Dan Conant Transcript
Clint Betts
Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO and founder of Solar Holler. Tell us what Solar Holler is and how you became the CEO and founder of the company.
Dan Conant
At Solar Holler, we're the largest developer installer of solar projects in central Appalachia, particularly in my home state of West Virginia, but we also work in Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia. But really, for the last 12 years or so, we've been on a mission to build the solar industry from scratch in coal country and to do it in a way that helps folks who had always gotten left behind. So we, in particular, started working with churches and libraries and homeless shelters and developing job training programs for kids of coal miners and all kinds of fun stuff that are letting us not just build a company but build an industry and do it in a way that we're proud of and will always be able to look back on pride with.
Clint Betts
What about solar gets you excited?
Dan Conant
A whole bunch of different things, but when we're working with a school. For instance, we're working with Wayne County School System right now in the heart of coal country in southern West Virginia. With the latest rate hikes in place, we're going to be able to save them enough to pay for nine teachers forever.
Clint Betts
You're kidding.
Dan Conant
So, every little bit of solar energy we put into their building means that they can put more towards teaching, books, and programming and that always makes me happy. But beyond that, too, just in West Virginia, we've been really proud for a really long time of how we've been able to power the Industrial Revolution, how we've been able to power the rest of the country, and that's kind of drilled into us growing up in the state and back in high school and college, we all talked about getting out or moving away, and you could kind of see the writing on the wall that things were changing. So a huge part of the impetus behind starting up Solar Holler was making it so that kids didn't have to move away if they wanted to continue to work in energy. And so that's been a big piece of what we're doing here.
Clint Betts
How does the state treat solar companies compared to, obviously coal, West Virginia is known for that, known for that industry still, and I know that they're trying to keep it alive as much as possible. How do politicians, government, all that type of stuff, how do they treat solar?
Dan Conant
Surprisingly well. We've gotten a ton of support from our federal legislators over the years. Not that we're getting a ton of grant funding or anything, it's just more that people like the idea of us continuing to be an energy state and being able to keep doing what we've always been doing. Beyond that though, I think the one thing that really unites folks across the state is hatred of the utilities and how prices on utilities go up year after year after year.
And in our state, we've got the fastest-rising utility rates of any place in the country and have for the last decade or so. So there's a real interest in people taking control. We've got a monopoly utility that they don't have to compete. They can just keep raising prices, however much they can convince the Public Service Commission to let them do. And as a result, people are looking for alternatives. And solar is the easiest and easiest to understand and easiest to put in place.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Dan Conant
Oh, all over the place. I get excited by shiny new things. So there's that. I personally am super involved on the policy and finance front, so we're constantly involved in public service commission cases or federal legislation. So kind of working on that. On the finance side, it's been really interesting that for a long time, our biggest challenge had always been that we were growing too fast. We had five straight years where we were growing more than 75% a year. And whenever you do that, you're constantly hitting up against your cash and your lines of credit, and so constantly negotiating with banks and financiers for the financing that'll allow us to do more stuff. So that's a good time. And then a little bit of everything beyond that too.
Clint Betts
Tell us about this virtual power plant idea and this whole crowdfunding model that you kind of innovated for this industry.
Dan Conant
So, back in 2013... So grew up in West Virginia. I grew up in my small town of 1500 people, moved away for college and grad school and getting into the industry. But in 2013, moved back home to start up the company and I really wanted to do my work with churches and nonprofits around the state, figuring that they're the folks who'd need it most.
The way you typically do solar for groups like that is what's called a power purchase agreement, where a solar company owns the panels, sells the power to the church, and then takes the tax credits behind the scenes. And you had to do it that way because nonprofits don't pay any taxes in the first place to be able to get credits.
Well, I started working with my congregation, Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church, and we attempted to do the first power purchase agreement in the state, but then we got shut down by the Public Service Commission for violating the utilities' monopoly on selling power. The PSC said, "No, only the utility can do that. And sorry, too bad." And at this point, I'd already quit my job. I'd already moved home and needed to figure out something to do.
And so we went back to the drawing board and created the first virtual power plant in the country. The idea is instead of having a coal plant or a nuclear plant in one single place, what if you hook up hundreds or even thousands or millions of little things and coordinate them all at the same time? And in our case, we did that with water heaters. So, I convinced a hundred of my neighbors in our tiny little town to let me install a remote control on their water heater.
And then my wife started day trading them on and off, on and off every two seconds with fluctuations of the power grid. And so we were using water heaters to stabilize the entire power grid across West Virginia and Maryland, DC, Pennsylvania. So we're playing in this real-time market, and we used all the revenue from that to give away solar to the Presbyterian church.
So, that initial project would've cost the congregation 55 grand. Instead, it didn't cost them anything, and it was all paid for just by these little day-trading, little blips in electricity consumption.
Clint Betts
That's wonderful.
Dan Conant
We did that back in 2013, 2014. Now, of course, Tesla is doing it with its battery systems. There are lots of virtual power plants going on, but we did it first in a small town in West Virginia, which makes me really proud. And then from there, we did it first with my church, then the Harper's Ferry Library, and then an affordable housing group. And for the first couple of years of our business, we never charged for a project. We just kept giving them away. I don't think it was until year three or four that we actually built a system for a normal contract.
Clint Betts
That's wild. That's really cool. Tell us what you've learned about leadership throughout leading this company. And you're a leader in a lot of different spaces. You're a leader of the company, but you're also there in West Virginia and even beyond, a leader in solar space and energy and things like that. What have you learned about leadership?
Dan Conant
For me, it's really about, it's not about a hierarchy. It's more about just sharing what I'm excited about and what ideas are popping into my head. And then I love having whiteboarding sessions with the whole team and the company, and we're going through all these crazy ideas. How are we actually going to pull them off? Of course, you need people who are good at details and good at organization, and we're fitting those people into the right space. But yeah, it's very much not a dictatorial my way or the highway kind of place; it's we're all here because we love this thing, and let's jam on this and do it because we all love it. So, that tends to be the approach within the company.
And then, as far as being involved in the wider solar space, I think what's been so important for us all along is that we're not just representing a company. We're actually representing our customers. And so whenever our customers are taken advantage of by the utilities, we're out there alongside them. And we're thinking about this not just from the perspective of a company trying to make money, but how do you use the company to drive the revitalization of an entire state?
West Virginia is the only state that has lost its population since the fifties. The entire country has tripled or more at this point. And here's West Virginia, which is actually slowly declining in population. So we've got lots of towns that have been emptying out, and we're doing everything we can to try to locate manufacturing back in the state and advocate for that, even if it's not going to be us doing the manufacturing just because we care about this place and want our towns to survive and doing work with low-income folks, those are our people and our neighbors and our friends. And so all of our policy work is kind of geared towards that.
We even unionized as a solar company, or we unionized our installation crews willingly, and we approached the union to join up back in 2020. And we did that because West Virginia really kickstarted the labor movement back in the twenties, 19 teens and twenties, and really even before that. Our approach has always been that just because you're changing the energy source doesn't mean you need to get rid of all the other great things that have come along with it. So we're really proud of that. [inaudible 00:13:04] There were only a handful of companies at that point, especially on the smaller end with residential and small commercial circa 2020; all the unionized shops were huge utility-scale kind of industrial shops. So, proving that we could do that while working on people's homes was basically unheard of at that point.
Clint Betts
Why has West Virginia uniquely experienced that decline since the fifties?
Dan Conant
Back then, at its peak, we had about 400,000 coal miners out of 1.8 million people.
Clint Betts
Oh, wow.
Dan Conant
So just if you think everybody was involved in the industry and you go across the southern part of the state, you've got entire towns that have just shrunk. As the coal industry became more mechanized, the image of a coal miner, someone with a pickaxe, literally picked out the coal underground. Well, starting in about the eighties, in the 1980s that that started to change. And coal miners for the last 30 to 40 years have been more, they operate big rigs, they're driving big equipment, they're using dozers and dynamite, and it's just a different industry than it was back then. So, it's gotten a whole lot more efficient from a personnel perspective. You need a whole lot fewer miners to produce the same amount of coal.
And with that, everything kind of shrunk up. And then, when you don't need as many miners, that means you don't need as many grocery stores. You don't need as many teachers. When you've got an entire town of 3,000, 5,000 people and the main industry is the mine and the mine doesn't need as many people anymore, the town's just going to shrink up. On top of that, even back in the fifties, people were telling kids going through West Virginia high schools that if they wanted to make it in this world, they had to get out. And if you ever saw the movie October Sky that came out back in the nineties, that was really the feeling. Well, the result of that is you get a brain drain. Everybody who's ambitious, everybody who wants to go get a good job, ends up going away to college or just kind of floating away. And all of that just kind of feeds on itself. So, in order to reverse that, you've got to make good opportunities available to people. You've got to actually give people a reason to stay home and really just provide the types of jobs and careers that people are going to want to do every day for their lives. And not that we're everything to that, we can't be, but we're trying to provide a little sliver of what we can. And at this point, we've got about 95 folks working at Solar Holler.
One of the other really cool things that we've been doing to combat the brain drain is launching internship programs with different county school systems. So one is the school system that I was mentioning that we're solarizing, we're covering all their schools with solar, but we've also got an internship program going with their VOTEC programs.
So kids and seniors in high school are going to school four days a week for electrical theory and history, carpentry, and everything else they're going to school for. And then one day a week, they're paid members of our crews. We're specifically targeting seniors in high school because that's a really important fork in your life where you can either go down one path that means moving away, moving out of state, moving to Columbus or Pittsburgh or Raleigh, or wherever you're going to go. And if you do that, you're probably never coming back. You're not coming back. Or if you stick around at that point, you get to stay close to your family and your social networks and kind of make a go of it.
And so we're currently on our third cohort, and during the first two cohorts, we ended up having a 40% sign-on rate full-time at graduation. So I'm just thrilled about that in terms of developing the talents that we need to actually pull this software. It turns out we need a lot of people to run the entire economy off of renewables. But then, from the brain drain perspective, I'm really, really excited that we've been able to have so much success with that.
Clint Betts
What do you read, and what reading recommendations do you have for us?
Dan Conant
For a long time, I only read nonfiction, but I need more and more fiction these days, too, so my favorite book of the past year is a book called The North Woods by Daniel Mason. It follows a single farm in Massachusetts through 400 years, and all the families that kind of cycle in and out of this apple orchard and has a little bit of paranormal stuff in there, too, and some ghosts. But that's probably the single book that's stuck with me the most over the past year, which I think makes sense given my attachment to places and places and countryside. And that book really just made me happy.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Tell us what you're thinking about; we're speaking at the beginning of 2025 here; how are you thinking about this year versus last year, this time, economic outlook, and how things are looking? I mean, obviously, there was some unpredictability at the beginning of last year for obvious reasons and some unobvious. How are you feeling right now?
Dan Conant
Yeah, this is an interesting year for renewables in general, given the new administration coming in, so I think there's a lot of uncertainty right now. I don't know if you want to edit this out, but we've been dealing over the last two weeks with federal agencies ignoring contracts that have been signed over the last year. So we're just dealing with the bureaucracy of all that and tariffs being implemented this weekend. And so there's all of the government uncertainty.
But the other things that are... And those are the headwinds, the tailwinds that we're dealing with, though, where there's more power needed than ever before. Artificial intelligence is taken off. And it turns out you need a ton of juice to power those data centers. In particular, for us in West Virginia, my hometown is in the eastern Panhandle, right on the Potomac River. So we're 30 miles from the data centers in Northern Virginia that are powering the entire internet.
Just gobs and gobs and gobs of power that you need to do that. The only way to get power onto the grid fast enough is to put in panels in little bits. It takes a ton of time. It can take seven years to put in a utility-scale or a giant power plant. It takes us a month or two to put in a rooftop array from contract to actually putting it in. So that's all at our back right now. It turns out people need power, and solar energy is the cheapest way on the planet to make it, and that's not changing no matter what kind of bureaucratic kerfuffles go on in the meantime.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Give me a sense of how you think about this need for power in the age of AI. I mean, it's obviously what everybody's thinking about. I mean, the president, with a bunch of huge tech leaders, announced a $500 billion project that was mostly around infrastructure, meaning mostly around power and data centers. How do you think that gets solved? I mean, if we need that much power, and it's interesting, maybe we don't just post that DeepSeq comes out and says that they did it for way less, so who knows, but how do you think about AI and our need for power and how we don't have nearly enough according to the experts?
Dan Conant
Yeah, it's been fascinating watching the utilities adjust their projections on how much power they're going to need. And the Commonwealth of Virginia, for instance, the forecast in the last year or two have changed so that they're doubling the amount of power they need as a state just because of the data centers that are in pipeline or in queue.
Once again, it kind of all comes back to speed. And right now, you've got this huge log jam of everybody who is thinking about building a solar farm or a wind farm or re-upping a nuclear plant or anything like that. They're all kind of just throwing their hats in the ring, and it's taking years and years and years to analyze all that. So, on the one hand, you actually need some AI to figure out how to do all the power clustering analysis, which I don't know will help our problem. It should drive a bunch of efficiency and how you actually analyze it to bring stuff on board. So, there are some really cool companies in the solar software space working on that angle. I would like to give a shout-out to my friends at Kevala Analytics, who are working on that.
But beyond that too, you just really need to think about it from the perspective of speed to market. And there was an announcement maybe a month ago, I forget exactly when, that Virginia is trying to put the first nuclear fusion power plant into operation down in Norfolk or down in Hampton Roads somewhere. But even with that announcement, we're still, if everything goes right six or seven years away.
In the meantime, you've got data centers that need the electricity, and that means they're probably going to be burning more coal. They're probably going to be burning more gas. Just because that's what's available right now. And if you want to meet it in a non-carbon way, you just have to put in more solar as easily as you can, which is going to be on rooftops, it's going to be behind the meter. It's going to be where people are already using power and just using those rooftops as much as we can, because like I said, we can, instead of those seven-year waits, we can go from contract to actually building it in the space of a month or two.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's interesting. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Dan Conant
There are a couple of folks, all my professors at Allegheny, who took a chance on a crazy kid with crazier hair from little Appalachia, a little Appalachian town. Beyond that, my friends Dwayne and James hired me into my first solar role despite having no experience in the industry. So, thanks, Dwayne and James.
And then I'd say an even bigger shout-out goes to all my friends at Shepherd's Town Presbyterian, who, what was that 12 years ago now, took a chance that I'd actually be able to pull off this crazy idea of a virtual power plant and that they were willing to be Guinea pigs in their own homes with it and all the good stuff that has come out of it, and all of Solar Holler and everything that developed after that was because they didn't laugh me out of the room. So thanks, y'all.
Clint Betts
Dan, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on. Congratulations on everything you built seriously, and you're making a difference in the world, which is unique and really fun.
Dan Conant
I appreciate the chance to be on here.
Edited for readability.