100KW solar rooftop panels atop PowerLight’s Berkeley headquarters
August 2004
Solar Flair
As PowerLight Prepares to Build One of the World’s Largest Solar Power Stations, Founder Thomas Dinwoodie is Beaming
by Dana Smirin
Thomas Dinwoodie rushes into the spaceship-like conference room built with curved glass, timber and photovoltaic panels. He apologizes for his tardiness. Since 5:30 am, he has been on the phone, negotiating a deal that for the past nine months has been his obsession. He has logged thousands of air miles, visiting partners based thousands of miles from his Berkeley offices. Will the deal go through? If it does, his $55-million dollar solar company, PowerLight, will become a major player in Germany’s push towards green energy.
New regulations are working in his favor. By 2050, 50% of Germany’s electricity must be produced from renewable energy. Surprisingly, this European giant lacks the industrial manufacturing capacity to meet that demand. Dinwoodie’s German partners are looking to him, a 49-year-old whiz-kid engineer and architect who started PowerLight in a garage 13 years ago, to pick up the slack. We’re talking 10MW split between three German cities one of the biggest solar power stations in the world! Enough solar energy to power 10,000 Californian homes at daytime demand. With its access to financing, its unique technology, and this new deal, PowerLight will make its imprint in global markets.
Nicholas Parker, Chairman of Clean Tech Venture Network (CTVN), credits Dinwoodie’s vision for making PowerLight one of the nation’s “fastest growing and most reputable clean technology companies.” This stewardship earned Dinwoodie CTVN’s coveted Enterprise of the Year award last April. In addition, for the past four years, INC. magazine has listed PowerLight as one of the fastest growing private companies in America and Fortune calls the company “The Next Big Thing.” In typical American fashion, Dinwoodie’s journey to Solar Celebrity was built on modest beginnings and big dreams.
Environmentalist Genes
As a child in Omaha, Nebraska, little Thomas Dinwoodie fantasized about exploring space. He was devastated to find out in fourth grade that his poor vision would prevent him from pursuing this dream. Shattered by the reality of glasses, he set aside his astronaut career and pondered his passion for atoms. He resolved to become a nuclear physicist. Ultimately, he admitted to himself, he did not have a mind for that trade, either.
Today, a gray-haired CEO smiles as he reflects on his boyhood dreams, grateful for the brief respite from his hectic day. Seated in PowerLight’s small, dimly-lit “meditation room,” Dinwoodie explains that it was his appreciation for nature that awakened what he calls his “environmental gene” — that innate drive to do something positive for our environment. “Very early on, I was inclined toward what I am doing now.” His eyes light up behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “I was a Boy Scout. I learned about being out in the wild, about leaving places better than when you arrived, and about conservation. There is the influence of that on my sense of my self-reliance and a nation’s collective potential for its self-reliance on things they can take care of for themselves.”
Dinwoodie’s defining moment came in 8th grade when a class on global warming kicked his “environmental gene” into overdrive. From then on, Dinwoodie’s life changed. “I walked around, curious whether people knew about this dilemma, wondering if they cared.” Years later, his passion landed him in New Hampshire’s wind power industry, but the challenges of the industry took the wind out of sails. He leans forward, clasping his hands on his knees. “When you work very hard, you get burnt-out. And, the step beyond burnt-out is jaded. I had gotten to that point. I needed to break completely loose. I fled to the West Coast to do something completely different.”
Solar Epiphany
Dinwoodie enrolled in UC Berkeley’s architecture school to re-charge his batteries. The engineer-turned-architect laughs softly as he recalls the excitement of his career epiphany. It came in the summer of 1991, when he found himself stuck, physically and metaphysically, in a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge. He was driving into the city in search of bathroom fixtures for a house he’d designed in the Berkeley Hills for his first client. “Finding that right bathroom fixture was important,” he recalled, but he realized that it just wasn’t enough to design upscale half-a-million dollar homes for Berkeley’s haute bourgeoisie.
In that instant, the asphyxiating chokehold of Bay Bridge exhaust fumes brought him full circle back to the problem of global warming. He decided it was time to put his $100,000 education toward doing the right thing and that meant finding a solution that made solar power economically feasible. The operative word here was photovoltaics, not plumbing.
“You don’t fight the market,” says Dinwoodie, “you work with it.” His goal was to find the highest return for photovoltaics. After crafting many spreadsheets, and drawing on his experience in engineering, architecture, and wind-power financing, he arrived at PowerLights’ value proposition: solar power for commercial rooftops. And then he began tinkering with different photovoltaic designs in his garage.
What spurred him on? Dinwoodie claims it was fear and passion. “Fear is a great motivator,” Dinwoodie explains, “If this did not work out, what was I going to have to do? Find a job?” Possibly there was more to his drive. One staffer describes him as a stickler for detail and highly intelligent, yet also a spontaneous, earnest and generous man. “If I imagine him as a cartoon character,” she giggles, “I would imagine ‘E=MC2‘ in a bubble above his head.” A sense of balance has kept him going — swimming three times a week, meditating regularly since high school, and contemplating the teachings of Lao Tzu, father of Taoism.
The Birth of PowerLight
Dinwoodie talks of PowerLight as one of his children. In 1996, after five years of dedicated nursing, this doting father lifted his “child” from its cramped crib in his garage, and transported it to a spacious Berkeley warehouse. At the same time, he hired his first employee, Dan Shugar, 41, now PowerLight’s President and public evangelist.
For Dinwoodie, creating PowerLight was not just about creating a company with a profitable bottom line. His aim was to create a work environment where his employees felt engaged in a mission. Initially, PowerLight functioned more like a family. But during the hasty growth cycle that followed, the intended corporate culture was diluted. Dinwoodie recently requested the formation of Team PowerLife, a Committee to reinstitute a thread of progressive, people-based corporate ideals through out PowerLight. Currently, there is no official manifesto of Corporate Social Responsible (CSR) like the one that guides PowerLight’s Berkeley neighbors at Clif Bar, but as the Vice President of Marketing, Estreilla Zulch says: “People who are here, are here because of what we do. We do not have to create [guidelines] to indicate corporate social responsibility. The very thing we do is social responsibility. We are environmental stewards. People come here with that frame of mind. They are coming here because they are on a mission.”
Has Dinwoodie achieved his goal? “I want people to feel like they are working for something that is bigger than just a job.” To that end, PowerLight provides stock options and sponsors company soccer team called “The Black Outs.” Just as at Clif Bar’s offices, dogs and kids are welcome inside PowerLight’s digs. Dinwoodie enjoys having children around. PowerLight also attempts to give back to the greater community by donating equipment and staff time to Habitat for Humanity and providing free education materials for teachers. They also host monthly informational meetings for staff, boasting guests such as architect Bill McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle, a book about rethinking the way we design products to create a new framework for how we interact with the world.
PowerLight also works strategically with the nonprofit sector. Company Policy Director Kari Smith highlights one such successful alliance, the Vote Solar initiative. Vote Solar’s work resulted in PowerLight’s contract to power San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center with 675-kilowatts of solar electric. She explains: “We work hand in hand with Vote Solar or other nonprofits, providing them information and connecting them.” Smith comes from the non-profit sector and knows that nonprofits can accomplish things that the private sector can’t. “They have the outreach,” she says, “and we can alert them to issues that are important to the industry. There are many groups that support solar but they don’t know what needs to happen from the industry perspective. We can tell them.”
Ecological Footprints
It is these “type two” partnerships (a term frequently used at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainability for private, non-government and government partnerships) that reflect the values of the paradigm-shifting corporation. Such a corporation has integrity and is not just focused on profit margins. It measures its performance against environmental and social impacts; takes responsibility for its ecological footprint and the company’s impact on communities.
PowerLight has reduced its own ecological footprint by installing photovoltaic panels on the roof of the Berkeley Business Center. Use of photovoltaic cells does not stop there. They have been recycled into the reception area walls and the conference room table. Dinwoodie notes: “As an architect, the character and quality of the space is important to me.” Clearly it is reflected in the design. An egg-shaped hive sits in center of the first floor. The curved bookshelves hold numerous awards, books and photographs of Dinwoodie with random politicians. Daylight is maximized in the open space and tasteful large oil paintings (the work of a PowerLight employee) hang on opposite walls. A large gong stands to the right of the hive, ready to ring at sale victories and babies’ births. To the left, visitors can entertain themselves with a touch-screen computer display linked to the PowerLight website.
Dinwoodie intended for the open architecture to promote flow of communication and open-door policies. Some like it, but some staff noted it can get a bit loud. The 90-plus employees are packed into two floors. Engineering is centered in the basement, while operations, sales, human resources, and management are upstairs. The boss has a corner office, but it hosts no door. Its boundaries are created with chin-high charts and map-covered wood partitions. The one true wall supports shelves holding family pictures including his two children, Anna-Isabella (11) and Julian (9), who poses with a guitar.
As Dinwoodie’s photographs suggest, like the solar industry itself, he’s matured. Solar is considered mainstream for homes not connected to the centralized power plants (off-grid) markets around the world. “However,” Dinwoodie laments, “regulatory hurdles and subsidies do not allow a free market for electricity that values the kilowatt hour when it is produced, and the time of day it is demanded. If it did, on-grid solar would be mainstream.” Dinwoodie argues that US spending on energy is irrational. “There are serious alternatives to the current Mid-east oil strategy.” One example he cites is “removing ourselves fully from Mid-east oil dependence by taking the $100 billion we have paid for...the Kuwait War, and now Iraq, and using that to incentivize Americans to turn in their cars for hybrid vehicles.”
Dinwoodie, a Toyota Prius driver, wonders if people can see the direct line that links the 9/11 terror attacks and the imperative for new non-oil energy technologies. Concerned, he ties the distributed generation solution into our nation’s security issues. PowerLight sells distributed generation systems, whereby you power you office and/or community on-site instead of running miles of power lines from a central power plant to your location. The USA is “a terrorist target,” explains Dinwoodie. “Central power plants look more attractive to terrorists, and we are much more vulnerable to disruption as a result of central power generation than you would be with distributed generation.”
Dinwoodie is so concerned about his children’s future that he is prepared to make difficult personal sacrifices to support the growth of the Solar Power industry. This summer, instead of playing catch with Julian or listening to Anna-Isabella play her flute, Dinwoodie will be in southern Germany, designing and constructing one of the world’s largest solar power projects. It will require that he abandon his Piedmont garden full of squash, sunflowers, corn, and tomatoes for the fields of Bavaria and 70-football-fields-worth of photovoltaics. As he packs for Bavaria, there’s a lot to look forward to. Dinwoodie may not have become an astronaut, but he has helped launch an energy revolution fueled by star-power. PowerLight has become Dinwoodie’s NASA, and, as the invitation to Germany demonstrates, all his team’s hard work has paid off.
Dana Smirin is a SF-based consultant working with companies committed to sustainability. She can be reached at www.danasmirin.com
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
