36,339 words into my 51,000 word manuscript for #WeTookTheRisk and continuing from last week’s theme of risk-taking teams that “were the first”, I got a chance to reflect on the SunEdison journey undertaken by another “dream team” – Jigar Shah, Claire Broido Johnson, Christopher Cook, Mark Culpepper, Colin Murchie, Joe Henri, @photolopren & the late Brian Robertson. Special thanks to @photolopren for helping to organize the group interview.
“The exciting part was founding the vision, opening the markets before anyone else and having the ability to scale,” started @clairejohnson0273 in recollecting the first days of SunEdison.
“We never took ourselves seriously though, we just rolled up our sleeves and were always diving into some problem we had to solve,” added Jigar Shah in a separate conversation with Emily Kirsch on her podcast, Watt it Takes.
The journey involved a number of notable partners who believed in the power of distributed generation – including Mark Buckley, a pioneer sustainability leader back then with @staples, as well as one of the first EPCs in California, Team Solar, founded by Rick Lavezzo & his wife, Angela Lavezzo, with additional leadership from @mysmud and Jon Bertolino.
From the standardization of the commercial solar PPA to paving the way for regulatory wins ranging from SRECs to various state incentives, without SunEdison, the renewables industry wouldn’t be where it is today.
More to come as I close out the remaining 4 chapters.
