Engine For Green Jobs: Premier Power CEO Dean Marks (Part 3)

SM: What type of wineries did you have as customers?

DM: They were high-end wineries. Shafer Vinyards, Chateau Montelena, and Spottswoode Vineyard and Winery are a few examples.

SM: I am assuming you had a different hardware solution for those agricultural cases?

DM: Yes. We did a ground mount style, and we did a lot of it. We then moved into commercial cases more and more. Today our mix is 80% commercial and 20% residential. It has certainly changed over time.

SM: Does commercial include agricultural?

DM: We break it out but it should be included. We do government, utilities like a 1.2 megawatt for SMUD in Sacramento, which was a thin-film wide open turkey ranch. It was the first of its kind in the nation, where we tied right into their grid. It fed their utility grid and SMUD called it their Solar Shares program. They would sell these green kilowatts to their customers.

SM: Are some of the farms in the area becoming solar farms?

DM: This was a turkey ranch that became a solar farm. They are selling into a utility grid. Strategically they need to be near high voltage power lines and substations. There are a lot of spots like that. What has happened in Spain and Europe is now happening here. You can identify these areas, and sometimes instead of building a coal power plant they would rather have solar there. That is why the utilities are talking about 200 megawatt jobs across California now.

We feel like we have jump on this because we have had some experience in Spain and are now moving into Italy with these larger megawatt jobs. Over here in Richmond, there is another first of its kind in the nation. It was a large 11 kilowatts that would track the sun from east to west and north to south. Wherever the sun was it would follow. It was a massive array almost two stories tall.

SM: Was that also a GE product?

DM: It was not. We brought it over from Spain. It is called the Meca Tracker. We are sharing things. We brought over a ballasted rooftop system from Otis Elevator Systems to Spain. There are not penetrations on the roof, it just sits there. We are sharing technologies back and forth, and we have become technology agnostic along the way.

We were set on GE for a good five years, then we branched off when they started raising prices substantially. We then started looking at other module manufactures such as Sharp and Suntech. We started with different inverters and different tracking systems. We have a parking structure in downtown San Francisco that is a system that tracks the sun from east to west and shades the employees’ cars. They park under [the structure] it while it follows the sun all day. In the morning the system resets. We look at our customers’ needs and then engineer a system to meet those needs across different suppliers.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Engine For Green Jobs: Premier Power CEO Dean Marks
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