Why George Hershman of SOLV Energy Is Bullish on Solar: The Economics Driving Growth

In this episode of the Green Giants Podcast, host Wes Ashworth welcomes George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, to discuss the economic forces driving the solar industry’s explosive growth. This conversation reveals why solar energy is thriving, regardless of political shifts.

SOLV Energy has built over 15 gigawatts of solar projects, making it the top solar contractor in the U.S. Hershman shares his unmatched industry insights, explaining how technological demands, such as AI and widespread electrification, are making solar the most cost-effective and scalable energy solution today. He also discusses the industry’s transition from being policy-dependent to being driven by pure economics.

Key Takeaways:

• Solar’s Unstoppable Growth: Hershman details the massive demand surge and how AI and electrification are changing the game.
• Economic Resilience: Learn how SOLV Energy thrived through different political administrations by focusing on market fundamentals.
• Community and Job Impact: The episode covers solar’s role in job creation, especially in underserved areas, and the broader community benefits.
• Innovation at Scale: Discover how SOLV Energy embraces new technologies to accelerate project timelines and enhance efficiency.
• Overcoming Challenges: Hershman addresses supply chain and workforce hurdles, and how the industry is meeting these head-on.

Show Notes:

1. Introduction (0:00 - 1:25): Wes introduces George Hershman and SOLV Energy’s achievements.
2. Hershman’s Solar Journey (1:28 - 6:58): From starting with a small team during the 2008 crisis to becoming a solar titan.
3. Scaling Up (7:00 - 13:12): How SOLV Energy’s growth philosophy drives opportunities and innovation.
4. Current Market Overview (13:14 - 19:33): Why George is bullish on solar and the tech-driven trends fueling demand.
5. Economic Stability (19:35 - 22:09): Navigating political climates and why solar’s future is secure.
6. Workforce and Supply Chain (22:11 - 24:19): Challenges in scaling labor and logistics, and strategies to overcome them.
7. Regional Expansion (24:21 - 30:34): Insights into SOLV Energy’s strategic moves into new markets.
8. Diversifying Services (30:36 - 35:15): Why SOLV Energy is more than just an EPC provider, offering SCADA and repowering solutions.
9. Innovation Highlights (35:17 - 45:27): How robotics and AI are optimizing solar construction and the vision for future growth.
10. Closing Remarks (45:29 - End): Wes wraps up the episode, emphasizing the transformative impact of solar energy.

Links:
George on LinkedIn
SOLV Energy

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Transcript

Wes Ashworth (00:25)

Welcome back to the Green Giants podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to introduce a true leader in the solar industry, George Hershman the Chief Executive Officer of SOLV Energy. George has spent over 30 years in construction and has spent the last decade propelling SOLV Energy to the forefront of the renewable energy industry. Under George’s leadership, SOLV Energy has completed over 300 utility scale solar installations across the United States, building over 15 gigawatts of solar energy projects in 30 states.

His team’s remarkable achievements have earned SOLV Energy the distinction of being the number one solar contractor by Solar Power World and the top EPC and O&M provider in the industry. Beyond the numbers, George has also served two terms as board chair of the Solar Energy Industries Association, where he’s been an advocate for the entire solar sector.

Join us as we dive into George’s journey, the future of large scale solar projects and how SOLV Energy continues to shape the renewable energy landscape with innovation and purpose. Welcome to the show, George.

George Hershman (01:25)

Well, thank you, Wes. Appreciate you having me.

Wes Ashworth (01:28)

It’s an absolute pleasure to have you and to start out with a little bit of personal journey and just some of your leadership. I know you’ve been with SOLV Energy really since its early days and have led the company through absolutely tremendous growth. I’m curious, what drew you initially to the solar energy sector and what’s kept you passionate about it over the years?

George Hershman (01:49)
Well, it’s interesting. We actually started our renewable energy division of a legacy construction company that we were a part of back in 2008. And if you can imagine in 2008 going through the financial crisis being a large commercial contractor, we had a lot of impacts in our business. And so we had to look for areas where we could really reposition people. It was a really tough time, a lot of projects in the commercial space. When you think about office buildings, hospitality, multifamily residential, all markets that were just devastated in 2008. And so we looked at where could we pivot parts of our organization and look for opportunities. And being based in California, it was a right opportunity to look at a kind of a growing solar market.

If you remember, there was a California solar initiative that was, really helped to grow the commercial market. There was also something really new in the industry, which was a power purchase agreement where somebody, a third party developer, if you could imagine, this is how long ago it was, people were trying to explain how a power purchase agreement could work, a third party developer could install solar on your school, office building, medical campus, pay all of the capital expenditure associated to it, and then sell power, right? Pretty traditional, you know, industry market, obviously now, but in 2008, it was pretty new, gave us an opportunity to look back at our customer, our traditional customer base, you know, community colleges, universities, medical centers, and go to them in a very tough market where they were looking at how do they hedge their operating expenses and offer them this opportunity.

So we really started in that space. started in carports, rooftops. And it was just what we thought was a bit of a port in a storm, an area where we could use our expertise in building in the built environment and bringing kind of a new solar opportunity to the marketplace. And so, you know, we started out with a very small group. And when I say a very small group, I mean, it was like two people, myself and one other. And we carved out, you know, kind of a more of a, let’s go see what we could find and create some ways to, keep working and, and put some people to work. And, you know, we had a strong name, strong reputation in California.
It was a good opportunity for us to do some projects. We started, you know, really in like 2009 and 10 doing, you know, school districts. I think our biggest kind of breakthrough program we did with recurrent energy at the time, which was, became one of our largest clients and we continue to do work with a number of iterations of that company and group over time. But it was a large-scale healthcare system in California that was like 15 hospitals and medical centers under a large program.

And that was one of our biggest initial kickoffs into the market. That ultimately transitioned us into utility scale solar, which was like a 10 megawatt project at the time. And we quickly saw that that was a much better place for us, better place for our resources, opportunity for us to innovate on how projects were gonna get delivered at scale and really haven’t ever turned back. And we’ve done some commercial work along the way, but for the most part it was, move into utility and then continue to grow with the market from that point forward. And where we are today, just as we update the numbers kind of so quickly, I think we’re close to about 15 gigawatts of built solar these days. So we’re putting probably, I think we did about four gigawatts last year. So the market is really growing dramatically and seeing huge opportunities.

Wes Ashworth (06:28)
Yeah, that is such a cool story. I love the pivot from the economy, having a hard time, kind of using your strengths and pivoting to this market that you’ve been ever since, as you’ve said, and have grown tremendously. It’s an incredible story. I am curious to learn more about that. as a leader, you it was you and maybe one other that you mentioned, really, really small team there. How have you managed to scale SOLV Energy from that small team to now one of the largest solar companies in the US?

George Hershman (06:58)
Well, it’s, you know, I mean, it’s kind of an interesting, you know, when you look at the kind of steps of the company, we’ve, we’ve had kind of two major milestone moments. One was, you know, I’ll be starting the company in the middle of, you know, huge economic downturn. And, and you, you fast forward and the company grew and we continued to scale over time with the market, you know, we were able to build lasting relationships where we did repeat business over time and we grew the business successfully. And then really the next, you know, point in time was another, you know, significant, you know, kind of economic moment, which was 2020 in COVID.

We looked at the business, we’re now sitting in a situation that looks like we’re going to go into the next economic downturn. And we’re in this kind of fork in the road where we say, it looks like our commercial business is going to go through an economic downturn again. And our renewable business is now so well positioned and moving into a new administration that was going to be very pro renewables and likely end up with a large scale policy that was going to continue to grow renewables.

And we saw that as a point in time that we were literally going to break the company apart. There was no way that we could have part of the company trying to figure out how to manage through what thankfully wasn’t the recession we all thought it was. But you couldn’t predict that in 2020. And then a company that was going to grow 30 or 40 % per year. So that’s where we really decided at that point, the right thing to do was to separate the organizations. And we went through a kind of a leveraged buyout process.

Ultimately ran a process, brought in a investor sponsor for what is now SOLV Energy and carved that out to a specific business that was going to focus on renewables and both in the EPC business and a suite of technologies around SCADA, our O&M offering, bring all those together and really focus that part of the business while we allowed our legacy company to move forward and focus on their business, which ultimately has been great for them as well as they’ve come out of COVID and that business continues to move successfully.

But to your question around growth, part of my mission from day one was recognizing that growth was not for just the sake of growth, right? I think that explaining to your teams what growth means and how it provides additional opportunities for strong players on your team. And a lot of times I use the analogy of a swimming pool with swim lanes, right? If your strongest swimmers are stuck in lanes where other strong swimmers are, they’re gonna go find another swim lane.
And if that swim lane is not with your company, it’s gonna be somewhere else. And so the enabler to continue to grow allows you to add more lanes. So build the company wider allows you to continue to attract talent and retain talent. And so that to me is what growth is about. Growth is about opportunity, right? I was never gonna attract the best and the brightest if we were gonna be the greatest solar contractor in San Diego County, which is where I was based at the time. So I recognize that the way to continue to attract talent and grow and keep the talent that we were educating and training every day was to continue to provide opportunity.

So that, to me, is the most exciting thing about this industry is that as it continues to grow, it allows new opportunities and opportunities for us to innovate and change. Every day we’re looking at new opportunities and we’ve been doing this since 2008, right? So it is in an industry that’s not been around much longer than that at scale. And I feel like we’re innovating every single day, even though we’re building a virtually the same product, right?

We’re building a tracking, you know, large scale utility plant but every day our teams are looking at ways to optimize and innovate, and that allows us to grow and build and bring new opportunities. That for me, from a scaling standpoint, I think it’s a lot about getting that message to your team. So they understand that, that this is why scale matters. And this is why growth matters. Because if people just believe that growth, you’re growing for the sake of growing because you want to financially, right? You want to grow the top line and the bottom line.
Like, those are very important, but nobody’s going to get behind that. Like they’re going to get behind the motivation of this gives you opportunity and it gives the person that you just hired that is building their career in renewables, gives them the opportunity because that’s what people really get passionate about is opportunity and growth, right? I mean, the financial aspects of the business are great, but much more about the culture of growth and innovation and change and how do I grow in my career? And that’s where I think growth really comes together.

Wes Ashworth (13:12)
Yeah, that’s such good wisdom and insight. And I love just how practical and down to earth that is, but how important it is. And I think that’s a lot of times some of the parts that are missed, it’s the, I think people talk a lot about our company, where we want to go, revenue, you all those sort of things. And the average person in that company doesn’t necessarily understand what that means for them or like you said, sort of the why. So bringing it down to their level, like here.
Here’s what’s in it for you. Here’s why this growth is important so that they can buy into that. I think that’s extremely, extremely powerful. So I love that you shared that insight with us. Transitioning a little bit just to the current state of the solar industry. So given your experience and role in the industry, how would you describe the current state of the solar energy market in the US and what you’re seeing today?

George Hershman (14:19)
Well, I think, you know, I remain extremely bullish and positive on this market. And that honestly hasn’t changed since, you know, a week ago, right? I think there was a, obviously, as you know, we sit here today having this discussion, we’re a week past an election. And, I think that obviously creates some uncertainty, but does not stop the demand side of this business and the need that this industry has. So, you know, I’ve been, having run this business through, the previous Trump administration, we grew our business significantly year over year through both a Trump administration and a Biden administration.

And so, you know, I think that the fundamentals are stronger today than they were then. There’s a demand like I’ve never seen in this industry because it was created by technology, right? The AI demand is, you know, is real, right? There’s data center demand all over the country. And, and the fastest, lowest cost implementation of energy on the grid today is solar. And so solar plus storage is, we’re doing it in every region of the country. And it continues to be driven by
that one, electrification of everything that we all are, you know, experiencing in our everyday lives, but this kind of hyperscalar demand that is in the market now has absolutely changed the game. And I think that it is, beyond administration, beyond everything, it’s economics, right? The economics of this work, the deployment of this work. If you need to put gigawatts on the grid, the fastest way to do it and deploy it is solar, just full stop. So the good news for me, and I think for us as an industry, is that we’ve grown past all the other kinds of noise and concerns and now this is just purely economics and the reality of needing energy.

So, I’m proud of what the industry association did, during my time as chair, but, I’ve been on the industry association for a long time. In passing the Inflation Reduction Act, I think it was a huge win for renewable energy and the opportunities that we can create all across the country. The majority of IRA dollars are being spent in Republican districts, creating jobs in Republican districts. So if you look at it from a political standpoint, it’s job creation, economics, renewable districts, that’s where our plants are being built.

That’s where the dozens of manufacturing facilities are being built. That’s where the money is being spent. So you can look at it from a Power demand economics and you can look at it as a job creation, bringing everything, manufacturing in the US. I mean, it checks the box for everybody, right? It’s the reason that universally renewable energy polls in the 80s to 90% across all demographics because people recognize that renewable energy, energy security, manufacturing in the US are all driven by this industry. So, you know, I think you put all those together in any political or business environment and it’s a winner.

So, I’m positive by nature. I love this industry. I’m passionate about it. I think I’ve seen it provide so much to so many. I mean, the amount of jobs we’ve created, the amount of communities we’ve changed through direct employment and through community engagement. I just think all of those things support anybody’s agenda.

Wes Ashworth (19:00)
I agree. I’m so happy to hear you share that. I agree wholeheartedly with every point you made there. And I think it is so well said and something probably people want to hit rewind and listen to a couple of times. It’s just a great synopsis of the current state, the future, the positivity. And I agree. you know, there’s nothing that can stop it at this point. That demand is going to only increase. I think even when you look at AI and data centers, that’s really still in its infancy, you know, and will continue to grow and expand and certainly not going anywhere. So I agree. I agree completely with that.

George Hershman (19:33)
You know, I think, in all of that positivity, obviously, there’s challenges, right? I don’t want to, I don’t, I don’t want to say that we don’t need to look at, some of the, the, kind of inherent headwinds that just happen when you’re growing an industry so big. And, you know, it’s around, how do we get the labor forces that we need? How do we train people correctly? How do we build a robust supply chain that can support? Those are all things that we have to look at and continue to focus on.
So, you know, while the outlook, in my opinion, is absolutely bright, and the need is there, we also have the kind of block and tackle challenges that we have to face, right, is that we are trying to large scale projects in rural communities. And that means that we need to train a workforce. We need to find a workforce in some areas. We need to do a massive amount of logistics around the supply chain, because the parts and pieces and the consumption of these projects is huge. And so managing that kind of risk is, the demand is there, the supply side risk is real.
And so, I think that I don’t wanna undersell that there’s, the challenge to scale is there, but the demand is there as well. And to me, if you have a demand for something, you’re gonna work through the challenges, right? You’re gonna put the resources on it, you’re gonna figure it out because everybody wants to see this succeed.

Wes Ashworth (21:18)
Yeah, no, well said completely there too. And then I agree. And I think, not to underestimate just the talent part of that. And you reiterated that there, just, that is going to require it. And it’s a reason why I’m passionate for that. And what I can do with that is just helping bring that talent in. And it will take, you know, people from other industries, attracting people in, you know, industry switchers and things like that. It’s going to be a tremendous amount of that, as you said too, a lot of training and interesting to see how that’s going to evolve with some of, like anything from internships to just training programs starting really early. trying to get into high schools and help encourage kids even at that level.
So I’m sure we’ll see a lot of the same things in renewables as we go.

George Hershman (22:09)
Yeah, and we are doing that across the country. I think the industry recognizes that this is a great career for people. The youth of today are very passionate about this industry. The great thing is we go to career fairs and internship events and we have an internship program. We have no shortage of excitement for people that want to get into this industry. They recognize that it is on the cutting edge of, you know, an industry that is in demand for the foreseeable future.

And, you know, one of the things that I get most excited about every year is we do an internship program. And at the end of that internship program, I’d sit down with all the interns before they start to leave. And, you know, I talked to them about, you know, my career and the industry and the similar discussion we’re having today. And, you know, I always say, I wish that I was at the front end of my renewable career today.

Doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere anytime soon, Wes, don’t get me wrong, but I wish I was at the front of my career today. Like they are on the front edge of an energy revolution in the US and across the world. As we start to really pivot in a meaningful way into renewables, we’re starting to see this as, in every single region of the country. This used to be a West Coast thing. Then it was like a West and Southwest. Now we’re building projects all over the country everywhere. Everybody needs the energy.

This is the right thing to do. And yeah, I always say, you know, to start now, what a journey you’re going to go through in your career over the next 30 or 40 years, as you see this industry change and continue to grow. Pretty exciting stuff.

Wes Ashworth (24:23)
Yeah, it is. You see that, how quickly that’s going to evolve. Again, to see like we fast forward, 30, 40, 50 years and to see where it’s going to go and to be able to be a part of that, you know, really closer to the ground floor where you’re able tohelp build that and propel that forward. You know, if you look at the talent landscape, especially, people that are earlier on in their career, that’s what they’re looking for. They want cutting edge. They want to make a difference. They want a purpose driven company.

They want to do something that’s growth oriented and has this kind entrepreneurial mindset about it as well too. And this checks all the boxes. So yeah, love that. To transition a little bit to SOLV and looking at SOLV Energy’s expansion and some of those innovations dig into that a little bit. So you’ve been expanding into new markets, including the Northeast and Southeast. Can you share more about those regional growth efforts and the challenges or opportunities that come with entering, especially these emerging markets?

George Hershman (24:58)
Yeah, I think, it’s always been challenging. I think as we have grown as an industry into new markets, I think we all, you know, kind of experienced the growth in California, we all understood it, the growth in the, you know, Southwest and even, you know, the Texas market boom. And, you know, I think we all kind of stepped probably the last, two or three years, we stepped into the Midwest and we found that building at scale in the Midwest is not like building at scale in California or Texas.

Weather effects are different, just production rates and all the things that affect projects. And I think we learned a lot and we’ve said this is gonna be a strong market, we’re gonna learn, we’re gonna put people that are not transplanted, like leadership that are used to building in a desert Arizona environment and putting them in the Midwest, we’re starting to build resources there because we saw that market continuing to grow. I think that with the Northeast and Southeast, we see the same things. We see different challenges.

We’re lucky in that we have a, you know, we have a partner company that’s under common ownership that we are aligned with and have really built a collaboration kind of effort with. CS Energy up in the northeast that has been there for since, kind of similar timeframe since 2008. And they really understand that market and as that market grows to scale, we can provide them the understanding of scale, understanding of procurement, logistics, all the things that we have learned over time over the 200 plus projects that we’ve built at large utility and provide them those kind of understanding and support.

And they have the down on the ground knowledge of working in particular areas in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, areas where we haven’t been, really invested much time in the past, because quite frankly, the market just didn’t support the business that we were doing. Now, particularly the New York market, we’re seeing much more large-scale opportunities and between this kind of consolidated effort of the two companies, we can really provide them a lot of support resources. They can put the boots on the ground, understanding of the work, and we really bring together the strengths of both companies. So I’m really excited about the Northeast market and the opportunities that we have there. The Southeast market is more of a kind of, just organic growth of our business as we’re continuing to move east. And so we’re seeing more opportunities there.

We’ve always done a kind of, a little bit of work. Did some Georgia work, did North Carolina. We did up in Pensacola, kind of panhandle of Florida. And so we’ve done the Southeast market kind of in and out as we’ve gone in with, with key customers. We’re just really making that a growth focus of our business as again, we’re starting to see more opportunities there. And so, it’s important for us to support our customers’ growth.

Reason that we have such a, kind of a great customer base and repeat business customers is that we have built our business to support their businesses as well. And so the Southeast just is another area that we’ll do that. And honestly, I think there’ll be a day where we will literally put a flag and project in every state in the country. we’re getting there, right? I mean, the map, we have a map and we keep seeming to fill in states where we, and the amount of states that are left without a SOLV built project are fairly small. And honestly, I think the interesting thing about, back to our conversation about the kind of hyper scalar data center market, that’s gonna start filling in the kind of Wyoming, Montana, Dakotas, areas where there’s lots of land, cool ambient temperatures, some low base load energy costs, and ability to fill in with large scale solar and storage to support data centers.

So I think you’re going to see a lot of that kind of non-traditional area where we’ve been just because of lack of demand. That demand is gonna go up dramatically. So I think we’ll be building in all those northern central states in the coming years. And I’m excited because I think those are great opportunities for our product and great opportunities for job creation.

Wes Ashworth (30:34)
Yeah, I love it. I love it. And I’ll circle back to something you shared earlier. So SOLV offering more solutions beyond EPC, such as SCADA and repowering services to third party clients. How does that diversification just align with your vision for the company’s future?

George Hershman (31:00)
Well, from day one, I’ve really wanted to be a renewable energy service provider, right? I, think that, you know, being an EPC is good and is necessary and obviously very powerful for our business. But, at the end of the day, we want to provide energy services for this market. And so it allows us to build relationships with our customers and the project through its entire life cycle. so, and, going back to the early days is, we really started this out of need. We built a utility scale project and we looked around and there was no real O&M provider at scale. And so, we kind of looked at what we needed to do and said, well, we’ll step in and provide an O&M agreement and look at, how do we build that service because other people weren’t focusing on it?

And then, we started building these bigger plants, they got more complex and they started to outgrow the SCADA platforms that were built for, principally for commercial solar that we’re trying to scale. And so we just said, well, we’ll start adding it as part of our service and we’ll build the resources because, turning on a plant and monitoring it is so important to the overall success of the project that we want to control it ourselves. So we’ve built a robust SCADA program, and the majority of our projects use our own SCADA platform.

Providing our own O&M gives us the ability to build that relationship long term. Gives us efficiencies in the startup and commissioning phase because our team is there. We have the skilled technicians to be able to fix the challenges during commissioning when we’re kind of all up against the clock to try to get these plants turned on. And so, that diversity is one, it gives us diversity of, kind of strength, when you think about the business from a financial aspect, gives us the opportunities to have the additional swim lanes, when we’re talking about where talent is going to grow and come from. And it gives us the connective tissue to the customers and the projects. So when you get into a situation where equipment starts to fail, or we’ve had, as you’ve seen in, kind of the Texas corridor, we’ve had these hail damage projects.

It gives us the connection to the project, the opportunity, the talent to go in and do these large scale repairs. And I think that gives us a continuing differentiator as part of our business. It’s easier to go into a customer and build that relationship by saying, look, we’re gonna be here for 25 years with you. In that life cycle when it’s time to repower the project, because the interconnect is still the valuable asset, and you need to go in and repower that project for whatever tomorrow’s technology is, we’re the right people to do it because we have all the kind of domain knowledge of the project.

And so I just think it makes us a better partner and a stronger business because of it. I like to be on the same side of the table with my customers and try to work out what their problems are today and try to figure out how to solve their problems for tomorrow. And I think that’s what guided us a lot into the number of different services that we offer. And ultimately has made us a stronger company because of it. because of the ability to bring expertise and talent and innovation. So I like that we’re a service provider and EPC happens to be a service, you know, O&M happens to be a service, but I don’t want to be classified as any of those, right? I want to be a service provider.

Wes Ashworth (35:43)
Yeah, I think it’s brilliant. Makes so much sense. I love that philosophy. As we get closer to time, I want to hit on a couple of different topics. as a leader in a leading company in the solar industry, how is SOLV Energy staying at the forefront of innovation? I guess any exciting new technologies or projects on the horizon that you can share with us?

George Hershman (36:06)
Yeah, I think, we’re looking, we continue to look at and we built out a group internally that is really just focused on, looking at all of the technology, the new technologies that are in the marketplace. We were working with Swap Robotics on the ability to do everything from material logistics autonomously to landscape management, a number of different things within their technology.

We did a project with Charge Robotics where we looked at the installation to see if we can drive installation metrics up as we’ve recognized that projects need to move faster. But our model is really to look and vet, kind of every technology that’s on the market today. We’re doing some fixed wing drone surveys and other things to try to figure out if we can minimize or bring more visibility into production, layout, optimization in those ways. I think that we we’re kind of always looking at ways and different technologies and I think we’ve done a good job over the years of doing that to just optimize product, whether it’s tracker optimization, we were, kind of in the forefront with Nextracker working on their terrain following tracker and did a lot of work with them early days to help that and optimize that system.
It’s hard to see that there’s going to be this massive, like, all of sudden you’re going to wake up one day and there’s going to be a technology that ultimately changes what we do dramatically. But I think there’s, it’s going to take hundreds of small technology changes and optimization changes that save minutes on things that we do millions of times, right? You’re not gonna stop doing it a million times. You’re gonna save a few minutes each time you do it. And we’re doing this through, looking at how do we stage material, run AI models on where do you place material because you’re gonna move faster because of it, or you’re gonna save two steps on 500 people moving material two feet farther one way or the other, Very much manufacturing-driven thought process.

You think about these projects, they’re just really a big assembly line where the assembly line itself moves and the material stays in the same place. So if you think about what manufacturing has done for years is think about where do I place my tool? Where do I place the part so that I minimize the movements? We’re thinking about that now in a utility scale sense because if we need to build projects faster, because the demand is growing so fast, then we can’t just assume we’re gonna do it the same way, or we’re gonna do it with more people. We’re building a 500 megawatt project now, and we’ve got 400 people on the site, we have to build a gigawatt project in, with only a third more of the time, we can’t find 750 people to build it.

So we’re gonna have to build it with the same 400 people, but we’re gonna have to go a third faster. And that is gonna come through a ton of incremental changes and looking at every single thing we do. Yes, there will be autonomous pile drivers. We’re doing that. mean, yes, there’ll be all these things that are, there’ll be robots that are working on sections of the project, but not the whole project. Is really everything I see in the market today enables more production, does not reduce people, right? We get more production out of the same amount of people.
This is because that’s what we’re trying to solve for. We’re not trying to solve for eliminating people. This is a job creation, job opportunities. We need people on site. We need to figure out how we optimize them to be more efficient and build projects faster. And that’s what all of the technologies that I see in the marketplace today. And we’re excited about it. We continue to look at them. But again, it’s still about getting people, training them and getting a supply chain that works. You get those three, robotics help, right?

Wes Ashworth (41:33)
Yeah, no question. So as we wrap up, I guess overall, what excites you the most about the future of SOLV Energy and the solar energy industry as a whole?

George Hershman (41:45)
Well, I think we touched on a lot of those things during this discussion already is that this is becoming the most economic decision that anybody can make that needs energy. So, absent of administration, absent of federal policies that are just helped to enable some of the growth, the real demand is the market. And so I think when you look at that, we’ve gotten to a point where it’s not about a state incentive to go green or have clean energy. It’s not about any of those things.

Like, ultimately what is gonna drive an industry and create strong, robust companies that can sustain through any political climate is industry demand. If people need your product and they want it and there’s an oversized demand for it, you’re gonna find ways to get it done. And the fact that big tech companies and energy companies are coming together, right? And big tech has proven that they can move, literally move mountains if they need to. Now that those have fully aligned and recognized that the only thing, there’s a point in time where the only thing that stops the growth and implementation of AI is the lack of energy.
Well, if you think about the companies that are driving AI, are they gonna let anything stop the implementation of their business? No. And so we’re all in alignment now, which is such an exciting place to be. Because otherwise you’re going, look, I’ve been in this long enough to like run up in 16 because the ITC is gonna stop, you know, there’s gonna be a cliff and then we get an extension and then we go through another extension period. Like all of that stuff, one is, you know, a lot of it has been, we got much longer, a much longer runway with IRA because of the tenure.

But at the end of the day, what really matters is the people that want to buy it and the demand for it. And so, we’re not going to see that kind of up and down, concern about, administration comes in that supports it or doesn’t and all these things. It’s now, it doesn’t matter because the industry wants it. And that, that to me excites me every day. And when I talk, because I’ve talked to a lot of people, right, that, just uncertainty breeds concern. People want to reach out. I’ve been involved in this from a policy standpoint for a long time. And I’ve said, look, just let’s all focus on the economics and the demand side and the other things we’re going to have to work out.

Tariffs may be real thing. We’re going to have to deal with them. They’re going to drive some costs into the business if tariffs happen. All those things are small headwinds, but being fueled by a massive tailwind. I spend as much time as I can sailing. I’m a big sailor. You know, what I can tell you is, massive tailwinds are going to win all the time. So, I’m excited and it’s a good time to be in renewables.

Wes Ashworth (45:27)
Yeah, there you have it. It’s so good. It’s so well said. Thank you so much, George, for sharing your incredible journey and insights into the evolving world of solar energy. It’s inspiring to hear how SOLV Energy is not only leading the charge in utility-scale solar projects, but also really making a tangible difference in the communities where you operate. Your vision for a cleaner and more equitable energy future gives us all hope and motivation.

To our listeners out there, I hope today’s conversation has given you a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities and excitement in the renewable energy space. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the Green Giants podcast, share this episode with your network and leave us a review. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.