Transcript
Jigar Shah: The way we power the world is changing at a fundamental level. Across the United States, clean energy now makes up more than 90% of new electricity added to the grid — not because of politics or ideology, but because these technologies simply work better.
Jamie Nolan: They're cheaper to build, faster to deploy, and easier to scale than anything we've had before.
Jigar Shah: Whether you're curious about where the economy is headed, how energy affects your daily life, or who's behind the billion-dollar deals shaping our future —
Jamie Nolan: Energy Empire is your guide to what comes next.
Jigar Shah: Hello, I'm Jigar Shah, clean energy entrepreneur.
Jamie Nolan: And I'm Jamie Nolan, clean energy communications consultant. And this is Energy Empire.
Introduction
First Impressions of Dean
Jigar Shah: It is so wonderful to see Dean Solon continuing to just reach and reach and reach. That guy has been at it for so long and I don't think he's lost a single step.
Jamie Nolan: It's very clear that he is someone who has no chill. He was so high energy, so excited about all of his projects. Very high enthusiasm from Dean.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, and what about his whole thing with Disney — going twice a year? I love Disney, don't get me wrong, but I could not go there twice a year.
Jamie Nolan: I also, unfortunately, really love Disney. My husband and I were so prepared to hate it when we took our daughter for her sixth birthday, and we were sheepish to admit we actually had a great time. They know exactly what they're doing. I don't know if I could do twice a year, but I totally get it. And when he first joined the recording and we saw the back of his facility in Tennessee — all those machines behind him, all his toys — it all made sense. I understood his whole MO immediately.
Jigar Shah: What's interesting is that Dean has just been a decent guy for as long as I've known him. He was a guy who had the booth babes at trade shows and all of the other things people complained about — but at the same time, he's one of those folks who has mentored more people than I know in this industry. He's been the kindest, most generous person. It's one of those dichotomies I see all the time — a lot of people want folks to conform to a certain norm, and Dean doesn't conform to any norm.
Jamie Nolan: I will say I was very loudly opposed to booth babes and I will never stop talking about that. That said, a lot of people who rise to the top of their fields have very intense personalities, and Dean was no different. What really charmed me was his commitment to Americana. The reason he loves Disney — it's baseball, apple pie, and domestically manufactured solar panels. His heart is in the right place. He wants to create good jobs. He wants those to be American workers. He wants to build things here. It was really cool to learn more about his story and what drives him.
Jigar Shah: I loved how he tried to retire and just couldn't keep it going for more than a week.
A Wedding in Oaxaca
Jigar Shah: Just to pivot for a second — I was at a wedding this past weekend in Oaxaca, Mexico. My youngest cousin. My goodness, how far Oaxaca is. Two different flight legs. It was gorgeous, it was beautiful, I loved it — but man, it was hard to pull off in a four-day weekend.
Jamie Nolan: I'm so jealous. How was the food? You're a vegetarian — was it amazing?
Jigar Shah: It was great. I like cheese, and Oaxaca is known for cheese, as well as mezcal — which I did partake in. My wife was less into it since she doesn't really like cheese, but I had all sorts of incredible stuff. And the sauces — we had verde, mole, yellow mole. Everything was fantastic.
Jamie Nolan: Did you see any clean energy while you were there? It finds me everywhere I go.
Jigar Shah: Solar panels everywhere. But what was fascinating was the wedding venue — this really old church with a rented courtyard. You were supposed to arrive at four o'clock, and by then the left side of the seating was in the shade and the right side was in full sun. About 85 degrees. By 4:25 when the wedding started, the right side had rotated into shade. Those of us who got there early got the cool spot. Those who arrived right before the ceremony got the hottest chairs. As it ought to be.
Jamie Nolan: Well, I'm sorry you had to come back to February in the DC area, where we at least have slightly smaller mountains of snowcrete everywhere now.
Jigar Shah: The snow is starting to melt. I saw two of my neighbors whose cars had been completely plowed in finally able to get out of their snow banks.
Jamie Nolan: I think it's going to hit 60 degrees this week, which always makes me feel guilty for being excited about — climate change and all — but after what we've been through this winter, I feel like we deserve it.
Jigar Shah: I totally agree.
Who Is Dean Solon?
Jamie Nolan: So Jigar, today our guest is Dean Solon. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about who he is and how you two know each other?
Jigar Shah: Dean is a legend in the industry. When I started SunEdison, we couldn't even get electricians to install the solar projects we'd sold. We had to buy five companies just so we could force them to do the installations. Dean was in the middle of all of that — making wire harnesses and all of the basic components we needed to install solar. He was the only guy who would say, "Yeah, I'll make something custom for you, small run, low price" — and he manufactured it here in the United States.
The company was called Shoals, and he kept it private for a long time. He only took it public in 2020 or 2021. He made most of his stock wealth a little later in life, and then turned around and did it again with Create Energy. I'm super excited about his story.
Jamie Nolan: Awesome. After our years at DOE, domestic manufacturing is something I'm really passionate about. I can't wait to hear how he made it work.
Interview: Dean Solon
Growing Up in Gary, Indiana
Jigar Shah: Dean, you're one of the few self-made solar billionaires in the world, but you started out working with your dad fixing air conditioners. I want to get into how a kid doing HVAC jobs ended up building a multi-billion dollar energy empire. You dropped out of Purdue. You're one of these rare cases of a clean energy billionaire who lives and works in a state that isn't necessarily enthusiastic about solar power right now. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story with us.
Dean Solon: Thanks for having me, Jigar. It's been a while.
Jigar Shah: Let's start from the very beginning. Where were you born?
Dean Solon: I was born in Gary — steel mill country.
Jigar Shah: I thought so. Right in the waft of the steel industry.
Dean Solon: Absolutely. Two things I am empowered by: sarcasm — it's my favorite food — and dropping F-bombs. And the reason why is we lived about four or five miles from U.S. Steel. All that coke gas and those fumes rotted my brain down and made me goofy as hell. Thank God.
We had a 900-square-foot house in Gary. Both sets of grandparents lived with us — my great-grandparents came from Greece. Three kids, everybody fighting to get their fork in the bowl before the food was gone. My dad was a vocational school teacher and did heating and air conditioning on the side. So I started carrying his toolbox around age eight. We serviced most of the Greek restaurants in the community — walk-in coolers, walk-in freezers, air conditioners. Carrying toolboxes up a ladder in the middle of winter with that much snow on the roof, looking down thinking about your life. Those are experiences I'm so glad I had.
Jigar Shah: So you were ripped at a young age — carrying all that weight at eight years old.
Dean Solon: They got a little softer with age. But from about eight to twelve, with my dad being a vocational school teacher, I got that world early. Back in high school, you could spend half a day in regular school and half a day at the vocational school. Learning plumbing, electrical, HVAC — those people are all making very nice livings right now.
Dropping Out of Purdue and Starting Shoals
Jigar Shah: All right, let's go back. You started Shoals in 1996. Why did you start it, and why was it called Shoals?
Dean Solon: When I dropped out of Purdue, it wasn't because I just wanted to leave — I ran out of money. My dad was earning a vocational school teacher's salary supporting two other kids and grandparents. My grandfather had put it in my head that if you don't have the money, you don't borrow it. So I never applied for Pell grants. By junior year I thought, between eight years old and sixteen, I learned more carrying my dad's toolbox than I learned at Purdue. Purdue teaches great theory, but I was built for the field.
Jamie Nolan: That must have been a tough adjustment — sitting in a seat after all those years of actually doing things.
Dean Solon: Exactly. What ties everything together — cars, motorcycles, lawnmower engines, HVAC — is debugging skills. When a tradesman showed up to fix something back then, there was no YouTube video. You're standing on a rooftop in ten degrees below zero, the restaurant owner is yelling at you, customers are leaving, and you're looking at a schematic trying to figure out what's wrong. That teaches you massive problem-solving skills and forces you to rely on yourself.
In high school, I never thought about college. My dad said, "Come on, just give it a try." When I took the SAT, I was the first one out of the room because I just filled in C for every answer.
Jigar Shah: And you probably got a better score than everybody else.
Dean Solon: I scored a 780. Pretty proud of that. I never had aspirations to go, but then I got in and it wasn't so bad — until I ran out of money. So I left and took a job as a sales engineer for a marketing company in Hendersonville, Tennessee. There was a joint venture between General Electric and Bosch called BG Automotive Motors. I worked for a stamping company in Batesville, Indiana as a sales rep — we stamped out the blower motor housing that went into every Ford vehicle in the world.
I started winning projects by telling clients: "Give me your design. If I can't build it for you cheaper, it's yours free." I wound up winning six or eight projects in a row.
Jigar Shah: Had you already created Shoals by then?
Dean Solon: Not yet. I was still working as a sales rep. Then Bosch came to me and said GE and Bosch were splitting up — Bosch was buying GE out — and they wanted to know if I'd be interested in starting my own company to take on some of their lines. I was painting my garage when they told me to go check my fax machine. They'd sent a purchase order for $150,000 — the terms said "net zero," meaning they really didn't want an injection mold. They wanted me to start a company and move a bunch of their lines and processes to me.
That was Thanksgiving 1996.
Jamie Nolan: That sounds like an extraordinary founding story. They must have seen something really special in you.
Dean Solon: They knew I'd do anything they asked. I am loyal to a fault, and ideas pop into my head ten times a day. When people tell me no — for this engineering reason or that technical reason — I go "la la la" and just do it anyway.
Jigar Shah: So this is 1996.
Dean Solon: Yes. I started Shoals Technologies Group in Muscle Shoals, Alabama — which is in the country music part of the South, not far from Nashville.
Jigar Shah: Got it. That's why it's called Shoals.
Dean Solon: Exactly. From 1996 to about 2003, I was 100% automotive. Then Bosch called and said they were closing about fifteen automotive factories across the U.S. and wanted me to pick up Shoals and move it to Toluca, Mexico. I was like — what?
Jigar Shah: Your Spanish is rusty.
Dean Solon: "Sí señor. Hola." That's it. So I went to Toluca to visit, walked through the factory, and I looked at this motor — it's about $6, with $5 in raw parts. There's no margin left for labor, SG&A, and facilities. There's just no money in it. I'm not going to facilitate moving to Mexico under those terms.
I walked out of that factory with my head spinning — strangest moment of my life — and I was walking around Toluca and found this really nice street taco stand. They had this meat wrapped in pigskin. It smelled delicious. I ate it. Woke up the next morning getting on the plane and Montezuma's Revenge hit me like a freight train.
Jamie Nolan: So that's the moment Dean Solon committed to American manufacturing — because he couldn't tolerate the food in Mexico.
Dean Solon: I'm physically and mentally dying, and at the same time Bosch is threatening to pull my business if I don't pick up and move. And then — right place, right time — the very next week I get a call from a company in Perrysburg, Ohio.
They said, "We've heard about you through the automotive business and want to see if we could do business together." I said, "Great — blower motor? Window lift motor? Power seat motor? What do you need?" They said, "No — we're looking for a junction box." I said, "What's a junction box?" They said it goes on a solar panel. I said, "A solar panel?"
My gut was screaming. I said, "How about I jump in my car and come up there in a couple of days?" I drove up and walked into a strip mall office — probably a former wallpaper store — and met eight people. They wanted me and a buddy to build a piece of automation that would take a plastic J-box assembly and drop it on a solar panel. I called my buddy Chuck and said, "They want us to build this thing. We in?" He said yeah. We built First Solar's very first piece of automation.
Then they said, "Hey Dean, we've got these three-foot extension cords with a plastic box — will you build us the extension cords?" I said sure. So I grabbed the cable assemblies with these MC3 connectors on the back and called Multi-Contact in Switzerland. I said, "I need about a million of these." They said, "Great — a million a year." I said, "How about a million a week?"
I spent about three months calling them, telling them: "If you guys don't figure this out, I won't just stop using your connector — I'll become your biggest competitor you've ever had." Finally the top guys from Switzerland flew over without much notice, walked through my factory for about twenty minutes, and one of them said, "Dean, I've seen enough. Let's go sit in your office." He pulled out a contract and said, "Not only will you become one of our biggest suppliers — you'll become our biggest customer." I didn't even read it. I just signed it.
Going Public and Sticking to American Manufacturing
Jigar Shah: Now we're heading into the go-go days of solar — 2003 to 2008. All of those companies went public. First Solar, SunPower. How many bankers were calling you about going public?
Dean Solon: I started getting calls around 2009, 2010.
Jigar Shah: After the financial crisis? The bankers were so bored they were calling whoever was actually making money.
Dean Solon: Exactly — Jefferies, Oak Tree, all of these guys. And I'm saying, look, I've never done anything trying to become rich. I just innovate, I want to feed my family, and take them to Disney twice a year.
The Disney Obsession
Jigar Shah: Wait — let's stop there. What is going on with Disney twice a year? Where did this obsession come from?
Dean Solon: 1972. My parents loaded us all into the back of a Buick Electra 225 and drove down to Orlando from Gary, Indiana. We walked into the Magic Kingdom. That hook went right into this little fish's mouth, and I've been hooked ever since.
Jamie Nolan: I've been to Disney twice in the last two years and my husband and I were prepared to hate it. We did not. I get the hype. But what's your favorite ride?
Dean Solon: Carousel of Progress.
Jigar Shah: Really?
Dean Solon: It starts with the turn-of-the-century, when there was no real electricity, no real plumbing, nothing. And then you watch American innovation progress the world — GE, Westinghouse, the rise of the automobile. Does it need an update? Yes. It's still running on Blu-ray. The last show at Disney needs a high-tech AI upgrade. But the heart of it is right.
Jamie Nolan: You should get in there, Dean.
Jigar Shah: I would have thought you were an Epcot guy.
Dean Solon: The second thing I love most is Tower of Terror at Hollywood Studios. And if you ever come to my factory — I actually power the building with children's screams. I have scream cans on every post and LEDs channeling laughter and screams into those cans and we operate the factory on it. It's Toy Story meets Monsters Inc. meets Cars.
Jamie Nolan: Who's your Disney crew these days?
Dean Solon: My wife tolerates Disney. But my daughters — I had them in the parks before they were three months old.
The Factory Floor and the Create Energy Vision
Jigar Shah: You've got that electric Harley behind you. You bought an electric Harley?
Dean Solon: Yes. And see that toolbox with the Nissan logo? I built Nissan's first microgrid at their North American corporate headquarters. It's a 60kW carport tied to a half-megawatt-hour battery energy storage system, tied to sixteen Level 2 chargers and two Level 3 chargers. My own little microgrid.
Jigar Shah: When do we get a Netflix show out of this? There are all these car rebuilding shows — there needs to be a nerding-out-on-microgrids show.
Dean Solon: This is my R&D lab — it goes way, way back, and then behind it is about 150,000 square feet of manufacturing. Two other buildings on the campus as well. My second building is my favorite — a full automotive shop. I call it Luigi's Garage from Cars. We've got a two-post lift, a four-post lift, a motorcycle lift. When we're tired of messing around with renewables, we go turn wrenches on old cars. It takes you from one kind of frustration to total frustration — and when you come back to the renewable side, you're actually less frustrated, because nothing is more frustrating than an old car. You fix it, it runs great, you park it, you come back a week later and the battery's dead.
Most of my employees — I call them cast members, because that's what Disney calls their people — I want them bringing 99% innovation and creativity and 1% office politics.
Think about it this way: remember when you just got your driver's license, grabbed a six pack, and went cruising? Life was nothing but opportunity. Pure opportunity. Then you go to college, you get your first job, and the innovation gets whipped out of you because office politics kicks in. By about age 28, you've got an 800-pound invisible gorilla called corporate culture sitting on your shoulders, and you've given up a lot of your creativity to navigate around it.
On Innovation, Office Politics, and Staying Young
Jigar Shah: My success has come from the fact that I got well-known at 29, running SunEdison, and I've basically stopped caring about the politics ever since. Everyone else is playing those games — "my bonus is tied to this, I've got to win this ballot initiative" — and I'm thinking, what are you doing? We invented this incredible stuff. Solar is the first time we've done something genuinely different in energy. Photons hit a silicon surface, you pop off an electron, you capture it in DC wire — you can build a system on top of the Himalayas. It is the most amazing thing ever and I still feel that way every single day.
Dean Solon: Yes — and I want my people to come to work and not be afraid to try things. When somebody says "I can't do it for this technical reason or that engineering reason" — I don't want to hear it. Just try it. That's what's kept me young, kept me innovating.
On Tariffs, 45X, and the State of Domestic Manufacturing
Why Manufacturing Here Is So Hard — and So Worth It
Jigar Shah: Let's go back to manufacturing. In 2012, the Obama administration put tariffs on solar panels. And now we've got 45X under the Inflation Reduction Act, which has actually started to move the needle. But I've always been more skeptical about tariffs than incentives. Give me your take on whether we can actually do big things in this country when it comes to manufacturing, and what it's going to take.
Jamie Nolan: And can you explain 45X for people not familiar with all the acronyms?
Jigar Shah: Sure. In the Inflation Reduction Act, there's a section of the tax code called 45X. Instead of giving you money to build a factory, it pays you an incentive for everything you produce out of that factory. Every battery you make, you get a subsidy. Every solar panel, a subsidy. And the more of the supply chain you onshore — cells, wafers, modules — the more subsidy you get. The goal was to reshore the full supply chain back to the United States by making it financially viable for entrepreneurs to do it here. For a long time, China was offering 2% interest loans to manufacture solar panels there, while here you were basically told, "If Wall Street won't fund you, good luck." 45X changed that calculus.
Dean Solon: Solar panels and battery modules are capital intensive. You put a lot of money out to make a relatively small margin. And it seems like every administration makes it easier and then harder and then easier again, which makes it nearly impossible to plan. To build a one-and-a-half to two-gigawatt solar facility, you're looking at a couple hundred million dollars of capital. If something goes wrong, you're in trouble.
Jigar Shah: The one thing that's better about solar manufacturing today versus a decade ago is that the technology has stabilized. The Chinese used to rip out equipment every two years and replace it with something newer. Today, you can put in machinery at 23% efficiency and have it run for seven years. You can actually amortize those machines over a reasonable period.
Jamie Nolan: So why was it so important to you to stick with domestic manufacturing through all of this?
Dean Solon: I'm an old gearhead, and I want American workers to get up, come to work, have pride in what they do, and go home — not wait for a check to arrive in the mail. When you get up and you achieve, you're feeding your family, you're giving yourself good mental health, you're raising your children on earned income. We went from being a manufacturing economy to a service economy, and we lost a lot in that transition.
Bringing manufacturing back is hard even for someone like me who's been doing it for thirty years. You don't have toolmakers. You don't have PLC coders. We've been losing those skills since Nixon ate Peking duck in Beijing and opened up trade with China. Every guy like Jack Welch at GE went chasing a better quarterly margin to hit his bonus at the end of the year — and every manufacturing building in every industrial town in America became a ghost or an Amazon warehouse.
Why the South? The Farm Work Ethic
Jigar Shah: But why the South? Why not Ohio or Indiana?
Dean Solon: Gary gets lake effect snow like nowhere else — Chicago dumps three feet right on Northwest Indiana. But when I moved to Nashville for the GE-Bosch plant, I fell in love with it and never left. What I get here in the South is a workforce that grew up on farms. A farm work ethic is unlike anything else — you're up at four in the morning, feeding the chickens by five, out plowing a field, and if the plow breaks, you grab the welder and fix it yourself or it doesn't get fixed. That self-reliance carries over. I drive around Portland, Tennessee, and it's all farms converting into industrial parks. That's the workforce I want.
The IPO, Retirement, and Create Energy
Retirement Lasted Three Months
Jigar Shah: You made your first big money on Shoals, but you also just had a big exit with Forgent. Give me the story behind Create Energy. Why did you decide to do it again?
Dean Solon: When I retired out of Shoals, I was bored out of my mind within about three months. I wake up at 4 a.m., I'm at work by 5:15, I don't leave until 6 or 7 p.m., five days a week, plus maybe ten hours Saturday and four hours Sunday. That's just how I'm wired.
I went from running Shoals — writing patents, building manufacturing processes, doing trade shows — to sitting in my backyard looking at the lake. I remember asking my wife, "What day is it?" She said, "Saturday. When are you going back to work?" I could literally feel my brain shutting down. If that's what retirement is, I'm not built for it.
Jigar Shah: So now you've started Create Energy, and it's doing more than just wire harnesses — solar panels, the whole package?
Create Energy: The McDonald's Menu Board for Solar
Dean Solon: My vision is what I call "on track" — think of it like a McDonald's menu board where you choose what you need and it gets delivered Amazon Prime style. Solar panels, trackers, wire harnesses, the whole thing. And one thing I've always done for every customer — I don't care if you need three pieces or three million, you get the same per-unit price. And where everyone's been giving two-year warranties on parts, I'm giving a ten-year bumper-to-bumper warranty on parts and labor out of the gate.
Celebrating the IPO: Upgrading to an Extra Large Dunkin' Donuts
Jigar Shah: When you have those big moments — like the Shoals IPO — how do you celebrate?
Dean Solon: When Shoals went public, I was sitting in our conference room watching it go live. One of my old buddies called and said, "Dean, it went to three or four billion dollars. What are you going to do? You're going to buy yachts, buy a mansion — what's the move?" I said, "Dude, I can't believe what's happened to me. Here's what I'm going to do to celebrate: I'm going to go from a large Dunkin' Donuts coffee to the extra large Dunkin' Donuts."
Jigar, I still drive my 2017 Chevy Bolt with 70,000 miles on it. I live in the same home I've always lived in.
Jigar Shah: My wife and I are the same way. I don't get any extra pleasure from wasting money.
Dean Solon: I've got guys in the data center world come up to me and ask which Falcon I flew in on. I say, "It's blue, orange, and yellow — it's a Southwest 737." They say, "You did not fly Southwest." I have two million points on Southwest. I fly Southwest. I drive a Chevy Bolt. I live in the same house.
Thank God this didn't happen to me in my thirties, because I might have done something stupid. But the advice I try to give everyone is: the best thing that can happen to you is that when you put your head on a pillow at night, you can thank God and go to sleep. No mortgage. No car payment. Just property taxes and a power bill.
Jigar Shah: Being grateful is a skill a lot of people don't practice. I totally agree with that.
Philanthropy: Fighting Human Trafficking
Jigar Shah: Do you and your wife have any special philanthropy you're particularly proud of?
Dean Solon: Yes, and it's a big one. We help women who have been survivors of human trafficking — there's an organization here in Nashville. I've kept it fairly quiet, but it's real and it matters.
Jigar Shah: How did you get involved?
Dean Solon: A close friend of mine is a retired Greek Orthodox priest who works with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations on human trafficking cases. We put something together and now we help hundreds of women get their lives back — through school, clothes, food, shelter, and the very hard work of deprogramming from the trauma and captivity they've endured.
The money from Shoals is in a trust and it funds the philanthropy entirely. The ages of trafficking victims is shocking — very young to quite old. One of our success stories: a girl we put through school just finished her law degree at Oxford. She was trafficked by her own father. So many stories that you literally cannot listen to without breaking down. But then you see what's possible on the other side.
I remember one girl who said, "If I could have one thing out of this organization, could it be a GED?" I told her: you're not just going to get a GED — if you want to go to college, we're going to figure out where. Vocational school? Diesel mechanics? Let's go get you through it.
Jigar Shah: I love how the college dropout is telling everyone to finish their degrees and go get advanced ones.
Dean, I want to thank you for spending so much time with us and being so honest. I was a little surprised that when the IPO happened, your answer wasn't "I'm going to Disney World."
Dean Solon: I just came back from Disney ten days ago. My daughter and I were there — we had a funeral to attend, and two days before I said, "Let's go to Epcot."
Jigar Shah: Thank you for being you. Thank you for constantly being that 13-year-old kid who keeps bringing life and energy to our industry. It's such a pleasure to be around you.
Takeaways
What Founders Can Learn from Dean Solon
Jamie Nolan: Well, that was great. I loved getting to know Dean. He's a zany guy and it was a really fun conversation. What's one lesson that founders should take from Dean's story?
Jigar Shah: When you have the clarity of vision that Dean has, just don't let people get you off track. Keep going. Bosch was trying to get him to move his entire operation to Mexico — and he said no. The very next day he got an order from First Solar. That level of persistence and grit is just so valuable to see.
Jamie Nolan: Do you think that's what you'd attribute his success to — sticking with domestic solar manufacturing when so many others have walked away? And where does domestic solar manufacturing stand today?
The State of Domestic Solar Manufacturing Today
Jigar Shah: It's been obvious for as long as I've known Dean that customer service is king for him. The stuff Shoals makes — wire harnesses, connectors, the components — was maybe a penny to two cents a watt, probably around 1% of total system costs. He wasn't going to make or break anyone's budget. But what does make or break a project is if construction can't start because parts didn't arrive, or if you're missing one piece out of 200 when you're trying to close out. The customer service angle is everything. And the fact that he treated someone who bought 10 pieces exactly the same as someone who bought a million — that is not an easy thing to maintain.
On the state of domestic manufacturing: the Inflation Reduction Act's 45X credit was a genuine game-changer. It finally gave entrepreneurs the tools to close the cost gap between manufacturing here versus in China. Today, 100% of solar modules used in the United States are made here. We've got significant cell manufacturing starting up, some wafer production coming online. We're on our way.
As for the current administration — I think the talking points about domestic manufacturing are one thing, but the actual support for people trying to climb that mountain is another. Even Dean had to pay enormous tariffs on equipment he needed to import in order to manufacture domestically. Villainizing imports is not the same as supporting manufacturers. The vibe is slightly off. I hope it changes.
Jamie Nolan: That's what impresses me most about people like Dean — they're going to manufacture here no matter what it takes. They're creating well-paying, family-supporting jobs in communities across this country. We need more of them. I wish him all the success in the world and I can't wait to see what he does next.
Jigar Shah: The Create Energy work is already taking off. He was an investor in a transformer roll-up that just went public. Dean is keeping himself very busy. The real question for our industry is whether we're going to see more solar billionaires like him.
Jamie Nolan: I hope so — but only if they're do-gooders. We need people building unevil empires like Dean. I was really moved by his work on human trafficking. Not something I expected from the man who had to be talked out of booth babes, but he spoke about it with real passion, and I'm glad we got to hear that side of him.
Jigar Shah: People surprise you. Having grown up in a very rural town in Illinois, and knowing that you grew up in a similar setting on the Eastern Shore of Maryland — people are just extraordinary with their time, and so generous. And they say the darndest things.
Jamie Nolan: They do. Some of which will not be included in this episode.