Cherry Street Energy opened their new office building, and with it, a “Solar School” earlier this month.
With a growing team, along with big contracts like City of Atlanta, Fulton County, Emory, Savannah and Chatham County, the company decided it was time to move into a space that reflected that growth.
The company moved from their 1,500 square foot design lab near Piedmont Park to their new space located on the Westside, which has about 13,000 square feet. It serves as home base for the whole team now, instead of having some employees work out of the office and others in a separate warehouse like before the new office.
The space also features a classroom space dubbed “Solar School.” Michael Chanin, CEO of Cherry Street Energy, said he asked designers to give it a high school science classroom feel, to really hone in the theme of the space being an educational opportunity. The space will be used to educate students about how a solar system works, as well as train workers in the solar space.
“What we do, which is building renewable power infrastructure — we build power plants, and we need to educate this workforce, the skilled labor, to do so. And we lack the place for those kinds of training opportunities,” said Chanin.
It’s even more fitting that Georgia should be the location of this solar school, Chanin added, as the first solar battery was installed in Americus, Ga., in 1955.
The Solar School will also help advance some of the work for Cherry Street’s Shine On program, which is focused on training workers in solar panel installation; “For every 1,000 kW of new capacity created, Cherry Street trains 25 new careers in solar power installation” according to its website. To date, at least 250 people have been trained through the program.
“What we needed to do was offer certification — so there’s some solar-specific training and certification that we offer — and then teach people,” Chanin said. “So teaching this, letting people see it, practice installing it, [learning] how to run wire through conduit, OSHA training,” Chanin said.
Nicole Lee, owner of Smart Home Solutions which is one of the Shine On program partners with Cherry Street, said she’s grateful for the program.
“They provide you with all the training where you as the owner can go out and bid on large scale commercial projects with them, or other companies,” Lee said.
Since Cherry Street often contracts out installation vendors — the people who physically put the panels on a roof — the Cherry Street training helped her own business, which offers solar installation as a service, advance in the renewables industry and provided Cherry Street with a reliable partner.
Cherry Street operates using a solar energy procurement agreement (SEPA) model, and was the first in the state of electricity retail renewable power in the state, according to Chanin. State laws changed in 2015 to allow SEPAs, which essentially allows companies to install solar onto a commercial building, then has both parties enter into an agreement — usually around 20 years — where the building owners can buy electricity produced from those panels at a lower rate than buying from the larger electrical grid.
In effect, the SEPA model lets commercial buildings save on their electricity long-term, and provides steady revenue for the solar company. Moreover, its not necessarily a competitor with the larger energy provider (in Atlanta’s case, Georgia Power); commercial buildings buying electricity produced from solar can help alleviate strains on the grid to produce electricity for a growing population and demand.
“We work very hard to be collaborative with our utility partners. The grid is going to be the backbone of our infrastructure for the foreseeable future,” Chanin said. “Southern Company has committed by 2050 that 100 percent of consumption is going to be without carbon — so we have to work together.”
Finally, it helps municipalities inch closer towards their sustainability goals, many of which hope to be entirely run off clean energy by certain dates in the near-future. In all, SEPA models represent a rather unprecedented opportunity.
“The biggest thing that we have to overcome is market knowledge of how possible it is,” Chanin said. “We make the adoption of renewable energy easy.”
