By Camas Frank
REC Solar Inc., one of San Luis Obispo’s most famous Cal Poly start-up companies, has been through a lot of changes recently. Since its much-celebrated 15th birthday in 2012, the company has sold off its residential solar division to Sun Run and had a controlling interest of its shares acquired by energy giant Duke Energy.
In June, REC used some of that Duke money to acquire Stellar Energy, a commercial solar project designer based primarily in Northern California.
The idea is to, “provide customers with integrated, turnkey solar solutions.”
In simpler terms, REC wants to expand its offerings for the kind of commercial project that could fit unobtrusively onto a local shopping center and provide energy immediately, without costing more than the PG&E base rate.
With financial products offered to customers through Duke, Al Bucknam, CEO of REC Solar said. “The deals are no more difficult than residential finance. Simple power arrangements onsite can be cheaper.”
With the deal REC is expected to add more than 60-Megawatts (MW) from 62 solar projects to its portfolio. That’ll make 200 MW of generation capacity installed or under construction in 18 states.
The official line that Bucknam delivered at the time was that, “By enhancing this expertise with Stellar’s team and streamlined customer financing through our partnership with Duke Energy, we’re helping more customers go solar with no money down and immediate energy savings.”
Later in the week, he assured the SLO City News that, despite all the changes, REC is committed to SLO.
“We’re a national company,” he said, “(but) our people are still based here. They live here primarily [although Hawaii is a growing base of operations]. Cal Poly is a tremendous asset for new talent in San Luis Obispo.”
In fact while Bucknam now has an interesting view from his corner office on Fiero Lane, the company is in the midst of moving its headquarters to bigger digs inside SLO.
They’re looking forward to more room, with half of the staff already transferring flags to the new space.
The rest are busy, shortly after the acquisition, with teams going back and forth between the Ronhert Park (near Santa Rosa) and SLO to sync operations and determine how the companies would fit together.
Stellar Energy’s former president, Ted Walsh, will join REC as vice president of business development.
“We’re fundamentally looking to grow,” Bucknam said. “They [Stellar] filled roles we were looking for. We’re still hiring and working for more organic growth.”
Most of the Stellar employees will make the transition over to REC in the process, although not all.
In essence, said Bucknam, he was given the task to grow the company when he came to SLO from New York in Oct. 2014, and that’s still the plan. However, “We’re not looking to pursue a roll up strategy.”
I.e., they’re not trying to gobble up all the competition, but if the opportunity presents itself, they have the capital to take advantage.
“You have to talk with the people involved when looking at that kind of opportunity,” he said. “We didn’t just buy the physical assets of a company. We were looking for the people to help us grow.”
