Dave Reasenberg and Examine Solar

Hey all,

I'm Dave. This is my personal blog. While I run the commercial arm of a domestic solar PV module manufacturer, this blog is just my hobby — a place where I write about solar economics, my favorite books, personal finance, and whatever else I feel like writing about.

And if you want to learn more, read below.

Name: David Reasenberg
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-reasenberg/

I was born and raised in Palo Alto and Cupertino, CA, and went to high school at Monta Vista.

After that, I moved to Colorado to attend the University of Colorado Boulder.

I earned a degree in Environmental Science with a focus on water science — limnology, freshwater stream biology, oceanography, etc.

After school, I decided to take a gap year and moved to Winter Park, CO.

I took a job at Christy Sports. I snowboarded all winter, traveled during the spring shoulder season, worked at Power Tools bike shop and mountain biked all summer, then went back to the ski shop when the snow returned.

After six seasons of this, I left the outdoor industry, took a job as an apprentice electrician, and learned how to wire new homes. Business was good — our crew of eight was running 10+ jobs at a time, all bougie second homes for rich out-of-staters.

After a couple of years of electrical work, I received my Residential Wireman's license, got married, and followed my new wife in pursuit of her dream job to Vermont.

It was 2007, and that's when I found the solar industry. I started with a small company in Brownsville, VT — South Face Design — installing Heliodyne solar thermal flat-plate collectors.

Jim Lyall at South Face Design was (and is) an amazing person, but I wanted to use my electrical experience.

I took a job in White River Junction working as an installer for a growing solar PV company — GroSolar. I was their 56th employee. During the interview, Jeff Wolfe, the founder, came in and told me how hard the job would be. He was right. Sliding around on the icy standing-seam metal roofs of Vermont is a lot of work! But I left because they were contracting out the electrical work to another electrical contractor. I was only doing the manual labor.

I wanted to sell solar. In the '90s, I became an eBay PowerSeller. The rush of closing a deal has always intoxicated me. So I created an e-commerce site, EnergyShip.com, and began selling renewable energy products online. The business model was "free design consultations, with the hope they'd buy from me at the end." And it worked. In retrospect, I was leveraging Robert Cialdini's Rule of Reciprocity.

After a couple of years of selling to internet customers (and having conversations about why they can't use solar to pump water uphill, let it flow down through a micro-hydro turbine, and create perpetual energy), I took a job at one of my suppliers, AEE Solar.

I spent five years at the company. I learned a ton about the distribution channel and the C&I and residential markets. I worked alongside some of the pioneers in the business — David Katz, Brad Bassett, Brian Teitelbaum, and Davy Rippner.

Then Canadian Solar came calling and offered me a job selling modules directly. I took it and spent the next seven years selling large volumes of imported modules into DG projects across the U.S. I learned a lot at Canadian Solar, but I also saw a growing demand for localized supply chains. Turns out, when you rely on a factory on the other side of the world, a lot can go wrong.

So I left and took a job at Heliene Inc., a local Midwest module manufacturer. And now I sell U.S.-made modules to developers and IPPs with projects all over the U.S. — FUBU-style.

And that, my friend, is where we are now.