Entrepreneur Journal: Dave Llorens, CEO, 1BOG

March 5, 2010

(Reuters) – Up to now, the main impediments to powering your home with solar energy have been cost and a confusing sales process, but Dave Llorens wants to change that. His San Francisco, California-based startup, One Block Off The Grid, operates as a kind of solar brokering middleman, gathering together large groups of 100 or more home owners to negotiate cheaper deals with solar installation companies, often saving customers as much as 15 percent. The following is Llorens personal five-day entrepreneur journal exclusively for Reuters.com.

By Dave Llorens

Day 1: Monday, April 5

Today, the New Jersey solar rebates dropped from $1.75 to $1.35 per watt. We’re in the middle of a group purchase campaign there so we had a quick strategy meeting this morning to make sure the homeowners in the group knew what was going on. We’ve just brought on a new VP of operations, so the team’s really getting organized. During our management meeting we discussed our priorities for each of our active campaigns.

Basically, the rebate drop there is not great for the industry, but the overall impact is relatively small due to the fact that the real financial benefit to the homeowners in New Jersey comes from SRECS (Solar Renewable Energy Credits) which basically turns your solar system on your roof into an ATM. (Note: SRECS are renewable energy certificates that solar systems spit out each time it generates 1000 kWh of energy, which have a market value in some places)

In other news, the buzz in the office today was that one of our San Francisco customers signed up for a system that turned out to be free. She’s waiting for final paperwork from the city, but the combination of our San Francisco solar campaign group discount rate with GoSolarSF’s income-based incentives makes her system free. That’s crazy. Free solar energy.

Day 2: Tuesday, April 6

Today we selected an installation partner in New Orleans. The community and PR teams are planning strategy and events to get the word out about the 1BOG campaign. I grew up in Louisiana and I’m proud it has one of the best incentive structures for solar in the nation. With state and federal tax incentives, they pay for 80 percent of a homeowners solar system!

The engineering team is in the final stages of revamping parts of our site that will walk 1BOG members through the steps they need to take to go solar. It also will show members outside of active group purchase campaigns how many more people we need to get on the bandwagon before we launch one in their area. This is what I’m currently most excited about in the company.

Tonight had a dinner with our board members and we talked about where 1BOG is headed and how to get solar to really take off. Talked a lot about celebrities and how if we’re going to sell solar to the masses, it’s going to need to be me more layman’s terms. The words “photovoltaic” and “inverter” aren’t going to resonate with the mainstream.

Day 3: Wednesday, April 7

Today had lunch with Adam Browning of Vote Solar (the biggest lobbying force the industry has) and we discussed what’s coming about and what’s looking bad. Looks like there is a potentially huge new state-wide program in New York which could heavily affect our Long Island solar campaign. Talked about what happened with the net-metering cap in California and how residential solar is now probably OK for a few years in what was potentially a looming disaster.

I had an afternoon coffee with PG & E and talked a lot about the potential for SRECs here in California, which would really get home solar to take off. Also talked about a pet project of mine a lot. They’re figuring out internally how distributed generation affects them and the grid, as solar is more adopted here than most other places.

Day 4: Thursday, April 8

Steve Cooper, our new operations guy, is already putting in place a lot of measures to help us scale as we run group purchase programs in more and more cities. Solar’s not completely an online purchase yet, and talking to each and every 1BOG member in all of our city programs has a myriad of scale issues.

I spent the morning at Stanford speaking on the ASES Summit Clean Tech Panel along with John Bissell, CEO of Micromidas and Kevin Hauck, Project Developer at White Hat Renewables. We spoke about the hurdles of cleantech adoption here and the hurdles and opportunities in other nations.

Then I had a media briefing with a pretty spectacular Los Angeles Times reporter, who went solar through our first 1BOG L.A. campaign. I gave her an update about our campaigns there and plans for the future.

It looks like San Francisco’s PACE program, GreenFinanceSF, is moving forward as planned. Energy efficiency is about to officially marry solar power. We’ve built up a solid bank of resources to help San Francisco homeowners understand what’s involved in the program and how it can help them get solar and energy efficiency.

Day 5: Friday, April 9

Lilly, our new energy efficiency adviser, and I had a call with Merrian Fuller, the nation’s leading expert on PACE financing. We discussed our initiatives in spreading the word about PACE programs in cities where we’re running active campaigns. We let her know what we’re doing to prepare for the inevitable connection between solar and energy efficiency and our plans to expand in this area to support members. We talked about pulling the compelling discussions going on in the PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing Google group into www.pacefinancing.org, which a team of BYU students are working on to make a helpful resource to the consumer… to answer the question, “what the heck is PACE and how to do I get it/use it?”

Every week we do a “naked lunch” where the whole company gets together to discuss… anything… and this week we talked about PACE. Think of naked lunch as a cross between the “airing of grievances” of festivus and a mini, intra-company TED talk. We’re at 19 people now, still a size where we can have everyone get together and talk about any one issue. It’s fun to be in the stage where we can still distance ourselves from TPS (Testing Procedure Specification) reports and monthly evacuation plan meetings.