just like, the crazy hippie who lived down the street who had solar, right? On his or her house. And then it became more mainstream, and we saw costs come down and then it became a little cheaper and now it's like, well, this is just what has to be done. And I love that observation of seeing it congeal into like a legitimate industry, like on its own legs.

 

Darryl Parker:

That really had a lot to do with us reaching grid parity, and the ability to do market based contracts for the electricity. You know, when you go back to those early days, pre-me joining solar industry in 2008, and you say, wow, the hippie craze. Yeah, those are the guys who are taking lead acid batteries and going back into the back woods and putting them together. They had three and a half panels with 55 cells in them. And, you know, I can get 50 watts, but those days are long gone. Now, we still have a few of those folks that are entrepreneurial in that scope, but now we're looking at very large-scale utilities, the PG&Es of the world, the Duke Energies of the world, the Next Eras of the world that are looking at gigawatts of power.

And they're actually putting it out on the transmission lines and sending power all across the United States. So, it's a fabulous industry to be a part of now. When we look at some of the insight evolution of it, you have a very robust residential solar industry where we're now able to talk about what can we do with this distributed energy that we're generating and all the households putting back power to the grid. So, we can see a network starting to develop, and as the technology continues to evolve and grow and people add storage in their garages, and we add storage on the grid in the utility class, you can see that there's going to be a very nice convergent point down the road. It's really just fantastic.

 

Working in regulated and deregulated states and it’s effect to market parity

Amy Simpkins:

I love that perspective. I want to go back for a second to what you said at the beginning of that, which was talking about market parity and the ability to participate in markets. And so, I'm curious from your perspective, do you work in, I assume you're doing work in both regulated and deregulated states, and I'm curious on your perspective on like, where you see kind of that part of like the regulatory piece going, is that causing problems? Are there different approaches for regulated states versus deregulated states? How is that affecting that market parity?

Darryl Parker:

The way I actually look at it is these markets are all going to be evolutionary. And so, we may not want markets as deregulated as say, Texas and the ERCOT marketplace. We may also don't want to see them as tightly regulated as they are in some of the other marketplaces. You probably need something more in the gray area kind of in between, like what California is doing in CAISO or what New York is doing or New Jersey. What we actually see is when they're very tightly regulated, then you're only opportunity to be a part of that marketplace is through that power utility. And if that power utility has the vision and the foresight to actually see it go forward in the slightly deregulated marketplaces, or say a Florida based site marketplace where you have deregulated and regulated or say Duke Energy, where you have regulated deregulated, what you actually have is the birth of a marketplace where you can buy and sell and trade energy across the different applications that people use.

And what that allows for is that allows for the innovation that causes us to actually grow. And I'm finding that in all the places that are regulated, they're absolutely looking at how can we participate in this new technology. And so, they have to find a way to get on it. Otherwise, you're in that position of, “My gosh, the technology's just passing me by”, and I see other people that are really taking advantage of it and can do things that I cannot do. So, eventually it'll not all be deregulated. It'll all be somewhere in between.

Amy Simpkins:

I, hundred percent agree with everything you just said that it really is the market participation that allows for innovation that allows for us to make these changes industrywide on a grand scale, but that it can't just be completely deregulated that there have to be guardrails. I think we definitely saw that with things coming out of the Texas power crisis of last winter, exposed a lot of those gaps. And I feel that as an industry, we're all trying to figure that out. I mean, what do you see happening in terms of when we say we are figuring out who's the we, and how do we do that?

How CEA work in regulated states?

Darryl Parker:

Well, let's take a say a utility in one of the highly regulated states. They would come to someone like CEA and say, we are interested in doing a renewable energy project in solar. We have a lot of experience on coal fired plants, natural gas plants. We might even have some utility in our portfolio, Cogen plants, but we've never done anything in solar. How do we do that? And what we'll do in a case like that is consult with that firm and introduce them to solar, take them through a ground up this, these are the suppliers that you need to work with. Here are the EPCs that we'll need to bring in to do the work for you. Here's how we'll help you. Not only oversee and monitor the people working on your behalf, but make sure that you're having the right suppliers and a good supply chain for the projects that you'd like to do, and then hold their hand all the way through the first implementation of a solar project that they would do

So, it starts there from the utilities, typically in a regulated marketplace. They'll be very thin on personnel that actually know and understand the business and so they can kickstart themselves and get up to speed very quickly when they employ a company like CEA, because we'll be their immediate, let's call it subject matter experts for a project that they may want to do. And there's a lot of learning that can go into that initial project where I've always found it quite interesting from my background in solar is you'll see a company that's usually very large and their used to doing big projects and they go, yes, we'd like our first solar project to be 400 megawatts. It's like, well, you sure you don't want to try to do ten first? just to make sure you know what you're doing but they'll want to start off large usually. And that does, take some getting used to an understanding is the problems you have in 10 megawatts are very different than the problems you have at a hundred. So, we have to work through it, but it does happen. It's so interesting to see it happen. And then watch that evolution as people start to transfer their knowledge from one form of energy generation to another form of energy.

Progression of the renewable energy industry

 

Amy Simpkins:

I love that, when the go bigger go home guys are getting involved like that, the industry has real momentum then and I also love that this is the evolution of the industry, I think for maybe some like late people who are consumers of energy, but maybe not in the industry. You know, they see it as this like step function of like yesterday, we were using coal plants and now we're using renewables. And there’s like this gap to cross and there's some gaps to cross. I mean, that's why we're here, right? Is we're trying to figure out how we make all this work, but I love that that is a natural evolution to say like, “Oh, I have a portfolio of coal, of gas, and I want to evolve that portfolio”. And I know it needs to contain renewables. And that's what I want. I want to move toward that. That's the evolution of the industry.

Darryl Parker:

Yes, you're absolutely right because the grid has always been an amalgamation of multiple types of energy generation. We have probably 60 to 70% of our stored potential energy sitting behind dams in hydro plants. But if you go into every area in the U.S., there's this combination of coal-fired plants, Cogen plants, some nuclear in there as well as natural gas fired plants. So, it's just going to add into that. And as things, the technology gets older in some areas they'll decommission those plants, and they'll bring up brand new plants. And now we have wind in there with the solar and eventually there'll be hydrogen as well. And it'll stay that way. I think the real difference in the whole energy transition.

Sorry to just drag on something like that.

 

Amy Simpkins:

No, I love this.

 

Darryl Parker:

You know, I'm an engineer and I like to talk about is the actual electronics that are going into the grid and the control capability of it.

So, that now when you have solar on your grid, you have wind on your grid. You actually have electronic equipment inverters that are operating on the grid. And these inverters are actually operating in microsecond speed versus the old style where we had turbines. And, you know, it takes three minutes for a turbine to spin up to a 60 kilohertz rate to drive the sign waves that give us our power to our house. Now it can happen in microseconds. So, you can envision going forward. We start having power outages. You have this equipment sitting between the homeowners and the main grid. You can reroute power and almost instantaneously. So, these are just some small things that'll be happening as the grid transformation continues to happen. Another thing will be adding EV into the grid and, you know, I've always had visions of things, like if we really want to do the energy transformation, then our government shouldn't just dump a lot of money into an infrastructure bill, you can use in investment tax credits and tell people like Shell “Hey, put a couple of EVs on that gas station.”. They already have an infrastructure that goes across the country, put EVs in those things. Why not? Now, you have a little snack shop. You have gasoline, you have EV power, and your infrastructure is set. It's electronic and it's golden for the way we want to grow this country. That's my two cents.

 

Amy Simpkins:

Oh, I love it.

Darryl Parker:

Soapbox now for you, Amy.

 

How Darryl made the decision to move to the solar and renewable industry and how did the transition go?

 

Amy Simpkins:

Love the soapbox. That's exactly where I want to go but no, I love it and I want to hear more, but I want to hear more before kind of, we go to looking at the future. Sure. I'm curious about you personally.

So, you know, you are, you've been in kind of a sales role, sales and marketing for quite some time now, and you made a jump over into renewable energy, but you are fundamentally an electrical engineer which, you know, I love bonding with engineers. It's awesome. And the more nerdy we get on this podcast, like the better. So, I'm curious, what drew you to energy and how did you make that transition?

Darryl Parker:

That was very interesting transition because I was in the telecommunications industry, and I was building microwave networks around the world and had a very similar organization. But it was more like the amped organization where it was salespeople and technical people that were doing the projects. In some cases, when we were building projects in Africa, we would use solar to help power the radios that help drive the microwave systems. And so, I started getting in a little interest in that. And when it came time for me to say, “Okay, there's enough to do in telecom now. What's the next most interesting thing?” I started thinking about Solar. And I was really specific, not renewable energies, but solar and how big do these get? How much can you do with it? So, when I went out to the marketplace and started looking around, I specifically told people I was interested in solar, and I had a technical background.

So, pops a number of inverter companies that I started talking with. And I found one that was like a startup, and it was a really a restart company, but it was a startup. And I go, “Oh, that's intriguing”. I had just come off of an engagement where we had to take a company that had dropped way down in the dotcom boom-bust and it lost almost $200 million in revenue. And we had to build that back up over a five-year period. And I go, “Hmm, I kind of like this building thing, let me go with somebody who's small and we can go do some building together. And I said, that would be most interesting.” So, I stumbled on to SatCon and at that time, you know, the large-scale sites were 1-2 megawatts, right?

That was big. And the biggest inverter we had was a 225-kilowatt inverter and then we went to a 500-kilowatt inverter and off that was just the biggest thing that would ever be developed, right? And while I was there, we developed a 1-megawatt inverter and I go, wow. You know, that's just huge. So, it just really kind of fell into it. And I was at the right place at the right time and I'm forever thankful for that because I found my niche where I wanted to be until I'm done working.

Controls Piece: Storage Software applications

Amy Simpkins:

Awesome. I've heard you say a couple of times talking about like the controls equipment and it's definitely something that I have seen and come to believe that like, you know, we're getting to a point in the industry where the hardware part like the panels and stuff, obviously there's always more you can do, but sure. It's easy. You know, we're starting to come into this time of the industry where you can commodify some of the components but those control pieces are the real crux of the problems right now. What is the brains of the system? How does the system actually operate? How does it decide by itself to operate without somebody there pushing the button. And so, you already started to speak to that from the soapbox there, and I'm just curious a little more, especially with your background in power electronics. Can you talk a little bit more about the controls piece?

Darryl Parker:

Well, the controls piece. Let's back up a moment and just say, I think we've all come to the realization that we are going to be in a software driven world. It's just what's going to happen.

Amy Simpkins:

To that point. I was reading, there was an article that came out a couple of months ago. I think it was the CTO at John Deere. So, engines, tractors, agricultural equipment, construction equipment. He said he hires more software engineers than mechanical engineers at this point and it was like when John Deere is saying that, you know, yes, software driven world.

Darryl Parker:

And to that point, one of the things that we have - the controls, we know we've already gone through the evolution of inverters where they were relatively dumb converting DC into AC. When I first started out, there's a whole science around, what are the grid controls that any inverter on the network now has to have? And those are things that allow the utility to control how that power is operated or how that power is actually being distributed out onto the network. And when it turns on, when it turns off and how it operates, you see that even more in the new storage related applications where you can actually now, in real time, arbitrage power and that comes from the ability to control it. I was working in my last role with systems that were uniquely designed to turn on at a certain time of day.

It utilizes the power that they had helped to store and then turn off at a certain time at night so that you could actually take the solar profile and time shift it into later hours. All of these are designed around the controls, the microprocessors that are inside the circuitry of what we call the brains of the systems. And it's all software control where it's going to go next, where it actually is already now, when you start looking at companies that are in the storage business, it's AI driven now. So, you're not only going to have software controls, but you're going to have intelligent software controls so that, you can take the same application and put it in California and have the application also running in New Jersey. But the AI drives the application slightly different because of the variability and the network, what the weather is the time of day, what the load is on the system, all of those things are going to be controlled and they're going to actually result in better power, better power conditioning, or reliable power.

And so, we're all going to just use it in a ubiquitous fashion, like the way we drink water, right? We just plug it in, and it works and that's really where we're headed and we're there already. It's just very analog driven and mechanically driven. It's going to go electronic.

Amy Simpkins:

Yeah. I love that and I agree. I think that arbitrage piece is so huge for solar and also wind. You know anytime you have non dispatchable generation, we always hope, I do techno economic analysis. So, that arbitrage is an economic concept that there will be economic advantages. And of course, that's how you make it work. But I mean, we have to make it work because you can't just have power when the sun is out. You have to put it where you actually need it. And that's what underpins the market conditions, and the economic arbitrage is the fact that we need to put the power where we want it at a very visceral level. So, I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's huge.

 

So, we’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we will turn toward the future and hear about Darrell's perspective on where he sees the industry going and what challenges we're facing.

Darryl Parker:

Absolutely.

 

Solar and renewable energy challenges and how do we move past it?

 

Amy Simpkins:

And we're back with the Power Flow podcast. I'm here today with my colleague, Darryl Parker, talking about market parity for solar, talking about control through power electronics and getting just really excited about the future of clean energy. Like I'm loving this conversation. It is exciting and it reminds me of why we're all doing this every day. So, from here Darryl, you already got on your so soapbox deliver which I love. And we can go back to some of that and talk through it some more too, but it's obviously we've made a lot of progress in this industry so far. Solar is solidifying into this industry that can stand on its own that has this market parity, but there's still challenges. There's still challenges between us and the clean energy future and acknowledging that we're always going to, and for a long time at least we're going to have a very diverse mix of generation sources. We also are seeing this clock ticking, this climate change clock ticking. So, what are the challenges that are standing between us and this clean energy future? Let's talk about that.

Darryl Parker:

Well, one of the challenges that I've always felt and is still with us today is really the challenge of the widespread adoption. As I look at how the Paris Accord coming into reality and as I look at very special interest groups that are around, if you just go back and look at what happened last year in the ERCOT marketplaces in Texas. The first thing that comes out is, we had a problem because all of the solar fields, just stopped working when the freeze came which was actually wasn't true at all. The real issue had to do with the fossil fuel plants were not being maintained in a way that would allow them to operate in subzero temperatures.

But you know, you can't avoid that kind of thing. And when you go even further out and look at what the geopolitical implications are that tends to also impact the widespread adoption of clean energy. I happen to think that if we could have a more balanced view, from my point of view as an electrical engineer, it's just power. It's just electrons, running on a wire that helps us run our daily life and how we get it, the fastest, cheapest, most economical way, whatever. Let's just do that and make it available to everyone because, you mentioned a little earlier that you worked in the microgrid area. I love that area because having worked in Africa and India, these microgrids are what's going to power.

A lot of people going forward, island grids, things like that. You're going to have that ability to really touch people with electricity. And I’ll give you an analogous story from my past telecommunications. We would go into a place in Africa say Nigeria or Tanzania and we'd put in a microwave network. What would happen when one of these networks would cross by a village. These people would come out from everywhere to connect to the network for their cellular phones. And they immediately start calling family and friends in the overseas countries that they haven't been able to talk to in years, sometimes. And you could just see this connectedness starting to happen. And then the entrepreneurs would come in and they'd start driving people 50 miles away from the further villages to get close to the network. And then the entrepreneurs would come in and have battery charging so you could charge your cell phone, and you'd just see this community just develop overnight. And that's what happen in the power area as well. When the networks get fully ubiquitous, when you have microgrids that can go out and touch all the villages, you can have wells that are driven off electricity. You can have lights at night so that you can continue to read and educate and build yourself up. It's all going to happen. If the world comes together and says, let's not think of it like it's fossil versus renewal. No, it's just power. It's all power and we'll gradually move off of the fossil and go to the renewables, but it's still just power. That's all it is.

 

Amy Simpkins:

That is definitely something that has felt frustrating to me, that there's this false sense of like competition or a false, I mean, hostility is too strong of a word, but like you know, this false pitting these technologies against each other when they all work together. They all work together actually quite well. I mean, batteries increase the efficiency of fossil fuel generation and fossil fuel generation provides reliability where non-dispatchable renewables can't, and obviously non dispatchable renewables don't need fuel replenishment. And so, they can operate when there's no fuel. And so, they all provide these like symbiotic benefits. And it has felt very frustrating to me. And I know that, there's a lot of human elements to that entrenchment of emotion and I'm curious from your perspective, how do we move through that?

Darryl Parker:

I think that what happens is as more utilities are coming on board and they actually see this firsthand, they actually see, “Ah, it's time for us to decommission a coal plant or a gas plant, or an oil-fired plant.” Very rare, but what we'll do is we'll now bring in renewable energy to make that up. We'll add in storage as well, so we can make it dispatchable power and as they see that, and as it starts to become more and more dominant in the actual, because remember in the old days, they would say, well, what happens when you reach 3% penetration of renewables on the grid? Will it disrupt it? It's like, no, it won't. We now have the controls, and the software and people understand it doesn't disrupt anything. It continues to operate and as the news starts to take over the old and we begin to educate ourselves better we get to that point where “okay, it's really just an evolution.”

The policies that we drive as a government across all countries, like here in the United States, you know, coal is still subsidized. Okay, well that keeps the coal industry kind of going and everything is happy in that regard. And there's a lot of people who have a vested interest in it. Well, that eventually will start to fade away. And as those tax credits are going into other areas, they'll make their way into renewables as well. And we'll start seeing how that grows and flourishes. And, you know, we see a part of that today with things like the investment tax credits that are available to us in renewable energy. So, it's an evolutionary process. I guess from my side on the renewables, we wanted to go faster, you know, from the other side of fossil fuels, they wanted to go slower but it is an irreversible march to the future. So, I'm just hoping I live long enough.

Amy Simpkins:

I think it's a really good point that coal is subsidized. Like, I mean, I think that there have been people who look at the incentive programs for renewables and said, well, that's cheating. Like, the market won’t stand on its own, but that's not, I don't think that's true. And it's not like the other, you know, the fossil fuel markets exactly stand on their own anyway, there's more complexity to that. So, I'm curious, well, go ahead.

Effect of reaching market parity in the solar and renewable industry

Darryl Parker:

That argument, dry it up when we reach grid parity and now, we can implement a solar farm cheaper than you can any other type of plant. So, it's like, now you can actually operate at market rates. And so, we saw this coming, was it about three years ago when we saw the PPAs come up at 3 cents a watt in Utah for example and that was Warren Buffet's company that was actually doing that PPA. So, you said” Okay, it's going to be here now.” And we've even seen some at 2 cents a watt. So, it's at that point now where I can generate solar at a price point that at one time was only available in hydro where, gosh, back in 2008, you could buy from, think of the hydro company that was up in Washington. It was about 3 cents a watt to purchase power and of course, you know, the utility would purchase that power and turn around, sell it to us at a retail rate, but now they can do the same thing with solar. So, it's irreversible, the march is gone its way.

 

How do we, as an industry, engage to support policy?

 

Amy Simpkins:

The march is on its way. So, I'm curious, a lot of the things that you've talked about here, have been sort of policy based, you know, regulation and like the tax credits and things like that. How do we as industry, I think you had talked about a little bit beforehand about advocating for policies that support the adoption and growth of renewable energy, taking a leadership role within industry to support government leadership. And so, I'm curious, what's your vision for that? If you were on the world, how do we as industry engage to support policy?

Darryl Parker:

Well, I think that one of the best ways is to use our policy advocacy groups, various like SEIA. It's the way that business is operated in this country for a long time there's policy and industry advocate groups for all the various different areas of energy. There's some for oil, there's some for coal, there's some for, you know, children's play toys, right? It's all done the same way and our policy makers understand that. And so, it's important for us to work through organizations, just like that, because when you're trying to address a Congress person or a Senator, you've got to come to them on their playing field the way they're used to seeing it because if you don't, it just falls on deaf ears. So, we have to do it that way so that we have a single voice or single voices, because there's more than one policy group that can advocate on our behalf.

And we have to support that group by being members, sending them our money, sending them our expertise.  So, we have people that are our participants there that can be a part of that advocacy and then our policy makers will actually see that. “Okay, we have something strong here. We have the ability to create jobs here. We have the ability to make better laws here, so we can actually get behind this and support our constituency which is how you drive the votes to get things done.”

And it's just, it's kind of understanding how the infrastructure mechanism works and then make it work for you.

Amy Simpkins:

No, that's a great observation, to point that out what we're trying to do here. And I mean, the collective, we as the in industry is very innovative and I always talk about how we're taking an industry that hasn't really had to innovate too much in 150 years or more and all of a sudden, we're trying to disruptively innovate the whole thing, but it's important to recognize that like we can still fit that innovation into boxes that people are used to seeing. I have the same conversation about investors that like investors need to see things in the format they're used to seeing, even if it's an incredibly innovative idea and they might want to invest in it, you still have to kind of make it look like the format. It's using the structure, right. You just said that, and I think policy is the same. I think that's a really good thing you just said is making sure it's in the format, in the box, in the structure that a policy maker is used to seeing so that they can quickly make the decision and move it forward in the way that it needs to.

Darryl Parker:

Well, yeah, it's always important, you know, sometimes where we're having conversations about how do you approach people in sales and I go, “You always approach them on their turf. You always approach them in the language that they understand and talking about the problems they're trying to resolve.” And when you think about that, if you're a Senator or you're a Congressman, they're always trying to make things better for their constituency. Okay. How do we do that? and let's approach it that way and get their attention.

Amy Simpkins:

I love it. I love it. Have you read yet? Saving Us by Katherine Hayhoe?

Darryl Parker:

No, I haven't. But if you don't mind, I will write that one down.

Amy Simpkins:

Yeah. You should write that one down. I just finished it. And so, she's a climate scientist and she talks about exactly this topic of like, how do you talk about climate change or climate action to general people. And she does talk about that. There's like one certain faction of people that maybe just will not listen to anything you say. But the vast majority of people will be receptive if you can meet them on their turf. If you can put it in language or concepts that are important to them. And I think that's so hugely powerful from the human perspective. And I mean, policy makers are human and so are clean energy, you know, industry workers, you know, we're all human here. So, I think putting it into those human terms of meeting people on their level is so important.

Darryl Parker:

Oh yeah. In the earlier days I tell people that I'm in renewable energy and solar specifically and they go, “Oh, you're one of those, save the earth, tree hugger kind of people.” And I go, no, not at all. I'm one of those, I love paying less than half for my electricity than you do and then they stop, and they go, “What, huh?” and I go, “Yeah. You know, is your utility bill over $300 a month?” “Yeah.” “Well, I pay, you know, 150 and less in some months I actually pay nothing, and I get paid.” He goes, “how do you do that?”, I go, “I have solar on my roof.”

Amy Simpkins:

Ooh. And now it's a conversation. Right.

Darryl Parker:

And now it's a conversation. How do you do that? You know, why would I do that? What did it take? And I go, it's very easy and oh, by the way, it's, it's kind of like your, “Oh gosh, what was that little tool that used to sell on TV? Your kind of, you set it and forget it. You know, you just, you put the solar on your roof and then you say bye-bye to it, and you come back 25 years later”, but you've been saving every month from the time you put it in. So, you don't have to maintain it. It's not as hard to manage as your rose garden.

What’s the next best step for the solar and renewable energy industry?

Amy Simpkins:

So, we talked about a lot, we talked about a lot of different like avenues for innovation and in avenues for change. And so, I'm curious, kind of, what’s your perspective as an industry? Where should we be focusing next? What's the next right step?

Darryl Parker:

I think the next best step for us would be the steps that take us towards larger disbursement of renewable energy. How do we get more of it into our systems? How do we grow it and take advantage of it in places where it's not right now? One of the things that I think was really cool, was in the telecom industry, what we noticed was it's very difficult to put that infrastructure in, to put landlines in. And so, we had countries that would leapfrog that whole thing and say, we'll just do the entire country in wireless. And we'll put telephones in everyone's hands, and we'll go ahead of the system versus tearing up all the streets, putting in wires, things like that. I see the same thing going on in this industry as well. One of the things that I would was advocating from a California state point of view was let's put solar on everyone's house, new homes, old homes.

It doesn't matter, put it on there. And the question was, why would you do that? It's very costly. I go, Two reasons, the first reason is that if I'm advocating to put solar on my roof, my roof is never moving offshore. So now I have an industry that's never going to go to China. It'll never go to India. It'll always be here because the roof on my house is going to sit right here in America. The second thing is you are now developing an infrastructure that begins to employ people all the way back to the manufacturing point. And at that manufacturing point, we now have an opportunity to retrain people who are trained in automotive plants and steel plants to either install solar or build the products that drive solar and wind. So, now you can hit the manufacturing sector, very costly, very expensive, but there's a future for it.

 

And you can see it. The industry already supports 265,000 people most are our installers but that's a great job because it's a high-level job. You can't just take someone off the street. They have to be trained. They have to be certified. Electricity will kill you. Don't never forget that it will kill you. So, you need to know what you're doing and that means there's a skill level. It's not a non-skilled labor job, it's a skill job and so, as we advocate to put more out, you can say why isn't every home in America have solar on it. It should, you know, not many people are going to put a windmill in the backyard. You could, but that's not practical. So, that's one of the big, you know, when you say let's have a big audacious goal, you know, our goal should be, let's get America a hundred percent energy neutral, self-sustaining so we don't have to import anything from anybody to run our country. You can do it with renewables.

Amy Simpkins:

Wow. What a vision. I love that vision. Believe we have talked about that idea of leapfrogging just like you described before on this podcast. If you're a listener and you want to go back and check out Season 1, Episode 12 with Lori Wright, we talked about that concept of leaping forward of not having, you know, going straight past wires and I think that's something to keep in mind like that we are going to see an evolution, which we've obviously talked about on the podcast before too. There are things that the transition will happen, gradually and be more evolutionary, but there's room for disruption. And I think that leapfrogging into something completely new is an example of disruptive innovation. And so, it's that kind of combination let's remain open to both evolutionary growth and disruptive growth.

Darryl Parker:

And it's interesting, you know, in the solar space, we've already seen it start to happen in distributed energy. You know, let's use the energy, let's generate the energy where we're going to use it and you'll see that in some of the merchant PPAs or some of the, even the corporate PPAs where you have a solar farm right next to a manufacturing or production facility. And they're utilizing that energy that's being, generated, converted from the sun right there at their local spot. If you put batteries in, you can run the thing at night. So rather than saying, I need to transmit it, you know, a thousand miles over the wires. No, we just use what's right there. And then when we don't need it, we'll push it back out onto those wires and someone else can use it. So, we're already starting to see that happen. It's well known in the industry to do that and what's going to happen is the innovation is going to make that simpler, easier, cheaper, faster, and, and that's that disruption that starts to happen, that you just can't reverse.

Renewable energy creates opportunities in workforce and aids in economic growth

Amy Simpkins:

Definitely. I also loved what you said to go back a little bit about the workforce, and I think that's a really critical piece of saying “this is such an opportunity particularly the American economy.” I mean, that's where we're speaking from obviously there's opportunities worldwide too, but it's always a concern about creating economic growth and opportunity and I think that workforce development piece like this is the next step. This is the workforce of the future; it’s going to be the clean energy workforce.

Darryl Parker:

Absolutely. Just think about it. If you really want a blue sky like we do here in the Silicon Valley a lot, you can say “Wow, you know, with all the innovation that goes on in just the electronics world, where we took, say a microprocessor all the way through to where Intel is today, what would actually happen if you got behind that?” and you said, “Well, Intel says we're going to actually make a power management dedicated chip, and we're going to grow that business and then you have your Googles and Apples of the world saying we're going to drive software innovation on top of that chip.”

Where can it go? It can go in any number of directions that are all good. So, things can happen and they typically happen in places where we don't expect.

Amy Simpkins:

Oh, I love that. So, before we wrap up here, do you have any kind of final thoughts for the audience?

“Solar industry is here to stay, there’s room for everybody.” – Darryl Parker

 

Darryl Parker:

My final thought would be grow solar. That's my final thought. Do it. That's what I want to see more than anywhere else, is that if you're hearing this for the first time, if you've been thinking about it and you haven't done it, please contact someone near you that can take you through it and bring it into your business or bring it into your home but really it's the direction of the future we really want to drive as much as we possibly can. This is an industry that's here to stay and has room for everybody in this industry. So, it doesn't matter if you're an engineer like myself and Amy, or you're an arts and science major, or you're an English major, there's room for you in the solar industry. So come on aboard and join with us and we'll do it together.

How do we get in touch with Darryl or CEA?

Amy Simpkins:

There is room for everyone. I love it. Well, Darryl, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. If our listeners wanted to get in touch with you or Clean Energy Associates, how did they go about doing that?

Darryl Parker:

They can always find me through the website at CEA, if they want to contact me on LinkedIn. I have one of those unique LinkedIn profiles so that they can just type in global leadership and my name pops right up as Darryl Parker, because I started in LinkedIn at the very beginning, and we didn't have the IDs. You could just pick your own that you wanted. So, I picked global leadership and so you can always find me there, but you can also go directly into CEA and send me a message directly through our website as well.

Amy Simpkins:

Can I just say that global leadership is just about the most awesome keyword you could personally rank for? Like that is really cool. Like when you type in global leadership, Darryl’s name comes up. That's so awesome. That's amazing.

Darryl Parker:

Yeah. People stop when they look and go, “Hmm how'd you do that?” And I go, “You're old. you're very, very old.”

Amy Simpkins:

Let's say, okay, let's say early adopter.

 

Darryl Parker:

Early adopter first. And that makes sense.

Amy Simpkins:

You sound super trendy, right? If you're in early adopter.

Darryl Parker:

Amy, thank you very much, and I've truly enjoyed our talk today. Thank you.

Amy Simpkins:

Thank you so much for your time today, Darryl. Thank you for coming on the show and listeners, we thank you for your time as well. We do not take it lightly that you spend this time with us, and we look forward to more collaborative ideation and more innovative ideas for the clean energy future.