Solar Maverick Podcast

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The Solar Maverick Podcast is the insiders guide to where the solar and energy markets meet entrepreneurship and trailblazing. Hosted by Benoy Thanjan - a serial entrepreneur and founder of Reneu Energy

Episodes

Tuesday Apr 23, 2019

SMP 25: Unique Customer Acquisition and Financing Solutions for the Commercial Energy Market

Tuesday Apr 23, 2019

Episode Summary

Benoy goes deep into Kumar’s experience of evolving from his finance background into developing distributive energy projects in the U.S. and the new innovations in customer acquisition and financing that have allowed Kumar to become successful with his company. In addition, Kumar share strategies to investing and why Kumar likes to invest during the seed round of companies that he believes in Cleantech.

About Our Guests:

Benoy Thanjan

Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy and he is also an advisor for several solar startup companies. Reneu Energy is a premier international solar energy consulting firm and developer and the company focuses on developing commercial and industrial solar and utility scale solar plus storage projects. The company also sources financing for solar projects and hedges energy and environmental commodities. Reneu Energy has brokered $27 million in environmental commodities transactions.

Benoy received his first experience in Finance as an intern at D.E. Shaw & Co., which is a global investment firm with 37 billion dollars in investment capital. Before founding Reneu Energy, he was the SREC Trader in the Project Finance Group for SolarCity which merged with Tesla in 2016. He originated SREC trades with buyers and co-developed their SREC monetization and hedging strategy with the senior management of SolarCity to move into the east coast markets. Benoy also worked at Vanguard Energy Partners, Ridgewood Renewable Power, and Deloitte & Touche.

Kumar Aiyer

Kumar is the founder and Managing Partner of Blue Flame Energy Finance LLC, a start-up company in Carlsbad, CA focused on the commercial and industrial energy sector. Since 2011 he has served as the Managing Partner of CleanFin LLC., a structured-finance advisory firm focused on the sustainability sector. Prior to his career in clean energy finance, he was a portfolio manager and strategist on Wall Street in the residential mortgage and asset backed securities industry. He was a senior portfolio manager at ZAIS Group, a structured credit asset management firm in Red Bank, NJ from 2006 to 2011, working on residential mortgage securities and whole loans. He has also served in senior research strategy roles at Banc of America Securities, Credit Suisse, and Paine Webber.

PhD, Electrical Engineering from University of Rochester

MS, Renewable Energy Systems from Loughborough University

Insight from this episode:

The challenges related to developing small scale solar projects
BlueFlame’s technology platform called Hyperqual to assist developers and installers with financing their projects
Tips on how to procure and scale businesses
Strategies to streamline and finance a distributed energy portfolio
How to recognize needs in a market
Tips to use prior knowledge in other industries on our current endeavors
In depth explanation of C-Pace- Commercial Property as a Solar Energy
Strategies to finding product market fit
Secrets to recruiting great team members

Kumars suggestions for being an entrepreneur

Be passionate about what you do
Do research to make sure there is adequate funding for your business to grow

Quotes from the show:

“What we found is practice is very different from theory.”- Kumar Aiyer Episode 25
“I am very passionate about climate change and renewables at a high level. ”- Kumar Aiyer Episode 25
“We are working with a lot of greenhouses that grow organic lettuce and things like that, that are also big energy consumers and they need innovative financing” - Kumar Aiyer Episode 25
“Right now C-Pace is limited to certain states and jurisdictions” - Benoy Thanjan Episode 25
“I put money where my mouth is” - Kumar Aiyer Episode 25
“Our focus is very simple, we want to bring in the cheapest cost of financing to these projects for our customers” - Kumar Aiyer Episode 25
“Identify the segment that you are looking to finance make sure there is adequate funding for your business plan to go 1-3 years and grow” - Kumar Aiyer Episode 25