Engine For Green Jobs: Premier Power CEO Dean Marks (Part 4)

SM: What is the employment makeup of a typical team for one of your jobs?

DM: For residential it will take a team of four 2-3 days to do.

SM: What are the roles of those four people?

DM: There is typically a lead who is an electrician. That will be a C-10 or journeyman electrician. There are laborers underneath who have been with us for a while who will do penetrations on the roof or some of the basic wiring of plugging the modules together. The new laborers will help hoist modules onto the roof or into the racking.

SM: It is a blue-collar work force that you are using. What percentage of your 85 people are blue collar?

DM: I would say out of 85 employees, 25 are blue collar.

SM: You have gotten to $45 million in revenue with 85 people. That sounds pretty profitable.

DM: It is. Right now, out of all of our competitors, we seem to be the only profitable company out there.

SM: What is the secret to that?

DM: We are very frugal and conservative. Perhaps they call us cheap. We do not go out and buy a ton of modules and put them in our warehouse because they are being sold at a good price. Other companies have done that, and now component costs have dropped. They now have to sell those components at a loss. We bring it in and try to get it out of our warehouse right away.

Our engineering expertise has been key. We get a lot of jobs that are too challenging for other companies. If it is not a cookie-cutter project, a wide open roof with no vents, they don’t want to deal with it. We do a Google Earth of the roof, lay it out in CAD, and we have engineers lay out the system. We get unique designs on some of our residential systems.

One example of a unique design is the carport structure I was talking about in downtown San Francisco. That is a system that has bi-directional trackers and follows the sun through the sky. We have done some other cases in which we have taken areas of bad soil, brown fields which cannot be dug in because they are so corrosive. We came up with a ballasted design which sits on top of the soil, and all our conduit is run on top of the ground because if it was run through the ground it would just get eaten up in 5-10 years. We have 11 kilowatt systems there that follow the sun throughout the day.

When possible, I do like to avoid systems that have moving parts in them. My system at home is a fixed ground mount system that faces south. It is just a workhorse. I have had it for six years and nothing has gone wrong. There are no moving parts. It just produces electricity. If I have lights and a TV on it feeds that, and it produces excess power that will spin my meter backwards and put it back on the grid so it can go to my neighbor’s house.

At the end of the year I pay the utility company the difference between what I have used and what I have produced. That typically ranges from a credit of $35 for the year to a max of $70 that I have had to pay to the utility company for the year. That is not bad for a family of five living in a 3,000 square foot home. I pretty much have a zero carbon footprint as far as electricity goes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Engine For Green Jobs: Premier Power CEO Dean Marks
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