The Outlook for Solar: Q&A With Borrego Solar CEO Mike Hall

Borrego to finance the cost of designing and installing a solar system itself. An additional $30 million in project financing from Taiwan’s Walsin Lihwa was expected to lead to as much as $100 million in PPA projects. Customers, who are not required to bear any upfront costs, merely pay for the electricity generated once the solar system is operating.

On to my interview with Mike Hall:

Xconomy: What are the key differences between projects undertaken in San Diego (and Southern California) and Boston (and New England)?

Borrego Solar CEO Mike HallMike Hall: The big difference is in the environmental circumstances that you have to engineer for. In California, we largely can ignore the impact of heavy snowfall, but we need to worry about seismic considerations. In Massachusetts the opposite is true.

X: In New England, how difficult is it to arrange with NSTAR and other utilities to provide excess power into the grid?

MH: The utilities have generally been good to deal with. The net metering legislation in most parts of New England is very strong. In Massachusetts, it was recently strengthened to be more solar friendly. Utility scale renewable energy projects (solar especially) have been slow in adoption across all states. It can be challenging as they are large projects and very few have been undertaken before. It takes all parties involved some time to get comfortable with the risk profile.

X: How do you view the permitting process in Boston specifically, and New England in general, when it comes to solar energy installations? Are some areas better than others?

MH: The agencies for the most part are relatively new to the industry. The major difference for Massachusetts is the fact that

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.