“BLAZER”
Sunspear Energy
Jeff Kaemmerlen, CEO
Kaemmerlen co-founded Sunspear Energy in 2017, which has since completed solar installations at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, Wet’n’Wild Hawaii, Capitol Place, MINI of Kapolei, and more. The company specializes in innovative solar carports, electric vehicle charging stations, battery energy storage solutions, solar panel cleaning, service and maintenance.
Jeff Kaemmerlen, president and CEO of Sunspear Energy
Sunspear Energy
Tell us about your most recent funding success. This year we started an affiliate company to Sunspear Energy, Sunspear Hawaii Fund 1, which will be providing financing for five commercial solar projects being built by Sunspear Energy. The fund is using a combination of private equity and debt from the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority and commercial banks such as AmericanSavings Bank. The five projects in this first fund’s portfolio are being allocated to several nonprofit entities that don’t have the legal structure to monetize the tax credits available for solar directly. This financing structure allows our customers to avoid incurring any upfront capital expenditure to build the system and start saving on their energy costs as soon as their system is energized by purchasing the electricity produced on the roof at a deep discountcompared to purchasing it from the utility. The fund is the owner of the system and provides ongoing maintenance to ensure the systems are maximizing theirenergy production potential.
What about your business excites you the most right now? We are movingto a new, bigger and better location. … The new space is much larger than our current spot and will allow the entire team to be consistently working together under one roof. We plan to set up a learning center at the new location so that we can hold training and educational seminars for our internal team as well as other industry stakeholders. We will be setting up a training area in the warehouse for practicing rooftop installation of solar equipment on a demo roofas well as a wall space for installation training of electrical equipment. Inside the office, we will be dedicating a large area as the learning room so that we can host product and technical trainings and other types of education-focused events.
What is one thing you think we need as a state to cultivate a robust tech and innovation sector? I think we should be leveraging our state’s unique characteristics to ensure innovation is being allocated to areas that will help solve problems most important to Hawaii. Given the remote island geography of our state, energy and agriculture are two areas that innovation can center around because we are so reliant on systems outside of our state’s borders, which poses a large risk. Hawaii is an ideal testing ground for building de-centralized systems that bring end users closer to the resources they are consuming. Our industry, energy, is going through that right now as we see theroll-out of some of these grid services programs where private rooftops are being used to not only generate electricity, but also provide services to help stabilize the power grid. Hopefully, this can be one of many examples of innovation undertaken in Hawaii that will serve as a model for other places.
