Interview: Phil Coupe, Solar Power Entrepreneur
A regional leader in the great American clean energy transition shares his story
Phil Coupe is a co-founder of ReVision Energy, a 100% employee-owned clean energy company serving northern New England. The company is also a certified B Corp with a mission to make life better by building our just and equitable electric future.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Coupe’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
Can you tell me the origins of ReVision Energy? How did you come to start a solar company and what has it been like to be running a solar company during the epic global rise of solar power, particularly the massive decrease in solar prices since 2010?
Well, I live in Maine and 20 years ago, there really weren't any significant solar companies of scale in the region. There were a few small backwoods operations doing off-grid solar, but no companies trying to foment a clean energy transition. After years of reading about the impact of billions of people burning fossil fuels in earth’s closed atmosphere, my instinct was that society desperately needed to move away from coal, oil and gas, and needed companies that could design and build high quality renewable energy systems that would be as reliable and functional as our traditional energy systems.
As I started trying to find a way into the industry, I had the good fortune to meet a couple of amazing engineers, Bill Behrens and Fortunat, who eventually became my business partners in the creation of ReVision Energy.
And that was kind of the earliest genesis of what ultimately became our employee-owned B Corp. It was sort of like the proverbial tale of a company that starts with a couple people in a garage and then scales unexpectedly large. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that today we are 460 people in six locations in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
I was just reading that the federal Energy Information Administration now expects U.S. solar power generation to grow by a whopping 75% from 2023 to 2025. Correct me if I'm wrong, but between solar price decreases and the Inflation Reduction Act, this must be boom times, right? What is the current business picture for ReVision Energy now, given that there's the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for solar and increased uptake of solar nationwide?
So the unfortunate reality we're facing, Sam, is that over the last 50 years, the fossil fuel industry has metastasized into a multi-trillion-dollar colossus that is arguably the most powerful entity on earth.
And that enormous power extends to both the political arena and the marketplace. Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry very badly wants to maintain its dominant status quo. So it is spending enormous amounts of money to sow chaos, confusion and doubt about the viability of a clean energy transition. And so you just said ‘the market really seems to be booming and this must be boom times.’ My counterpoint is that I think the clean energy industry would be growing 10 times as fast as it is today if it weren’t for the fact that the fossil fuel industry is constantly trying to drag down the renewable energy industry.
I am aware of that. I know how much opposition you guys face.
So we feel like we are constantly fighting with one arm tied behind our back because if you think about the clean energy industry, it’s trying to emerge, right? In history, what other industry had to fight as big a foe as the fossil fuel industry in their efforts to try to become mainstream and successful?
That's not to complain. It's really just to show for your audience that they have to be incredibly mindful about how much money is being spent to convince them that solar doesn't really work, that electric vehicles aren't really ready for prime time, that climate damage is not actually a real thing.
And so I'm trying to educate consumers to understand that a lot of the disinformation out there about the clean energy transition is intentional by the fossil fuel industry.
Absolutely. I totally agree with that. I'm aware of that. And part of the reason I write what I write is to try to show people: Look, solar’s doing great stuff! Look, this is a real thing! This is what's keeping the lights on. This is not some liberal fantasy. This is becoming the workhouse of the world.
So I totally agree with everything you just said. I guess what I'm saying is, given that you're still facing an incredibly well-funded propaganda machine trying to attack your product, which obviously sucks, given that, did the Inflation Reduction Act make things better? Like, are you seeing more orders, given that there's now some more federal support for solar than there used to be?
Without a doubt, the Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest piece of clean energy legislation in the history of humankind it is already having a powerful and measurable positive impact on the entire clean energy industry nationwide. We're extremely grateful for that.
What’s key for people to understand is that the IRA is delivering benefits to 100% of Americans. It’s creating manufacturing jobs, it's bringing back manufacturing from overseas that we conceded in past decades and it’s unleashing a torrent of clean energy investments and innovations. Plus, due to the ‘buy American’ provisions in the IRA, we have suddenly discovered that the U.S. has abundant supplies of critical mineral resources like Lithium to help us build electric vehicles and battery storage systems. The IRA is also bringing clean energy and economic boosts to former coal states like Kentucky and West Virginia.
In the big, long-term picture, the Inflation Reduction Act is benefiting all of America in terms of national security, which is an undervalued aspect of the clean energy transition.
Because when you think about it, America is arguably the last remaining superpower on the face of the earth in terms of our global reach and our influence. From a military standpoint, fossil fuels continue to be extremely critical resources necessary to defend territory and respond wherever needed globally. Based on the fact that we are digging up and burning our remaining underground reserves at an alarming clip, I would argue that America’s domestic reserves of oil and gas have become our most valuable strategic defense assets. [There’s also a strong case that we should keep a reserve of unburned fossil fuels available to help restart civilization in case of apocalypse; an even longer-term interest].
Thus we should be using our remaining reserves of oil and gas as stingily as we can and only for the best and highest use cases, while we build out a clean energy infrastructure that can carry our nation whether we run out of fossil fuels or whether they become too environmentally problematic to continue burning. As you know, many people would argue we have already crossed that threshold.
I bring this up, Sam, to say that we need a clean energy movement that appeals to 100% of America, not just the 60 to 70% who think we should be doing this. We need 100% of America going in the same direction on energy, similar to how Americans came together in the 1940’s to defeat the Axis powers.
Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you saw this, but the amount of installed solar capacity in Texas just overtook the amount of installed solar capacity in California, despite California having a lot of pro-solar policies and Texas having essentially none at the state level.
I think that's a really salient point about the extraordinary progress of renewable energy and battery storage in a place like Texas. I've recently read that the installed solar, wind and battery capacity that's gone in in the last 12 months would have made a big difference during last year's catastrophic winter storm down in Texas. I think people were actually freezing to death because natural gas pipelines froze and they couldn't get enough energy on the grid and in people's homes to keep them warm and powered through the multi-day deep freeze.
And so when people in Texas, you know, kind of lived through that extreme weather a year ago, and then this year they realize that clean energy is helping them keep the lights on and stay warm during the harshest months of the year, that really helps overcome the politicization of clean energy. That's great news for everybody.
There are just so many benefits to clean energy! If climate change magically wasn’t a problem, we’d still want to switch to clean energy just to reduce the air pollution deaths, to reduce the soot and particulate matter in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. If climate change and air pollution magically weren’t problems, we'd still probably want to do it just for the distributed modularity and the resilience aspects. The fact that every house could have their own solar panel and battery backup in case of a storm or catastrophic event, the fact that we hopefully don’t need to worry about geopolitical issues interrupting the supply of sunlight. There are so many benefits in so many domains even beyond the climate, like you said.
Totally agree.
I saw that you guys had an anniversary celebration and you were able to power it based on the batteries in your Ford F-150 Lightning pickup trucks. Is that correct?
Yes, we actually overdid it. We brought five Ford F-150 Lightnings to this celebration thinking that we would need that much power to run the entire soundstage. And we had a killer band! The Mallet Brothers Band showed up to play for us.
It turned out that we could have done the whole concert on one or two Lightnings. Those vehicles have the equivalent of 10 Tesla Powerwalls in the battery pack, which is 131 kilowatt hours of storage. And so it turned out that that was more than enough energy to power a bumping party for about four hours!
You were, I believe, part of one of the first community solar farms in Maine, in South Paris. Can you tell me more about that, how that came around, how that's grown, and explain to people who might not have heard the term how a community solar farm works and how they've grown?
Sure. The reality is that not every home and business and school can have solar on its own property, particularly in Maine which is the most heavily forested state in the nation, which means a lot of shady rooftops. Sometimes the rooftop doesn't face the right direction or the rooftop isn't strong enough to hold a solar array or they may not have any ground mounting opportunities. You have to build solar where it has a good place to harvest sunshine all day, and that's not always on the end user's property. So community solar is this approach where you build a remote solar array that could, say, maybe satisfy a hundred households, and then you can direct the power from that remote array back to the homes by using the grid electrical infrastructure and the meters that are in that infrastructure.
“Dead space” is a great place for a community solar farm, like an old landfill that is closed because we've filled it up with trash and covered it with a big mound of soil and clay with grass on top.
That capped landfill can't be used for anything else in the world, so why not use it for clean energy generation? So we'll put up maybe two to five megawatts worth of solar on this capped landfill and we will feed that electricity into the utility grid. Then the consumers who sign up for a share in that community solar farm, they get a portion of that electricity that's generated remotely. It gets allocated to the meter at their house or at their business or at their school.
We generally avoid using prime agricultural land for community solar farms, but we've also actually started building community solar farms that blend in agriculture with crop growing or livestock growing because the dual use approach creates more value for farmers, the community and the environment. We also try to avoid cutting down trees for community solar because they are literally the lungs of the earth.
Agrivoltaics!
Yeah. So when we built that first community solar farm more than a decade ago, there were some old archaic rules around the size of a community solar farm. It was limited to 10 members.
Yeah, 10 people, that's more like a neighborhood solar farm.
Not even, that’s a cul-de-sac!
A duplex solar farm. Or a triplex.
So it's actually a very tiny little community solar farm, but we built it to just prove the point that it could be done and that ultimately it would save people money while reducing their carbon footprint. And we did prove that point.
And now we're thankful that we can, under the new laws that have cropped up over the last five years in northern New England, we can now build community solar farms up to five megawatts, which can supply energy to hundreds of homes and/or businesses.
So it's been useful to figure out how to build a small community solar farm such that today we are now able to scale them to get community-wide community solar as necessary.
What are your thoughts on the global supply chain, which is often an issue for solar but is gradually becoming less and less so as the Inflation Reduction Act leads to a bunch of solar manufacturing scaling up in the US?
For example, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was necessary to help fight forced labor in China, which is an ongoing issue. There was a complex Commerce Department investigation into a tariff case over Southeast Asian solar panels.
Does any of that global drama trickle down to become an issue for your business? Have you had issues getting your supply of solar panels? Or do you find that that is mostly not a problem for you?
Well, solar is just one of thousands of global commodity products that get manufactured worldwide and shipped worldwide to meet the ever-growing demands of the marketplace. At times, solar has been impacted by the global supply chain. For example during the COVID pandemic, everybody all around the globe seemed to be having different types of supply chain problems.
But Revision Energy is a member of this national solar co-op called Amicus Solar. It's amicussolar.com. We are now a co-op of about 100 solar companies across the entire United States, and we band together for bulk purchasing of solar products like inverters, solar panels, and a variety of related commodity components. The co-op allows us to show up as this single enormous buyer in the marketplace, which means we can go manufacturer direct when we're aggregating the orders for 100 different solar companies.
That initiative to start the Amicus Solar Cooperative about 12 years ago has grown into this really super strong resilience, kind of like a supply chain cushion for all of us that belong to the co-op. And it's made us very resilient and able to withstand supply chain disruptions much better than some other non-co-op members throughout the United States.
The other thing is, the Inflation Reduction Act has really unleashed a wave of reshoring of solar panel and inverter manufacturing in the United States. We're gradually beginning to be able to source high quality products that have been built right here in the US. And of course, that's always going to be the shortest supply chain that exists. That's the one we are most in favor of. We'd like to be 100% domestic purchasing as quickly as possible, but that's still going to be a few years away.
We're very proud as a company that we've never sourced a single solar panel directly from China. Even though China has its fingerprints all over the global supply chain and some of the wafers that come from China will get assembled in Taiwan or the Philippines, but we never buy panels directly from China. We have sourced from Germany, we've sourced from South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, but never from China.
I think it's good for Americans to know that that is possible in this world, because a lot of what we hear from the fossil fuel industry is, oh, if you're doing clean energy, you're only supporting China. And that's just not true.
Absolutely. Obviously China is a big presence in the renewable energy market, but it is not all the renewable energy market. There is a vast amount of amazing great stuff you can do without sending money to China, and without potentially indirectly engaging in unethical Chinese labor practices. I'm very glad to hear that, and I think that's a very ethical choice you guys are making.
With the rise of new solar and battery powered devices from boats to leaf blowers to lawnmowers, does that connect to your business at all?
Roughly 10 years ago, the clean energy industry invented the term ‘beneficial electrification’, and following on from beneficial electrification came the call to action to ‘electrify everything’.
A decade ago that was a wildly aspirational goal, to electrify everything. At the time there weren't that many viable electric products that were ready to compete with traditional internal combustion products. Fast forward to today, and we have mind blowing examples of beneficial electrification and electrify everything!
For example, we already have the world's first electric airplanes flying around in the sky. And the first commercial electric planes are expected to be operating within five years. We already have electric snowmobiles, electric dirt bikes. We have electric excavators, electric dump trucks, electric ferries, electric container ships. There's a hybrid electric cruise ship that's already sailing on the ocean.
The emergence of electric boats is just one more example of this rapid progression toward what is ultimately the superior performance of electric technology. Electric automobiles are vastly better than the internal combustion engine version because they are faster, silent and the cost of ownership is less than half of the internal combustion engine. Plus you can charge your EV at home every day and start off with a full battery without ever having to go to an expensive gas station again. Right now electricity is less than half the cost of gasoline on a per mile basis.
Electrify Everything has now become a realistic goal that you're seeing happen across everything, in every product in the world. I already have a high quality electric boat. It's got a 100 horsepower electric outboard motor built by Flux Marine, fluxmarine.com. They're going to be the Tesla of outboard motors, without the crazy CEO. There's a lot of gee whiz factor to the electric boat, but importantly the performance is much better than the old Yamaha 115 horsepower gas engine that I had on it. Now I can enjoy quiet, fast boating with zero obnoxious exhaust fumes blowing into the boat.
That is great. Ultimately, even if people don't care about or don't believe in climate change, that is what will prompt them to switch, right? When it's just better.
I have this sort of emerging concept that environmentalism, and the climate movement in general, doesn't have to win the argument to win the war. Like, we don't necessarily have to convince people to care about climate change to actually take the action on climate change, because the solutions that renewable energy brings are just so good across so many domains, we can get wide adoption just because it's such a compelling product.
What are some anecdotes of what it takes to make a solar project happen on the ground? What is the sort of day-to-day sort of procedure of making a community solar farm or just a rooftop solar array happen?
We believe that the clean energy transition really depends consumers having high quality experiences with clean energy companies. This requires that the customer service end of the business is incredibly well-tuned and geared toward taking awesome care of every client every step of the way.
It also means that your engineering and design teams are experienced and knowledgeable and know how to design systems that deliver maximum economic and environmental return on investment.
And then you need to make sure that your installation team is as highly credentialed and trained and as experienced as they possibly can be.
We've tried to create a company that vertically integrates all of those components so that our clients receive a really high quality experience and end up with a renewable energy project or system that operates as good or better than what they experienced with their traditional energy systems. It’s crucial they feel like they got good value out of it.
To help make sure we deliver the best experience and installations to our customers, Revision Energy is a 100% employee-owned company because we believe that a co-owner who feels they have skin in the game will deliver their very best effort to their craft.
We’re also 100% employee-owned because we're trying to disrupt and reject the winner-take-all capitalism that we think has created some of the world's very worst problems, like extreme wealth concentration and extreme environmental degradation. These problems are unfortunately embodied by the fossil fuel industry itself. Being employee-owned and a certified B Corp is our way of trying to be the antidote to all of those really massive problems that winner-take-all capitalism has inflicted on the planet and its inhabitants.
And so when we explain to our prospective customers who we are and what we're trying to do and what our goals are, and the fact that we've been in business for 20 years and now have built more than 20,000 successful clean energy systems, we find ourselves able to attract and retain both clients and the co-owners who we need to keep accelerating this clean energy transition.
I love writing about companies that come up with a really awesome scalable way of doing lots of good in the world, and you guys are very clearly one of those.
Capitalism's kind of a bad word among my age group in many ways. I often try to point out, you know, I think what people really don't like is oligarchy, corruption, that winner take all version of capitalism you talked about. But I love your kind of capitalism! I'm trying to write about the companies that really have a strong ethical focus and are really working hard to make the world a better place. That's really great to hear.
Thank you.
So I'm sure you've seen there's been a huge wave of studies recently pointing out that solar panel waste is not really that much of a problem. There's not going to be that much of it. Solar panels tend to outperform what people expect, and what there is can be easily recycled and has essentially little to no toxic impact. So that's another, you know, fossil fuel attack on solar going down the drain, as they all tend to do.
Given that you guys have been around for a while now, have you come up with a standard procedure for end of life solar projects? Or updating solar projects, if you had to go back to some of the older projects and replace them with new panels?
So I think it's important for your readers to know that an entire solar panel recycling industry has formed already. I think there are two nationwide solar panel recycling companies.
Solar panels are made of silicon, glass, and copper, among other materials, so they can be pretty handily broken down and reconstituted into more clean energy products.
If you just Google solar panel recycling, you will see that there's lots of options to do the right thing, and not just put clean energy technology into a landfill. We Recycle Solar is one of them.
So you just have a relationship with these companies, you send your old solar panels to them and they recycle them.
Yeah. It’s kind of like computer recycling, except it's easier. Clean technology is generally easier to recycle than lots of other waste streams, particularly internal combustion engine material.
Yeah, because you don't have flammable petroleum based liquids running around and oozing and dripping into things! Solar panels have no moving parts. They're just a lot easier to handle as a material.
Yep. True.
You know, the vast amount of energy that the Sun delivers to Earth is almost incomprehensible. In one hour, the sun is putting enough energy on the surface of the Earth to power all global demand for an entire year. And put another way, 18 days of sunshine contain the same amount of energy as is in all the oil, gas and coal still remaining underground within Earth. So that's kind of a cool fact.
When I talk about the solar resource in Northern New England, it’s rewarding to enlighten people about the fact that Maine's latitude is identical to Monaco on the French Riviera. The South of France and the North of Spain is a famously sunny region on planet Earth. We don't get the year-round balmy temperatures that they do because of the Gulf Stream, but the bottom line is that this is a very sunny latitude that we're at.
And then the other way we talk about the solar resource in northern New England is to note that a solar array in Maine will yield roughly the amount of solar electricity as a solar array in Houston, Texas. And that's because solar panels are more efficient at lower temperatures. So when it's 30 degrees and brilliant sunshine in Maine like it is right now, you're getting a much higher yield per meter of solar panel than you would in hot and humid Texas.
In my front row seat at ReVision Energy, I'm witnessing tipping points all over the place, similar to this example from history. You've got 1900 New York City, all horses. The first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. And by 1913, you've got this radical disruption of transportation technology and fuel switching from hay and water to gasoline.
And now we see this happening all around us, you know, cumulative plug-in U.S. electric vehicle sales are skyrocketing. We now have 87 countries around the globe that have surpassed the 5% tipping point into widespread adoption [of clean energy]. And most people aren't aware of these facts. Humankind is not really clued in. Green investments are matching fossil fuel investments!
Absolutely. I write about this a lot. I think part of the problem is nobody has an incentive to celebrate this victory. The political right obviously wants to deny that climate change is a problem or that renewable energy is a good thing. And the political left, for understandable reasons, wants to focus on the problem, to keep whipping people up to fight the fossil fuel corruption, which is good, but it can also, I think, lead to ignoring all the amazing progress we're seeing. I'm trying to report on the progress.
So I guess my final question is, what else would you like to share? We've covered a bunch of aspects of the amazing transition happening. What final word would you want to leave readers with?
We can do this.
I love it. I absolutely agree. We can do this! And I was just writing, you know, we're looking to be on track to avoid RCP 8.5, the worst case climate scenario, due to the work of a bunch of amazing people like you. I feel like this is the victory that dare not speak its name, almost. We're making huge progress against climate change, finally. And the world is distracted, so it's not getting much attention.
But yes, we can do this! That is exactly the motto of the kind of writing and work I try to do. So thank you so much.
You're welcome, Sam.
Great talking with you.
Likewise.
Lots and lots to like here. I loved every point made. Standouts for me were the agrivoltaics, the solar co-op (great idea!)and the general leadership and vision of Phil's enterprise.
I'm interested to know the reliability of E/Marine motor compared to gasoline power marine engine in both ships and pleasure crafts?