Aaron Nichols talks with Exact Solar’s own Dave Hammes, a 20-year clean-energy veteran who specializes in helping non-profit organizations go solar.

Dave shares how learning about the true cause of 9/11 sparked his pivot into renewables.

He outlines his path from Solar Energy International training through launching a premium solar panel brand in the Americas, developing solar water-pumping projects across West Africa, and bringing that experience home to help municipalities and nonprofits go solar.

You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn here.

Expect to Learn:

* How a non-linear career path built Dave’s toolkit for getting complex projects across the finish line.

* What boards of churches, schools, and towns actually need to green-light solar.

* Why tax-exempt organizations interested in solar need to act now as policies and incentives start to shift.

Quotes from the Episode:

“Technically, solar doesn’t generate electricity—the sun does. We’re just smart about how we use it.”– Dave Hammes

“In a lot of these organizations, energy represents over a third of their expenses. That’s a big percentage. You’re passing the basket a few times now just to raise your energy bill every month.” – Dave Hammes

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Today we have a very special guest who I’ve been after for a few months to do the show. And you’d think I’d be able to get him easily because he’s within my own organization, but it took some doing. Dave Hammes basically stumbled into the solar world like I did. And Dave, I would love to hear you outline that journey for a little bit before we get started.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, I’d be glad to, and I hope I don’t bore anyone. But yes, I was motivated very early on. Actually, it was after 9-11. I was curious about that and what caused that whole disaster. And when I started digging into it, I found that a lot of it was driven by—oddly enough—about oil. And to a degree on that, some have been Laden and George W. Bush. And I thought, wow, I want to dig deep into this, and that is thinking, okay, well, how do you avert such things going forward? And it was such an emotional impact that that had everyone at the time. But I started paying attention to studying energy, energy efficiency, renewables. And I just became really intrigued with it. So I was self-taught for a few years early on, ended up going to Solar Energy International, one of the oldest training facilities for solar energy out in Colorado and went through their program. And people started learning that I knew about solar and they’d ask me to design a system for them and I would, and then all of a sudden they asked me to install it and I found I was in the solar business. And then someone else found me—an organization, a big conglomerate out of Germany—that one of their arms of their conglomerate was making solar panels, a premium panel, and they called and they said they were going to launch a facility here in the U.S. Would I want to join them? So I did. I was like the second person in the organization in the Americas. And I ended up running that organization for, I guess, about five years or more. And I had a lot of salespeople across the country, sales managers. And we grew it from nothing to like $100 million in solar panels, sales to all the solar installation companies across the Americas. And I eventually ended up going to work for a software company, one of the earliest ones in the industry that designed software, and one of our big clients was Sun Addison, which was probably the largest installation network at the time, a huge organization. And later I went to work with a company that used solar energy to pump and purify water. And they happened to do business all over the globe. So I was like one month with them, and I got the conversation—I was called into the office of the president. And he said, you’re going to Africa. I can do that. He said, do you know how to speak French? And I said, “ooh,” that was about it. That wasn’t sure how many words that was. So I did that. I started traveling over there—half a dozen trips over there—and developing projects in a few of the West African countries, which was quite exciting and eye-opening to say the least. Eventually, the pandemic hit and I couldn’t travel anymore. So I came back here. I took off for a little while because of the pandemic and I wasn’t going anywhere, but later joined up with Exact Solar, which happened to be one of the customers of mine when we were selling solar panels for the German manufacturer. So that’s it, and that’s how I got here, and gravitating towards commercial projects and the like. And I had a lot of experience with government-related projects, especially in Africa, where I was dealing with the highest level of parliamentary government, and I just felt really comfortable in pursuing that here. So I work with a number of municipalities and work on developing business in that regard. And the nonprofits is just an area that everyone stays away from, as well as a lot of government types of projects—people don’t chase after those because they take longer to develop, they’re tougher to develop, tougher to get across the finish line. And it’s not because I enjoyed that so much, but it is because fewer people do it. And I know, you know, the ins and outs of it a little bit—perhaps more than some do—just from experience, and failing often enough, you learn a lot.

Aaron Nichols: But yeah, and I want to touch on something that I think is so important. I mean, I’ve been really hammering on this on every podcast I’ve been interviewed on. In the solar industry, it’s so important to me to highlight the stories of people who didn’t follow a linear path, because I also didn’t follow a linear path.I work in solar because I was surfing in a town in Ecuador and I met two circus girls who invited me to sell solar with them door-to-door. And it’s so important to me that, you know, if you’re someone who’s listening to this and you might be intimidated by the business world or you want to break into clean energy, just start talking to people, because if it seems intimidating from the outside, the reality of the inside is, you know, things are just happening.

Dave Hammes: That reminds me of an aside I just shared with someone recently—one of our colleagues, actually. When I started developing these projects on my own very early on, a homeowner would find out about it and have me design a system, or a real small business or whatever, and I would do that. And then I was working with a friend of mine because he was intrigued by it and we were doing things together.And he got a hold of a request for proposal from USAID and he shared it with me. And I read this, and USAID was responsible for trying to put together the nation of, like, Burya in West Africa after their civil war—disaster—and USAID could not get it put together, so they’re reaching out for input and so forth. And their RFP was to create an energy solution for the entire country because it was destroyed—all the grid ties and everything was destroyed through the civil war. People were taking the wires off the poles and everything else. I thought, well, why not? I’ve done two homes and a small orchard business. So I’m capable of this—why not the entire country of Liberia? Exactly. So I took it on, and I met this gentleman—like you’re saying, you know, just in a conversation—who actually escaped the civil war, came over here to live with his daughter. And he happened to be in charge of the entire cellular infrastructure for the country, and he knew every square inch of the country, the terrain, and everything.So he and I worked together, I created this plan. He knew which industries were the strongest over there and what the biggest problems were. There’s like 85% unemployment—just a disaster. So the crime rate was so high, everyone was trying to survive. So I put together this plan and submitted it at the last minute to USAID. I did not win the bid for it, but I found out about maybe four or six months later that the energy company that had been in place over there was already awarded it before the RFP came out. So it was just like, you know, I don’t know what you call it—it’s like you had to send out an RFP by law or something, right? But then I read their solution and found out that they were burning old rubber trees that weren’t producing anymore. That was their clean energy plan for sustainability—plus whatever other fuels they had available to them. But they also apparently found three or four items within my proposal that they borrowed for doing energy along the coast because they could produce wind energy there and use that for freezers and refrigeration of their fishing industry, because they had none before that. So the industry could triple—things like that. But nonetheless, I just thought it was an interesting experience and you learn a lot doing business over there and so forth.

Aaron Nichols: Okay, so for anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know industry acronyms, RFP is a request for proposal.

Dave Hammes: Yeah. Thank you—I jumped through that. But yeah, it’s so cool that I’ve had that impact and have been able to carry that home and try to bring the same thing back to the U.S.

Aaron Nichols: And I’m curious: as you’ve worked with some of these nonprofits and municipal organizations, what are some of the major benefits of solar that a lot of these organizations see once they actually get those projects across the finish line?

Dave Hammes: Well, I can speak to the religious organizations—and there’s quite a few that I’ve been working with. I think I have at least a half dozen so far this year alone, just since the springtime, and there’s more on the horizon. But they have a real tenet—you know, their equivalent of bylaws in their organizations call for environmental stewardship and giving back to the earth. And for all the right reasons, they want to do clean energy projects. You can ask just about any organization of that type if they would like to go solar and the answer is yes. Historically, they’ve been prevented from doing so because it’s cost-prohibitive for the initial outlay of cash. That makes one of the biggest hurdles. So now we have some solutions, and especially with Exact Solar working on some very unique solutions that can overcome those hurdles. And it certainly helps with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is going by the wayside more or less now with our current administration. But that enabled these communities to go solar in their places of worship and save tons of money. So they benefit significantly from the financial side as well as doing what’s right at the same time—for their community, for safety, for resilience. All those things are boxes they need to check.

Aaron Nichols: So they have to justify upfront cost, but generally see quite a bit of savings on the back end.

Dave Hammes: Absolutely, yes.

Aaron Nichols: And then, other than costs—when you’re speaking to the boards of these organizations—what else are they usually concerned about, and what other worries do you have to alleviate?

Dave Hammes: Well, with a religious organization, they have multiple tiers. You have perhaps a small committee that embraces and wants to champion the efforts to go with clean energy. And then, if they are successful and collaborate and speak to people like myself, they can take it to the next step, which may be a bigger committee and eventually to the church council. And then that goes on to the congregation. And everyone has to have the majority buy-in in order to make anything happen, plus they need some way of funding the project—whether it’s fundraising, or they have the capital, or they’re depending on us to have a solution, which fortunately we’re able to do.

Aaron Nichols: Right. And after they’ve gone solar, what do you mainly hear from these organizations when you’re checking back in with people?

Dave Hammes: Oh boy. Well, they’re certainly pleased that they did it. I think the way that it’s vindicated, if nothing else, is the fact that one house of worship will share that experience with another. And then I get a call from them. And that’s how I got up to six or seven so far this year—by that exact thing happening. You know, someone may call in and I’ll pursue it and they’ll tell their friends in another congregation and it just—word of mouth. So that definitely takes place. Yeah, generally they’re excited.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. I think this is one of the obstacles of solar I’ve been joking about with a lot of people: it’s too good at what it does. It’s just kind of boring. It just sits there and makes power. And once it’s turned on, you forget it’s there because it’s so good at what it’s doing.

Dave Hammes: Well, yeah, that’s a good point. And I’d like to touch on that a little bit because technically, solar—as we know it, what we think about when you use that term, for better or worse—does not generate any electricity whatsoever. All the energy is the sun. And the sun’s energy is used in every way you can think—every single living thing on the planet, all our food, everything—heat, light, you name it. It comes from the sun, and it allows us, because of technology, to power the things that we want to power. And there are some people now that don’t want that to happen. They do not want some people to have access to the sun. And to me, I don’t understand it—it’s ridiculous. It’s free energy. It’s fuel. And yeah, there’s a cost for the hunks of metal and glass that we put on top of a building to channel that energy so that it runs a motor or your refrigerator or your internet or your TV or all of the above. But for those who want to stop the sunshine from being able to give us the living styles that we have—that’s just unbelievable. I don’t know that thought process. The alternative makes it even worse. So I was joking with somebody recently—I borrowed a line from a big long-term advocacy group, The Third Act. If you go in and have a conversation with one of these organizations, you get a checklist—two boxes: you can get your energy from heaven, or you can get your energy from below. And the one from heaven has the least cost, is the fastest to put in place, and the longest term of any—and it’s the healthiest, safest. But let’s not do that—some people don’t want to do that.

Aaron Nichols: Right, I mean, well, there’s an entire infrastructure built around just digging things up and burning them and then going to find more things to dig up and burn.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, that’s true. Poisonous water and poisonous air and everything else. If you get the stats that the government supplies us with—the stats on how many people die in the U.S. each year from particulate matter from burning fossil fuel, or from poisonous water, right. And it’s incredible. It’s like a small city every year, you know?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and this is one thing that I’m very fired up about because I’m a very contrarian person. And so whoever’s in power, I disagree with, generally. But I’m very excited at the idea that harvesting the sun’s rays is now an act of revolution—that just gets me fired up—because I love the idea that, you know, this thing that just shines on the Earth all day, and all that energy, and we found a new way to use it and it’s even better and more efficient than any way we’ve generated the electricity we need before—and now they don’t want us to use it.

Dave Hammes: Right—yeah, it’s coming off the sun. Let me talk about the ultimate power—how do you do that? It’s like, oh, that’d be pretty neat. If I can control the sun, why didn’t I think of that? Yeah, it’s crazy.

Aaron Nichols: One of the projects I’ve been most excited about since I’ve worked here at Exact Solar is our Habitat for Humanity project. And I’m interested to hear you talk about maybe challenges we faced there, how we overcame them, the benefits of that project, how that’s going to impact the people in those homes. I would love to hear you speak on it.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, sure. That is one of my favorite projects, if you will. So the gentleman from Habitat—Philly Habitat; Berks/Lehigh/Norristown from the Philly division—saw one of our highway billboards and started tracking us down and ended up going through Solarize to get to us. And I certainly looked at their project. They had five new homes that they were providing for some families in need, and they were building these super-efficient homes and solar was gonna top it off, which made a whole lot of sense. So they’re in the city, and there are certain restrictions there and certain guidelines we had to follow, but we designed the system. We designed the components; the equipment itself had to be special equipment for the project in order to abide by the restrictions that the city has or the guidelines that they have. And we did so. We adjusted the systems appropriately and we launched it and had a nice little press release at the location. And doing the math for that presentation, we found out that by doing so, they were saving those people over $40,000 in energy costs—simply by putting these solar arrays on their homes—for people that couldn’t afford the homes otherwise. Right now, it just lowered their cost to live there, and they’ll end up as homeowners and solar system owners in the not too distant future. So that’s a very rewarding success story. Kudos to Habitat for sure and that ongoing effort—that’s quite noble, I believe.

Aaron Nichols: And that’s one of the things I love most about those kinds of stories—especially when you talk about schools, houses of worship, or organizations like Habitat for Humanity. You have people who are wasting money on ever-increasing electricity prices, and nonprofits have very strict budgets. And when you can help them free up more money, that goes toward doing more good in the community.

Dave Hammes: That’s the intent. Yes, that’s the truth. Yeah, that’s definitely true. Yeah, that’s part of the conversations that we have. One of the plants is a Ukrainian church, and I brought an idea to the table that the money that they would save from going solar could be put into a fund that could be contributed to their homeland. And they’ve loved that idea. So there are things that they’d rather do with their money than spend it on energy. As you said, Aaron, the prices keep going up and up on fossil fuels. And that doesn’t have to be the case. Yeah, so it’s good to see those success stories, for sure.

Aaron Nichols: So what advice do you have for any tax-exempt organizations that are thinking about solar now? What do they need to do?

Dave Hammes: They need to act immediately. Right now. The winds change weekly. I mean two weeks ago, we were that close to a new executive order that’s going to change the world again in this world. And the people that want to wait and see are the ones that are going to lose out, and the people that take action now are the ones that are going to be like saying, “Wow, I can breathe,” you know. In a lot of these organizations, the energy represents over a third of their expenses. That’s huge. That’s a big percentage. And if you’re paying 35% of whatever, you’re passing the basket a few times now just to raise your energy bill every month. And it’s not an endless supply of money to keep these organizations running.

Aaron Nichols: And when we talk about organizations like Habitat for Humanity, you’re also talking about families that are on very limited budgets who then now have just a little bit more money to get through the end of the month and aren’t choosing between electricity and food. That’s true. The news article that’s coming out this Friday—I mean, this is probably gonna come out in a month—but the one I wrote that’s coming out this Friday is a deep dive on the cancellation of Solar for All, and a couple stories like the New York Times talking about this woman in Georgia who was paying $500 a month. She’s a single mom of three. She works two jobs just to support herself, and Solar for All was supposed to give them a solar energy system and take that cost off the table, and that just got yanked out from under them.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, it’s, again, one of those things. It’s difficult for me to process the mentality behind that because there’s been a lot of things in the news about how devastating the changes to these incentives have been for our industry. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this industry and losing jobs and companies going out of business and so forth. And I think beyond that—I mean that is a bad thing; there’s no question about it, and I’m part of that industry—but from our experience in the last three years and up until a week ago, for every dollar someone spends, they’re going to get two, three, or four dollars back from going solar—in savings or in incentives in some cases. The IRA had $369 billion assigned to energy, dedicated to energy, and I don’t know how much—it’s hard to find out how much—has been gone through. But if it was only half of that (I think it’s a lot more), that represents like $500 billion back to those people—coming back to the American people and the public. Forget about the solar industry employees or whatever—not that we want to—but I’m just saying, put that aside for a moment and look at where the real devastation is. You just took a half a trillion dollars away from the American people with that one move. And it keeps on happening. So I don’t understand that mentality or the people that are behind it, because they’re hurting themselves.

Aaron Nichols: And I do think the one thing the solar industry is very bad at—and this is something that I go back and forth with my friends who work with other companies all the time—is we’re not good at relating the human impact of things like this. It’s a very technical-minded industry of people who love numbers and graphs.But when you zoom in on the story of a single mother of three who could have freed up a third of her monthly costs and, you know, just gotten some nicer things and felt a little more dignity—and then had that sense of hope pulled away from her—yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that I think it’s important we focus on.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, you’re right. And there’s the argument of climate change. I feel in a similar fashion: you’re going to argue with somebody that disagrees with you all day long for years—and it’s been going on for decades—arguing, is it climate change from what we do or not, blah blah? Well, put that aside and look at what you just mentioned. And what I just mentioned a second ago: if you invest in clean energy because of such a low cost, at worst—even without any incentive whatsoever—you’re going to cut your bill in half. And all the things that come with that in cleaning up the community. For these schools that go solar—you know, schools and places of worship—they are community centers in a disaster, in a flood, or whatever the event may be, storm or what have you. And that makes it much more resilient. And it also separates from centralized energy—having one big generation plant somewhere—into distributed energy, which removes the possibility of as many cyberattacks and things like that if you can separate yourself from the grid. The grid gets hacked a few times a day.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, it’s been very sad to watch the administration try to tie clean energy to identity politics and use that and try to tell people that clean energy is just some sort of lefty comedy thing. It’s not. It’s here. It’s going to be the future in 20 years. This is a minor setback, but in 20–30 years these kinds of conversations are going to seem silly.

Dave Hammes: Yeah. But I know my children, my grandchildren, and beyond—they cannot imagine what a group of people are doing to their future. They can’t comprehend why somebody would knowingly and deliberately do that so that they’re going to have to pay for it in terms of health and price and everything else. You can’t fathom that.

Aaron Nichols: That’s a really good place to ask my last question, which I ask everyone who comes on the show. And I wrote this because I went to my grandma’s birthday party a few months ago—she was turning 80 years old. As I was sitting there, I was thinking about the timeline of clean energy and how she was born into a world that had just been electrified. The Rural Electrification Act had happened 10 years before she was born; she was born in rural Missouri. The first PV cell was 1954, so she was nine, and then Jimmy Carter put panels on the White House in ’79—and those were solar thermal; they weren’t even solar PV cells. And then everything that’s happened since the turn of the century with PV being at this ridiculously high cost per watt going all the way down to where it is now and being so economically viable—all of that has happened within her lifetime, coming from a world where what we conceive of as clean energy didn’t even exist. And so, if you just want to spitball just for fun: what do you think clean energy looks like in 80 years? And don’t worry—we’ll both be dead. No one’s going to hold us to the answer.

Dave Hammes: Yeah, that is true about it. But let’s see—how do I answer that? I would say a few things. One is, when I first started this—I gave you a brief background and my intrigue with the industry and the whole topic—I voiced the fact that I wanted to live to the point where fossil fuel would be the “alternative energy.” Clean, renewable energy—wind, solar, whatever—were considered alternative energies and called that back in the day; they still are. But I wanted to get to a point where they would supersede the fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are second and in place or beyond. And that actually happens—everyone that’s gone solar. I have natural-gas backup, but I don’t use it. I have solar on my house. I have heat pumps, you know—heating things and whatever. And I have an electric car—it’s so nice. So where will we be in 80 years? I don’t think the technologies that’ll exist then can even be imagined today because there’s this exponential development growth and what have you. There will be so many technologies that I can’t imagine today that will come and go. I think, one, there’s going to be some intelligence put behind building materials that doesn’t exist today, and those building materials are going to be much more efficient—and much more efficient ways of building things—and therefore a lot more efficiency in keeping them running as far as electricity is concerned. So you’ll have two things working in the same direction: just more intelligent products and building practices and less need for that energy. And, short-term, there’s great promise in solid-oxide fuel cells and these mini reactors that are in the news these days. A mini reactor—I love the concept; I just don’t think, in my backyard, they’re going to be… they’re not pet-friendly yet. I think those types of things may come and go, but the advancement is going to be—there’s going to be a constant need for energy, so there’s going to be a constant need to improve the technologies, the ideas, and where that comes from. And I think solar is playing a big part; it will be a big part. I heard something that Ron said when you were speaking with him—that it’s not going to be in the same form it is now. And I agree with that; there’ll be a whole lot of different approaches to solar energy that won’t be the same as what we’re doing right now. But it certainly is going to make up a significant part of our overall energy supply. And the rest of the world sees that in places like China that has passed us by in advanced technology. It’s interesting. But yeah, it’ll play a thing.

Aaron Nichols: I’m certainly excited to toss little uranium pellets into my backyard reactor. That’s going to be a fun day when that gets here.

Dave Hammes: Your new pellet stove.

Aaron Nichols: Well, thanks so much for coming on, Dave. For everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar. And—yeah.

Dave Hammes: Thank you very much.

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