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Dean Solon stands out as one of the very few self-made billionaires to emerge from the U.S. solar industry, following the tremendous 2021 initial public offering on the Nasdaq of his solar-equipment firm Shoals.
But a few weeks ago, as he and I found seats outside the Midwest Solar Expo in a far western suburb of Chicago, it was clear the major cashout hadn’t changed his style. Solon, age 61, was dressed not in Balenciaga or Louis Vuitton, but his trademark jean shorts and athletic sneakers.
“I’m gonna go from a large Dunkin Donuts to an extra-large Dunkin Donuts now,” he said. “I still, to this day, drive a 2017 Chevy Bolt, 100% electric. I still live in the same house. I didn’t do it for the money then, I don’t do it now.”
In fact, Solon’s instinct to tinker and solve problems has thrust him back into the solar manufacturing space at the industry’s most chaotic moment in years.
“The renewables building is on fire, and it is hot as fuck, and everybody’s running away from the fire,” he said. “We have asbestos-clad underwear on. We have our fire suit on, and we got a hose, and we’re running into the fire.”
Solon has decided to compete in these dire circumstances by essentially building the entire menu of items needed for a modern solar, battery, or microgrid project, and designing all the pieces to fit together seamlessly. His new firm, Create Energy, will sell developers solar modules, trackers, batteries, inverters, power stations, and other auxiliary equipment. The goal is to save customers time and effort compared to buying separately from a tracker vendor, a module vendor, an inverter vendor, and so on, and then assembling all those components with separate crews.
It’s an ominous time to start a new solar manufacturing business in America, to say the least. After a booming few years following the implementation of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and its various, generous clean-energy manufacturing incentives, firms now find themselves squeezed between fluctuating tariffs and the detonation of those same incentives, following President Donald Trump’s signing of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act last week.
What better moment to check in with one of the most singular voices in the solar industry, who has survived and thrived through the solarcoaster of the last two decades without wavering in his commitment to American manufacturing?
Solon’s previous company Shoals originally made automotive parts for Bosch back in the ‘90s. But after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, lifting most tariffs between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, Bosch wanted to relocate its suppliers to the latter nation, and Solon refused to move his operation out of Tennessee, he recalled.
Around that same time, he got an inbound request from a budding solar enterprise that needed some manufactured junction boxes and cable assemblies; that upstart turned out to be First Solar, pretty much the only U.S. panel manufacturer that has excelled over the last few decades (and whose stock has been on a tear as Congress prepared to revoke tax credits for solar projects that use Chinese-made materials).
Once he made the jump into solar equipment in the early 2000s, Solon kept manufacturing in America, even as installers and developers embraced cheaper Chinese products and U.S. cell and module manufacturing collapsed.
“Solar makes sense, with or without incentives; Buying American-made products, even better,” Solon said. “Listen, I fly the American flag like crazy. I grew up in the ‘70s working on American cars. I’m a gearhead my whole life. I love American-made products, and I’m gonna push it.”
That ethos continues in the new venture. The strategy is to build high-quality equipment and find customers who understand its value, because they’re investing with a longer-term mindset.
“We’re not looking for every Tom, Dick, and Harry that’s trying to flip a project to build it as cheap as possible with garbage,” he said. “I’m looking for the [independent power producers], the big power companies, who want to buy systems that are going to last for decades.”
In theory, a company with this attitude would welcome tariffs, which raise the cost of cheaply produced competition from Chinese factories. The last few months have seen new tariffs aplenty, though Trump has waived some within days or weeks of announcing them. But while tariffs are often billed as helpful to domestic manufacturers, President Trump’s tariffs are also causing complications for the American factory buildout.
For starters, Trump’s blanket tariffs on all Chinese goods impact manufacturing equipment produced in that country. Not only does China make most of the world’s solar panels — it also makes many of the machines required to manufacture solar.
“To be clear on this point, there’s no better-built machines for solar than Chinese equipment, end of story,” Solon said. “That’s how good it is. It’s heads and tails better than anywhere else you could get machinery.”
“It was easy to order machinery, but then once the tariffs hit, there’s a lot of machinery just sitting in ports in China that hasn’t left,” he added.
Even if Solon could get his hands on that equipment without exorbitant price hikes, the U.S. lacks enough production of solar cells — the component that actually converts sunlight into electricity — to meet the demand for domestic module assembly. Factories that can’t obtain the limited domestic cells need to import them, but the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump has announced on much of the world, and then delayed, have scrambled the economics for cells from outside the U.S.
Create is making other products at its Portland, Tennessee, factory, but the timeline for making solar modules in-house has been pushed back due to the macroeconomic headwinds.
A decade ago, solar module costs started to plunge, and the price of solar-generated power fell along with it. That has propelled solar to the front of the pack for new power plant construction. But lately the slope of cost declines has leveled off, and incremental module improvements do less and less to push the cost of solar power lower.
Solon is stepping into that mature marketplace, so he has to bring something new to the table to stand out. After years of making the electrical connectors needed to hook up solar panels into a functioning power plant, he realized he could eliminate several steps for installers with clever design hacks.
Today’s standard solar-plant construction process creates inefficiencies. “Everyone is this separate crew working on the same rows over and over and over ‘til they do it in the next location,” Solon said.
A singular project might have different crews clear the earth, pound the posts, add torque tubes, bolt the modules in place, check the torque on the bolts, handle the electrical work, and then clean up the site, he said.
The new products from Create come with electrical connections pre-wired into the modules and the torque tubes of the trackers. Installers can easily snap everything together, at which point, Solon insists, the systems won’t need any more maintenance.
Solon’s goal was to make installation so easy that it would be doable for an avatar of the modern man that he refers to as “Mr. Hot-Pocket Muncher,” who is “happy living in mommy’s basement eating Hot Pockets and playing 12 hours of Xbox.”
“Take my module, and grab Mr. Hot-Pocket Muncher,” Solon envisioned, after showing me an AI rendering of the character, which his colleague on hand advised him against making available for publication. “He picks it up. He clicks it on the torque tube. Did I hear it click? Yes, I’m done. Grab the next one. Click, yes. All the wiring is done. All the mechanical connections are done, and they’re non-serviceable. There’s nothing for an [operations and maintenance] crew to ever do again.”
That vision would threaten a number of specialized jobs in the solar installation and maintenance business. But it would also deliver more efficient construction, so the same workforce could theoretically deliver more clean power in the same amount of time. If Solon can pull it off, that kind of benefit could be valuable as the industry stares down the loss of its decades-long tax-credit regime.
Solon doesn’t deny that the solar industry writ large is heading for a contraction, but he rejects the more apocalyptic outlooks some fear for the sector. Instead, he thinks it’ll be a reset for the industry after the bounty of Biden-era policy supercharged the pace of activity.
“Right now, the solar business is a drunk pirate that partied like a rock star all last night,” Solon mused. “We woke up, we’re hung over as hell, and we’re reaching for our wallet and our keys, and we can’t find either one of them. And we wonder what the hell happened? I think we’re gonna be hung over for about six months to a year.”
The wave of bankruptcies has already begun, taking down longtime industry stalwarts like solar loan provider Mosaic, rooftop solar financier Sunnova, grid-battery integrator Powin Energy, and more.
It’s not a bad time to have a billion dollars in the bank and several decades of manufacturing experience.
“If you’re in a consolidated market [and] people are going out of business, who are you going to run to to get your products and services?” chimed in Create’s chief of staff, Joe Fahrney, who was sitting next to Solon at the Midwest Solar Expo. “So people are lining up to buy from Dean Solon, because they know Dean and Create will be in business over the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.”
“This time it won’t IPO though,” Solon interjected. “I’m not giving up control, because I want this little baby to run for hundreds of years.”
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