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Revolutionizing Urban Solar with TR Ludwig from Brooklyn Solar | EP246 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  TR Ludwig: We wanted to make it light enough that you didn't need a crane to get the members up there, and we wanted to be able to do it in a day. So it was one, one day of labor that alone would shave at least half the cost off, because a lot of the way people were traditionally doing solar canopies was big steel with cranes, lot of dunnage. It gets very expensive, and it's more, certainly, way more than one day. We wanted to get it down to those parameters.
• 1:21
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:31
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it.
• 1:43
  intro: Together we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:47
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, developing and installing solar in the urban core of New York City. My guest today is TR Ludwig. He is the founder of Brooklyn solar works and Brooklyn solar canopy company. Welcome to the show.
• 2:02
  Tim Montague: Tr.
• 2:03
  TR Ludwig: hey, Thanks, Tim.
• 2:03
  TR Ludwig: Thanks for having me.
• 2:06
  Tim Montague: You guys have a great story. I'm really excited to bring this to my listeners.
• 2:08
  Tim Montague: One of the things that EPC solar, EPCs, or solar installers, learn pretty early in their journey is that high rise solar is difficult. The building has a small roof relative to the size of the electric load, and the higher you go, wind loads get more intense to add insult to injury, you're dealing with an hj, which is probably one of the most restrictive hJS in the universe, known as New York City. But TR, before we geek out too much on Brooklyn solar works, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to clean energy.
• 2:51
  TR Ludwig: Yeah. Yeah, cool, yeah. So I guess I've always been quite interested and predisposed for the environmental fields. My mom is a clean energy and clean earth advocate, and has been since I've been born. Grew up in a family where Earth Day was a holiday, and we did our best to educate everybody that we could about the various things that we could do to improve the environment. She helped found Earth Day in our town, and has been a sort of a climate warrior for a very long time. So I had that from the beginning, and in college, I majored in environmental studies and geology, so had that bent as well. And once I got into the work world, wound up working in it for quite some time, doing IT consulting for a larger company called Gartner. And they also have research that they provide, and they happen to be covering solar at the time went. And so I got to know the analyst that covered that really well. And I'd always been really interested in in starting my own business and kind of being an entrepreneur, but I wanted to do something that would do some good. And so solar really seemed like the right sort of mix of both of those things. And so around 2008 2009 time frame helped start a residential solar financing company, as is one of the first in the country, out in the East Coast, and met a number of my current business partners in that business, and that didn't quite go as planned, but we learned a lot of important lessons, and from there, worked for Sun run for a bit, helped grow their East Coast presence here in New York and Massachusetts, Connecticut, Long Island, Jersey, and after a little bit of time, we all realized that, because we lived in New York City, lived in Brooklyn, we were driving by a huge opportunity to get out to New Jersey and these other places where Sun runs, serving and and so we we said, hey, why not try and come up with a business where we could do solar, where we live
• 5:11
  Tim Montague: one more time?
• 5:11
  Tim Montague: What year was it that you got into solar finance?
• 5:14
  TR Ludwig: That was 2008
• 5:16
  Tim Montague: Okay, yeah, so pretty early, I like to say the modern solar industry started in about 2010 in the US, but it's been around since the 50s. The technology is is very mature now, but it markets are different matter and money talks. And as as much as you and I and millions of other Americans want to save the environment, it it has to jive with what's going on economically, really, that is the driver for so. Much of what goes on in the built environment, but, and I share your love of clean energy for the environmental good that it represents, it is a great way to decarbonize the grid, and that's a significant chunk of our carbon footprint. So let's get into Brooklyn solar, though Brooklyn solar works. What was the ideation behind that you were already working in resi or resi and light commercial with sun run, and then at some point you said, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go be a maverick here and do this in my backyard.
• 6:31
  TR Ludwig: Yeah, yeah. And so while we were at Sun run, we opened up the New York City marketplace for Sun run, Sun run direct. They were just a financing company when we first, when they first tried to enter into New York City. Then they bought rec solar. This is 2013 2014 ish, early, 2014 I think, and that really changed the game, because they then became an EPC, and wanted to both do all the construction, selling and financing, and New York City, obviously, is a pretty big market for them, so we helped lead that expansion. And while we were doing it, we noticed that we really couldn't target flat roofs with sun run or really any other installer. They just weren't that interested in doing them. They were really scared off by all the fire codes and the complex permitting that came with that in New York City.
• 7:25
  TR Ludwig: And so we investigated, like, how you could get around some of these complex permitting requirements in New York City, the fire code requires a six foot clear path on a flat roof from the front of the building to the back of the building, and that clear path needs to be nine feet high for a fireman, six foot fireman to swing an ax. So it was pretty challenging to figure out how to do that on a, you know, 20 foot wide building, you really sacrifice quite a bit of the surface area of the roof.
• 7:57
  TR Ludwig: But if you develop a canopy structure that can go on these types of buildings, you can raise your system above the fire codes and comply and ease your permitting burden significantly.
• 8:12
  TR Ludwig: So we started investigating that and wound up partnering with a few really talented folks in the design community whose studio they're based in Brooklyn as well. They do a lot of high end design for like Google's campuses and that kind of thing.
• 8:27
  TR Ludwig: And they were really keen to collaborate with us on the idea, and this is an off hours and our spare time, we had talked with them, and we're getting jazzed about it. And we knew Sun run certainly wasn't going to support that kind of a development at Sun run, to be fair, they were trying to grow like hot cakes with just vanilla resi at the time. And eventually, once we had a few design iterations of what we thought a canopy could look like me and my other partners, we were like, wow, this is really awesome. We really should go do this. Go develop it. And that was effectively the genesis of Brooklyn solar works, was we were going to develop these canopies, and we probably were going to sell them. We weren't even sure if we were going to install them at the time. And, you know, we've had, like, a pretty basic business model in mind.
• 9:23
  Tim Montague: Let's get the let's get the gorilla in the room, out of the out in the open. Here it when you start talking about canopies on top of a building, my brain just freaks out and goes, Wait a minute.
• 9:34
  Tim Montague: That's gotta be super expensive and super logistically complicated. How on earth can you make that pencil? So tell us that story. How do you make this pencil?
• 9:47
  TR Ludwig: Yeah, the primary concept was, as we were building this canopy, we wanted to make it repeatable. We wanted to make it light enough that you didn't need a crane to get the members up there. And we wanted to be able to do it in a day. So it was one, one day of labor that alone would shave at least half the cost off, because a lot of the way people were traditionally doing solar canopies. Was big, steel with cranes, lot of dunnage. It gets very expensive, and it's more, certainly, way more than one day. We want to get it down to those parameters, those we actually got down to pretty quickly. And when you do that, the cost of these structures comes in somewhere around $1 a watt. So still quite expensive relative to certainly where things are now in terms of cost, but it eliminates all the on site fabrication that you'd be doing if you were using steel, for example, or on site welding steel here in the city is extremely expensive, so you effectively eliminate all. That.
• 10:49
  TR Ludwig: And in New York City, we have additional incentives, so we have something called a property tax abatement, which basically takes 30% of the system cost, and it deducts that amount off of people's property tax. It's not exactly like an ITC, but something similar. And so that certainly helps with the payback as well, when it all is said and done. If you're getting a much larger system on there, because you can cover more of the surface area of the roof, you're getting a better offset. It's a more compelling sale to a homeowner. And then these incentives, both with the property tax abatement and right now, Con Edison's power rate is that's in like, the 35 cents a kilowatt hour range. The combination of those things really helps get the paybacks into something that's pretty manageable four to four to seven years depending.
• 11:43
  Tim Montague: So your core customer is a, like, a brownstone home owner. These are row homes, right? So they're in blocks of wall to wall homes. So they're individual homes, but they're very narrow and long, and they have a long, skinny roof, which lends itself to this concept that you're talking about, of putting a canopy on the roof, something that you can apparently walk up to the roof, you don't need a crane. So I love that, and that you broke the design into components that are easy to lift. That's very innovative, for sure. What were some of the other challenges that you had to overcome, both in the design and then the execution of this product?
• 12:30
  Tim Montague: Because you really are hanging your hat, so to speak with the solar company on this canopy, are you not?
• 12:39
  TR Ludwig: Oh sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think a lot of it was, you know, early on, was a ton of engineering. I was working with structural we had multiple structural engineering firms working with us to help craft the geometry of the canopy, to make sure that I can work with a lot of these old buildings, iterating on the product, so that we could do it quickly. We could get the materials. There really wasn't anything that existed off the shelf for this, so we had to build fabrication relationships, eventually, extrusion relationships. We're extruding our own aluminum these days, and we had pretty big learning curve on that. So there's been a lot of scaling up in terms of intellectual property for the product. Once we did a number in New York City. We said, Hey, think this could be a pretty cool thing to bring nationally.
• 13:36
  TR Ludwig: And so then that started a whole bunch of other engineering efforts to make sure we could engineer their structure for various wind and snow loads around the country.
• 13:45
  Tim Montague: And I'm curious, when you first took this concept to New York City, what was the their response, and what was that process like, getting the city to accept your solar canopy?
• 13:56
  TR Ludwig: Yeah, it was, believe it or not, by the time we got the final design that we knew we were going to build on the first one, we put it into the Department of Buildings. And usually there's like a rejection, two rejections, and it's just sort of the way it works with Department of Buildings. But we got a permit like pretty quickly, and a lot of it was because we were complying with the fire codes.
• 14:23
  TR Ludwig: There was no lack of compliance when we applied, because the structure was designed to work with exactly what was required on the roof. So by the time we got to the dob, and by the time we really were able to file for a permit, a lot of the work we had done ahead of that sort of greased the wheels for our final steps there to get the permit, which was actually really satisfying, because we had worked pretty hard up until that point. It also vetted it with a number of different people that were not necessarily in the Department of Buildings, but engineers, architects, that
• 15:01
  Tim Montague: kind of thing.
• 15:01
  Tim Montague: What year was that that you got your first permanent project?
• 15:05
  TR Ludwig: That was 2015 Yeah, so
• 15:08
  Tim Montague: you're nine years in, right? Yeah, yeah,
• 15:13
  Unknown: yeah. We're nine, nine and a half, and we'll be 10 in February. Okay?
• 15:18
  Tim Montague: And when you look back at the this almost a decade now that you've been doing this, still very focused on New York City, what are some of the other lessons learned, and how has your business evolved?
• 15:31
  TR Ludwig: Wow, I think what we've learned is that you some of these things take a tremendous amount of dedication, and it would have been easy for us to give up and just melt back into the typical vanilla residential business where, you know, we could just go do pitch roof somewhere else. Yes, we were really dedicated to it, and I think that almost naively so at the very beginning, allowed us to put our head down and try and go do something that folks really had never done at scale here. And that's a really gratifying feeling, and it taught us quite a bit about what it takes sometimes to make a business work. I think the other component is just, everyone says it all the time, but it really is a people game and a people business, finding the right people that are dedicated to the cause you know, that do have some passion behind them that allow you to power through some pretty difficult times. It can be extremely frustrating, certainly with our permitting agencies and our utilities and fire department here in New York City. It's not for the faint of heart, but because we focused on this, and we did so like at the very beginning, like building just the DNA of New York City into our company, that that is an advantage that we have here, and it is paid off so many different times. It's also a weakness sometimes, sometimes Department of Buildings changes the way they want things done, and I really gums up our pipeline or something. We're usually one of the first companies that notices. And so we also work on behalf of the industry to try and help remove some of these barriers that that exist sometimes spontaneously appear, and we all have to try and deal with them.
• 17:20
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• 17:42
  Tim Montague: The 252 75 pairs well with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to Chintpowersystems.com to find out more. I'm curious when you think about New York City. First of all, there's a huge variety of types of buildings in New York City, so we have to be careful about generalizing too much. But when you think about New York City versus some other major metro, maybe, compared to Los Angeles, which is very different. How successful is the residential and like commercial solar market in New York now, as a result of your work, do you think, what's your critical assessment,
• 18:26
  TR Ludwig: I would say, specific to our work? I think there's no way there would be as many solar systems in our core geography, that if we weren't here, there's just no no company would have chosen to focus on this as much.
• 18:40
  TR Ludwig: Maybe there would we do have competitors, of course, that try and come in and do what we do.
• 18:49
  TR Ludwig: But I think just the sheer focus of what we saw was just a wide open marketplace and these rows and rows of houses that are all right next to each other, that all basically look the same. We just thought that was a great opportunity. Not nearly as much shade, not nearly as much other obstructions. Of course, there's the tall building here and there, but for the most part, it's actually pretty shade free, so that kind of gets you out of some of the traditional residential issues. But I do think we've left our mark for sure, and I don't think that there are other companies out there that really would have stuck with it as much and then developed a specific product for that market the way we have I do. I'm proud of that, and proud of my myself and my partners for sticking with it.
• 19:38
  Tim Montague: I love what you said about people. Truly, people are what make the world go round, and technology is a wonderful thing, and we can't survive and do our energy transition, so to speak, without technology. So we it's a both and, but I'm a huge believer that it's your people. If you're a company, whether you're an installer and manufacturer, a financier, an IPP, whatever your segment is, it's the people that are going to make you stand out and creating a culture. So if you had to characterize the culture of Brooklyn solar works, how? Tell us a little more about that.
• 20:20
  Unknown: Yeah, we've done quite a bit of work on this, actually, even recently, try and better define it. For a long time, we just called it the vibe. So if someone came into the company and they got the vibe then that was great. And it was a light hearted, fun loving person that was smart and capable and dedicated to solar and that was the, really, the main bar that we look for here. Yeah, over time, we've tried to define that a bit more our core values. Are, I think, have gotten us a lot further as we've been clear about that, being passionate, being committed, being adaptable, and being inquisitive, those are the things that we felt like were really the main core attributes of the people that have done the best here at Brooklyn solar works that really align the best with their company. And so that's basically how we recruit new folks. That's how we evaluate our existing staff on how well they're living up to those values. And of course, as the company changes, we may decide to change those values, but it is quite important to have folks that align there, and it can be pretty hard sometimes, especially if you're up on a super hot roof in the middle of the summer, to be to fulfill some of those but we think that's what makes the difference. And if folks want to go work somewhere else because they don't believe in them, that's totally great. That's what we require of our people here,
• 22:45
  Tim Montague: are you suggesting that everyone has to, at some point, go on the roof? Oh,
• 22:53
  TR Ludwig: yeah, okay, that's important for us. We have a roof deck here in our office, and so most people have felt and touched a solar system pretty easily, but yeah, we really encourage all our people, it doesn't matter what their job is. Want to get them exposure up on the roof as we're building the system. Yeah, because it's just it's super important to connect the physical work that we're doing to whatever part of the business that person is working in but we want them to feel as connected as possible to physical product and also understand what half our install team is going through as they are up on hot roofs, or if it's super, super cold roofs in the middle of winter, like they need to know that it's not all office work here, and it's definitely some challenging stuff to get up there, no matter what's going on with the weather. Yeah,
• 23:49
  Tim Montague: it definitely gives you an appreciation for what installers do. It's it's a tough job, yeah, hot in the summer, cold in the winter and and a lot of pressure to get things done in a timely manner, and get them done right the first time, and then you're moving on right? And there's probably not a lot of people thanking them for their hard work, but I'm curious you. You said you developed a company around an innovative product, this lightweight canopy. When did the companies bifurcate become separate? And yeah, tell us about that journey. And how do they how are they different today than originally? Yeah,
• 24:30
  Unknown: yeah. Brooklyn solar works spun off Brooklyn solar canopy in 2018 very beginning of 2018 so we had about two years of operating. Brooklyn solar works two, three years of Brooklyn solar works on its own, but it had the company developing the canopies as we it became clear that we really should create a product and sell it to other companies. That's when we created Brooklyn solar canopy, and that's we created a different brand for it, different branding whole thing.
• 25:05
  Unknown: And we're coming up on six years, six plus years, actually, for the canopy company. And that's been a lot of fun too, because then it enables us to look outside of New York City, look at other markets. And so we've had a number of folks from various states around the country, buy the canopy from us.
• 25:26
  Unknown: We've built out some new products within the canopy, company wood, a wood canopy that we're super excited about, a cantilever design, post trust design, so we've started to diversify a bit in terms of the products. And yeah, that's also been a lot of fun to build new, new concepts and address different, different canopy needs. The a frame canopy that we originally developed serves a really great need for here in the city, on a rooftop, it can be a carport, can serve a few different needs, but sometimes it's a pretty radical design.
• 26:04
  Unknown: And so some people want something a little bit tamer.
• 26:07
  Unknown: And so some of our newer designs are efforts to try and meet those needs more sort of table like or post trust, post and beam. Look,
• 26:18
  Tim Montague: gosh, there's so many things that I'd love to talk about, but we're a little short on time, we should probably talk about Nicaea.
• 26:24
  Tim Montague: You're very involved with Nicea, the New York Solar Energy Industries Association. New York State has some of the best legislation for the solar industry in the US. You also have NYSERDA, which is an amazing R and D policy. See, it is a PUC on steroids. We cannot shake a stick at NYSERDA anywhere else in the United States, I would argue. But tell us a little bit about the greater landscape in New York and how, I guess, how they, the two work together, because New York is like a state in and of itself, right? It's a very unique jurisdiction. And then there's the rest of this very large state, the Empire State, and but it's a both hand, right?
• 27:12
  Tim Montague: You've got a good solar market statewide. And, yeah, so tell us about Nicaea.
• 27:19
  Unknown: Yeah, I've been on the board of Nicea for going on seven years now it is pretty impressive group of folks that are all volunteer. We accept the executive director and his staff, but the board is comprised of mostly DG, CNI and residential founders, owners, policy people. I'm also the treasurer of Nicaea, making sure that we're going to be a solvent association for many years to come here, but we've been doing some really great work. Our Executive Director, Noah Ginsburg, has been real champion at going on offense here in in New York. Felt like, for a long time we were like, just trying to defend against various attacks on net metering and that kind of thing. And yeah, I think we navigated that well, but we were never really pushing the policies that I think are needed to get ourselves into sort of the next phase here in New York, Governor has required us to get to 10 gigawatts by 2030 and we just recently asked her to raise the goal to 20 gigawatts by 2035 literally, I think this week, we just crossed six gigawatts in New York. These gigawatts of solar deployed. We think we can definitely hit the 10 gigawatt goal at 3020 2020, 30, yeah, and 20 by 2035, that's a goal that we're asking the governor to to mandate. And when we do that, we know that will then kick a whole bunch of other agencies into gear, including NYSERDA, and we know that the DG industry can deliver we've done over 93% of the solar deployed in New York State has been done by the DG industry and folks that participate in the various NYSERDA programs. Let's
• 29:21
  Tim Montague: stop for a sec your your goal of 10 gigawatts by 2030 seems ambitious, but realistic. You're at six. You've got four years, sorry, six years to go, but doubling that then in in five years, right? Obviously, the accelerator needs to be pushed sooner than 20 to get to 20 by 2035 but it that is a huge jump. And so what is the essence of that jump? Though? How you have to fund these things, right? You have to pour gasoline on the fire. What is the sauce there?
• 29:55
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah. That's been our work. For the past six months or so, we've been developing this package of policies that we think can really accelerate the industry to get to those benchmarks. From our perspective, on the resi side, there's a few changes to the tax credit. The way that works here in New York state, we're asking for an increase in the there's a cap on that tax credit, $5,000 we're asking to increase it to 10,000 we've been asking for a number of years, and now we think it's the time to make that happen. On the commercial side, it's all about siting. There's a lot of siting issues that crop up that cause, you know, delays in permitting and or projects to be thrown by side. And so there's a few forms that we're asking for there with the Department of Environmental Conservation, believe it or not, is one that is blocking some solar development, so asking for some changes there and then flexible connection, so not totally disqualifying a solar project when a transformer could clearly handle more solar, but some awfully conservative measures that are being used to to approve or disapprove interconnections these days, and so we're asking for those to be reformed. But there is a tremendous amount of pipeline that's out there, and I know that we can definitely get to 10. In fact, we have 10 gigawatts in the pipeline already. So that's pretty, pretty big. I would say, of course, some will fall out, but we'll put in more and then, and just to the extent that we can really put our foot on the gas between a lot of the can. Unity solar development that's going on upstate, you can start to add gigawatts very quickly there, and between that and Long Island and New York City doesn't add quite as much solar capacity.
• 31:56
  Unknown: But there is also a roadmap for energy storage, which we think is going to really be very important here in the city as that evolves. But
• 32:05
  Tim Montague: yeah. So if you go to if you go to nice, see his website, you'll find the 20 by 2035, report. I encourage my listeners to check that out.
• 32:14
  Tim Montague: This is where the puck is going, right? So if you're in any other state, basically, maybe except California, there's a lot of stuff here, legislatively, fundamentally, that is going to energize your clean energy transition wherever you are. So learn this, because you have to.
• 32:37
  Tim Montague: We have to stand on each other's shoulders right here in Illinois, we have a great program, but it stands on New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, of course, California, Colorado, to some extent, with community solar. I'm very keen to learn more about this. But what you mentioned storage and maybe just, let's wrap up there. New York is already known for a good storage incentive program. But what's coming down the pike?
• 33:06
  Unknown: Yeah, so recently, just came out with their energy storage roadmap. That's more of a concerted effort to outline the market mechanisms and incentives that'll be necessary to spark more storage pretty aggressive goals there. We think it's quite possible. The big caveat is New York City. New York City's energy storage market has been quite emaciated, I would say, certainly on the residential side, but even at the industrial scale, it's just really hard to get stuff done here. Now, NYSERDA is throwing a lot of money at it now with this new plan. And so I do see that starting to come alive. I also see New York City permitting agencies, HJ is in and fire department starting to get some traction there and approving projects at a higher clip. But the energy density here in the city is just so incredibly immense that we'll gobble up every megawatt hour we can of storage, because the grid is quite constrained, and because of the density and because of the sheer cost that it costs to deliver a kilowatt hour here, there's gonna be some great opportunities for storage as well.
• 34:22
  Tim Montague: Yeah, storage is fundamentally really good for the grid, right? It's a great shock absorber. It's an instantaneous power plant when you need if the battery is charged, and it's a sponge, if it has capacity to absorb energy. So it's a super, super valuable asset for any grid operator or beneficiary of a resilient grid, right when consumers have access to batteries, it does provide the opportunity to have some resiliency, which does come in handy when you have a massive storm like Hurricane Sandy, which caused massive blackouts, yeah,
• 34:58
  Unknown: um, I wish we were way further ahead on that. Yeah, I think we learned a lesson, but does take time here in New York City. We're still on 2008 electrical code. So it does takes, takes longer than most to to get some progress on these things, but it does feel like we're getting there.
• 35:16
  Tim Montague: I see you have a New York solar Summit coming up, November 6 and seven. So check out nica.org and if you're working in the New York area, go to the summit. That's in Albany, New York. Unfortunately, I think it conflicts with the Midwest solar Expo, so I won't be there, but anyway. Tr, how can our listeners find you?
• 35:37
  Unknown: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, so. TR, Ludwig, if you Google, tr, Ludwig and Brooklyn solar works, won't be hard to find me, and then brooklynsolarworks.com is our website for Brooklyn solarworks, and Brooklynsolarcanopy.com is our sister company that sells canopies around the country.
• 35:58
  Tim Montague: Great. I look forward to staying in touch and following your journey. Tr, it's very inspirational. Please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify, and please reach out to me on LinkedIn or on my website.
• 36:13
  Tim Montague: Cleanpowerhour.com I love hearing from my listeners. With that, I want to thank TR Ludwig, founder of Brooklyn solar works for coming on the show today.
• 36:23
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much.
• 36:24
  TR Ludwig: Thank you. Take care.
• 36:26
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage.