We talk with VP of Solaris Renewables, Brian Sadler, and GM of Greentech Renewables, Buddy Starr, about the solar industry in 2025. We look at the growth of the industry, technology advancements, government policies, and key challenges and opportunities for solar in the coming year.
John Maher: Hi, I am John Maher and I’m here today with Brian Sadler, Vice President at Solaris Renewables, a solar company in Massachusetts providing premium solar and storage technologies with exceptional customer service and designing, installing, and servicing solar systems in Massachusetts, Southern New Hampshire, and Maine. Welcome, Brian.
Brian Sadler: Hey, John. Thanks for having me on.
John: Absolutely. And our special guest today is Buddy Starr, General Manager of Greentech Renewables, New England. Welcome, Buddy.
Buddy Starr: Thanks for having me.
Solar Industry Projections for 2025
John: Sure. So today we’re talking a little bit about solar energy in 2025. As we’re recording this, we’re in December of 2024 and we’re looking forward to the new year. So Buddy, what are your projections for solar energy growth in 2025? Are there any particular regions in the U.S. that are expected to see significant growth?
Buddy: Yeah, John, I mean, I think the regions where we have a high cost of power and a climbing cost of power obviously lend to the more… They’re going to be more apt to choose solar as an alternative where we can kind of give you a more stable energy price. And that happens to be right here in New England. We’ve got a really high demand for power and they don’t make new power plants in Massachusetts anymore. So, solar is obviously going to be a big part of the energy economy up here for a long time, but particularly so in 2025, I think it’s no exception.
Brian: Yeah, I think we’ve been seeing, historically, since solar has been getting more and more traction, we’ve seen double-digit year-over-year growth and that flattened or even went down this past year, and I think a lot of folks have been saying they expect to see [it go] back to a double-digit given a down year, but we certainly hope that that holds true and that there’s a rebound and continued growth in the industry and the adoption of solar because, like Buddy said, especially here in the Northeast, you have the highest rate structure and rises in the country, and so solar makes a ton of sense for folks to be able to fix their costs and save as well. So, we would expect [that for] the Northeast.
And then California had a big policy change with their net metering, I guess now going on almost a couple years ago, but they have of course adopted and reacted with adding storage to leverage that program and they’ve been able to start to bounce back.
I think California is the fifth largest economy in the world, obviously the largest in the United States, so anything that’s going on there is going to affect the rest of us, economy wise, but specifically in our industry, as they’re a progressive state as well. So that’s a good sign. I would say that they’ve sorted out a way to come back and sort out their new program. So we hope for continued growth and I think driving technology and advancements in our industry would also help to leverage that.
Solar Technology Advancements and Innovations in 2025
John: So, on that vein, are there any technology advancements or innovations that we might be able to expect in 2025 and how would that impact the industry and maybe see improvements in terms of cost and efficiency of solar panels, etc.?
Buddy: Yeah, sure. John, I think what we’re starting to see, from my side, is more kind of cross-trade collaborations, even seeing some of the HVAC guys getting the electrification through the mini splits. We’re getting the solar aspect a little bit. We’re seeing our solar companies start getting the HVAC side a little bit. Storage is obviously a big part that everyone’s kind of getting into. So I’m seeing really more collaboration and as solar companies who are doing a ton of the in-home selling are able to adopt the full electrification building material for lack of a better term, I think we’re going to start seeing the overall cost for electrification start to go down for homeowners and the investment overall to start making more sense, the more of these products you can combo together.
But as far as individual advancements or innovations, I do think the battery technologies are still kind of evolving and a lot of our battery manufacturer partners are on their second, third, fourth generation of their battery product. And so, we’re seeing the scale of manufacturing driving costs down, the competition from multiple manufacturers start to drive that down, and we’re seeing new chemistries emerge on that side. So yeah, I think that’s all signs to say that the battery stuff Brian mentioned in California is certainly going to be everywhere at some point, it’s just kind of a matter of when.
Solar power is generated during the day-time and power consumption often happens when the sun’s down. So we have to figure out how to generate and then use. So the deployment of that, whether it’s residential batteries or large multi-megawatt-hour batteries is to be determined. We’re just sort of at the cutting edge of that now and we’re doing it in coordination with local utilities, local policy groups, and of course with a lot of federal incentives right now in all aspects of electrification that we get to enjoy. That’s part of being at the forefront right now, so we’re figuring it out.
John: Do you think that the automotive industry going more into electric vehicles and things like that has actually helped in terms of doing a lot of research and development on battery technology and, like you said, new chemistries and things like that that are actually then kind of coming over into the solar industry?
Buddy: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, lithium batteries are in pretty much every device we use today, whether it’s your laptop or anything. So yeah, the electrification of the automotive industry is certainly part of that as well. Every automobile that’s electrified has an inverter, same thing we use in solar. So all these technologies kind of get repeated and whatever. The difference I think with vehicles for batteries, and again, I’m not an engineer by any stretch, but the weight of the battery is important. So we want lightweight, carry a charge for a long time, can withstand the elements, those are all the important engineering factors to consider. Whereas when you’re doing a standalone storage, maybe it can be a little bit heavier because we don’t have to worry about the fuel economy performance or the range performance, as much as it might be more important, which is like, well, how much storage kilowatt hours can we fit in a…
Brian: …small box.
Buddy: Yeah. In a small box that can fit in somebody’s garage or in the basement or something. So that’s the limiting factor in residential stationary storage is where can we deploy it and then how much onsite load do we have to serve? Do we have enough output? And that’s more of an inverter question than it is a storage question.
Brian: That goes back to a lot of that, the chemistry like you’re talking about, that they continue to evolve. I see every day on different industry forums and articles about this combination, that combination, and a new combination and solid state and trying all different ways to push the envelope towards that efficiency, size, range, and power as well. Like Buddy was talking about the combination with an inverter of what kind of power you’re going to get out of it, even my car that’s an EV has a heat pump in it, so that helps with the conditioning of the battery as well as the conditioning of the cabin, which is pretty wild to think of, like just a small vehicle has a significant size battery and range and inverter and a heat pump in it at fall, which is wild that they’ve integrated all those technologies into one thing, and I think they’ll continue to drive that.
And then funny, something we saw last year, maybe a year or two, was a little bit of the solar cell technology or infrastructure changed a little bit with TOPcon and that’s kind of a new emerging thing and starting to become standard over the perk type of cell and pushing that up because they’re driving a little more efficiency and a little more wattage gains. And then there’s perovskite.
Buddy: Perovskite, yeah.
Brian: There we go, thank you. Perovskite, which is-
Buddy: 2025 is maybe a little early to see that integration, but they’re-
Brian: They’re working on it, right?
Buddy: Working on it, yeah.
Brian: I just saw that they actually did a test site in China. They did a mountainside with hybrid cells there, which again, going for those gains and yields, it’s something like Buddy said, we’re not going to see in the market this year per se, but those are things to come. And again, everyone wants to know when they can have something the size of their cell phone power their whole home. And that’s like, vision, right? So that’s not where we’re going, but if you’re getting the same footprints and we’re continuing to get some moderate gains and efficiency and wattage, those are wins and allows the industry to mature. And so I think, so there’s probably going to be AI in there somewhere, right? Because everywhere, we’re going to have…maybe AI is going to start to get more into the apps and the system functionality and making decisions about when the battery comes on and solar and that interaction as well.
And then, even in the finance portals as well, they’re probably having instant approvals done by AI coming soon and things like this. So they’ll continue to push the envelope and I think we’ll see more access and usability across the board for the products and services that we’re delivering to our customers.
Whole Home Electrification and Heat Pumps
John: And going back to Buddy’s point about whole home electrification, Brian, you actually had heat pumps installed in your house this year, right? And that’s in combination with the solar panels that you already had on your roof, so you’re kind of going in that direction as well, right?
Brian: Yeah, it was a long-term plan and we were slow to move. We did solar a long time ago and then we actually added to our solar the next year because there was an incentive cliff, and so we said, “Let’s just do it now.” We just had a child and I saw that everything was charging, humidifying, dehumidifying, and laundry was going around the clock and I said, “Our electric bills probably aren’t going down anytime soon.” But we also were thinking that at some point we’re going to electrify the home more. I just built a studio for my wife that’s going to be heated and cooled. We were going to have heat pumps at some point. We had an old oil boiler that we wanted to replace, and for us living in a slab ranch, it wasn’t just the environmental impact and that we liked the technology, it was also space.
I want that 16 square foot of space in my garage back. And so, we finally did a lot of that and then we did get a plug-in hybrid vehicle and an electric vehicle, which was again, part of the long-term plan. And we did those things and we added a battery and a smart panel as well, so we kind of have a lot of those pieces together and we’re just… This last year was a big year to learn how these things interact with each other, and how can we control them? How can we leverage them and understand them best? And yeah, it’s been cool. It’s been a journey and get to be a little bit of a guinea pig for all the pieces and parts that we’re doing. And then a lot of our customers want to do it or want to understand and have questions about it, and we can speak firsthand about a lot of that as well.
Key Challenges and Opportunities for Solar in 2025
John: Buddy, what are some of the key challenges and opportunities facing the solar industry in 2025, do you think?
Buddy: Yeah, again, it’s always going to come to some policy volatility for sure. We’re hoping to get some clarifications out of the federal government. We have some tariff enforcement going on. We’re going to have to see how that kind of impacts the pricing and availability on solar modules broadly. We’re hoping to have enough domestic supply to generally meet demand. We also know the demand for solar and energy products are continuing to rise. So, it’s just kind of a balance of all those things. That’s always the challenge for the solar business. It’s never really been slow and steady. It’s rapidly start and then rapidly pause. It’s a lot of that, but that’s why we like it. That’s why we like doing what we do over here at Greentech is trying to be in the middle of that process and smooth things out and try to efficiently get things from the factory floor to the job site in the most efficient manner possible.
Brian: If you could predict what the next year is going to bring, you could probably retire next year, because one thing is certain about our industry, what is constant is change and it’s every year there’s positive and negative surprises to the year that none of us saw coming, others that we maybe had hoped for and been hoping for a while. So, I think some stability would be a huge asset to our whole country and energy demand and generation in general. That’d be great for us all to see, and hopefully we continue to see the domestication of manufacturing in general and our industry is leading the way in a lot of respects with that, where we’re bringing a lot of that back on US soil, which I think is a big deal. And I think that’s something that we can be proud of and that we should be rewarding that as well, and that we can make quality products and it’s about making them affordable as well in that respect, because we do have a higher cost of living and standard of living.
That’s always been the challenge as we ship things overseas because of cheaper labor like, how can we responsibly bring that back shoreside and deliver a higher quality product? And I think we’re in the midst of that, the former administration and soon to be again administration, started that with tariffs. Previously, the current administration made a little bit more about the conflict areas and humanitarian efforts as well. And then the incoming administration’s talking about accelerating that as well, which it’s not an overnight thing, it will take time, but it shows that making some hard decisions to bring that manufacturing back stateside will yield results. And there’s some short-term pain for long-term gain, and I hope that we see it through and can leverage that and go back to being a leader in the world.
Government Policies and Solar Incentives in 2025
John: Do you see anything happening in terms of government policies and specifically incentives for homeowners now, especially with the change in the administration and things like that? Is it just kind of a wait-and-see-what-happens kind of situation?
Buddy: Yeah, it’s a little wait-and-see, but what we suspect is the things that are working now are probably going to stay in place and maybe the things that are not working so much and maybe are really expensive, maybe don’t make the cut. But again, it’s kind of a wait and see. It’s kind of too early to exactly predict. But yeah, that’s from the federal.
And then of course, locally we’ve got some good news in that some of the policies we’ve been working on locally here in Mass are starting to come to the forefront. And yeah, that’s going to be good. We’re going to be able to serve customers more solar than they were able to prior. And again, we keep talking whole-home electrification that’s driving a lot of this. You need bigger systems now to serve your on-site loads than you did in 2014 when we had our net metering rules in place. So that’s all kind of, I think the market responding to stuff and the policy guys responding to what the market needs.
Brian: I think for us here in the northeast, most of our states are pretty progressive. We have strong policy supporting renewables, and we also don’t source or generate any fossil fuel power really. So we got away from coal, we only use natural gas. I think New Hampshire is the only holdout in New England that actually has any coal-fired power generation at this point, the rest of us have banned it. And we don’t have coal here and we don’t have natural gas here and we don’t have diesel here. So everything, if we want any energy resiliency and security, we have to look to renewables. And that’s why our region has been so supportive of renewables is because how we can control that and give ourselves some energy security. So even if the federal landscape changes and it’s not as supportive, that our region will do things, there’s levers that they can pull as well.
So for instance, we have a 15% tax credit, but it’s capped at a thousand dollars. So an easy unfold, if things change federally, to keep driving the bus, is to uncap that, go back to 15%. I think that the federal tax credit makes sense, its driven a lot of business, its created hundreds of thousands of jobs annually, and there’s been a lot of manufacturing that’s been moved because of the IRA stateside. It’s been in, I’ll just say, red states, so that incoming administration being conservative, if they were to unwind those things, they’re taking jobs from the folks that voted them in for the most part, too.
So it seems like, like Buddy pointed out, the things that make sense, they’ll carry on, they seem to be pretty firm. And then maybe there’s some fat that can be cut off, they’ll look at that and not the main drivers and pieces that might hurt some underprivileged communities and populations, but we’ve got to find ways to bring whoever is left out back into the fold and make it accessible for everybody as well.
There’s a “Solar for All” program that came out, there’s federal funding attached to that, and a lot of that’s been dispersed already to the states, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, I’m guessing Vermont as well probably. So there’s been some funding that’s already happened to help jog some of that as well, so hopefully those things continue.
The Impacts of Climate Change and Extreme Weather on Solar in 2025
John: Right. So, we’re continuing to see the impacts of climate change. We had some pretty significant or even extreme weather events in 2024, hurricanes that hit Florida and North Carolina, and caused a lot of flooding. How do you think that solar companies in 2025 and beyond will continue to adapt and change in terms of these challenges from weather events?
Buddy: Sure. I mean, I think from just a backup power, piece-of-mind standpoint, the home storage is obviously part of that conversation for homeowners to have that extra security there. I think from impacting construction and stuff like that, yeah, I mean, we’ve got to look at. Do we need to make sure we’re using more robust racking or the manufacturers have got to deal with different wind loads, wind uplift loads. Florida specifically is interesting because they have hurricane winds, so manufacturers have to make special products for the panels to withstand that so they’re not blowing off in a hurricane. So, some of those things just lead us to innovate and adapt, as you say.
And I think for us as an industry, I think all industries have to adapt to those sort of changes, and I don’t think we’re excluded from that. I think building codes change for that and our building code in solar is part of it. I think most code updates, there’s usually a solar update along with every single one of them as we’re kind of forging new paths and finding out new things, whether it’s module level rapid shutdown or other kind of safety features. And I think as the impacts of changing climates or any of that as we learn how to best deal with those, then I think building codes and policies change to kind of meet that. And yeah, we’re here for it. Like Brian said earlier, I think the one thing about solar is it changes all the time. And that’s where we’re at.
Brian: Right. To customers that are interested to talk about that we lean more on the environmental attributes of their system and the carbon offset that they’re able to attain and the difference they’re able to make. But I think a lot of it is building it back, building better and doing this all better and attention to detail. And for us, that’s doing in-house, having control over each part of the process and the system. Code enforcement, in Massachusetts particularly, is very stringent, probably the most in the country. And then, we have to make sure that we’re meeting all those codes to protect the customer’s property and their investments. And so, there’s that piece.
And then it makes me think of back when there was… A few years ago, Puerto Rico got destroyed and they decided, “Why are we going to build back this antiquated grid system? Why don’t we modernize it and we’ll bring it forward?” And they’re leading the world and being more climate resistant and renewable based micro grids and they use new and emerging technologies to build their new infrastructure, as opposed to what we’ve done before is just keep wrapping the yarn around and around and around.
In Boston, and here we have the oldest grid in the country, and one of the oldest in the world, you can only build on top of it so much. Now we’re going through grid modernization and trying to figure that out, and it’s a big problem to solve. So when these communities in Florida, Carolina, I hope that they can be a little more forward-thinking and say like, “Okay, let’s rethink this whole thing. We don’t need to just attach the same wires we had before to the grid. What if we did it this way? What if we made microgrids? What if we leverage storage and we can be more resilient?”
So I think those are things that will continue to emerge in our country and in different markets that are affected by weather that’s accelerated by climate change, which we’re seeing, right? We used to have a handful of hundred year storms, now we have 10 a year. So, things are changing and hopefully we can continue to adapt and be more resilient and that’s where our industry can help as well.
About Greentech Renewables and Solaris Renewables
John: Buddy, can you tell us a little bit about what Greentech Renewables does and how other people, especially solar companies, can reach out to you?
Buddy: Sure. Yeah. We’re a supply partner for solar installers locally. And yeah, you can Google us, Greentech Renewables, or find us at your local trade shows or your local policy groups. But yeah, we’re around.
John: All right, well that’s all really great information. Great to talk to both of you. Thanks for joining us, Buddy.
Buddy: Thanks guys.
John: Yeah. Thank you, Brian.
Brian: Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate you, Buddy. Thank you.
John: And for more information about Solaris Renewables, you can visit the website at solarisrenewables.com or call (781) 270-6555.