From the time he was first handed a hammer and nails as a kid, there was hardly a doubt Eric Carlson would make a career of working with his hands. But after an injury on the job sidelined him as a general contractor, he changed tack to sell solar for up-and-coming renewable energy firm Sunetric and became its top salesman his first year, growing the company into Hawai‘i’s then-largest solar company.

“My experience in construction gave me credibility,” Carlson says. “Because of my building contacts and because I was comfortable with job sites and general contractors, I had no problem walking onto a job and talking to them about solar.”

 

Solar is still one of the best investments you can make.

 

As oil prices skyrocketed and prompted a boom in renewable energy adoption, Hawai‘i was becoming an epicenter of solar in the U.S. “It made sense to do solar in Hawai‘i more than anywhere else,” Carlson says. “In the early days, when I used to talk about solar PV and the tax credits, people would kick me out of their homes thinking it was a scam because it sounded too good to be true.”

It wasn’t long before Carlson and a handful of his fellow Sunetric team members saw an opportunity to bring a white-glove service standard to the fledgling industry and branched out to found RevoluSun in 2009.

“With all new, disruptive technology, there’s a lot of nonbelievers,” Carlson says. “For the first two years, it was a huge education push. That was the whole basis of our marketing and sales platform: going out into communities, holding free public workshops and sponsoring events—wherever we could get in front of as many homeowners as possible to empower them and provide opportunities for energy independence and financial savings.”

Their community-centric approach paid off. “In the two years after we had started, we went from a company typically doing 100 installs a year to doing close to a 1,000 a year,” Carlson says. “Our competitors reaped the benefit of that as well, so that education platform really helped everybody as an industry.”

But the boom came to a screeching halt after 2013, and RevoluSun was forced to diversify in order to weather policy changes that nearly shuttered the solar industry in Hawai‘i. “There have been some very dark days in our industry, but I’ve never worked with a team that can turn on a dime and forge a new path like this one can,” Carlson says.

Expanding the company’s offerings to encompass a growing lineup of sustainable home technologies and energy-efficiency solutions, Carlson and RevoluSun founding partners Joshua Powell and Colin Yost launched RevoluSun Smart Home in 2015.

“Offering new products is something we always knew we had to do as solar becomes the standard, and the dramatic policy changes helped force us in that direction,” Carlson says. “A lot of our clients have spent more money on a solar system than they would a kitchen or a bathroom remodel. They’ve already put that investment with us and were happy with the result of the product and the process—now they’ll trust us for something else in their home.”

To give the public a place to see the company’s smart home products in action, the team set to work building a smart home showroom and innovation center, offering up the space for community events and workshops in addition to homeowners seeking guidance on residential energy efficiency and the increasingly complex solar landscape. Since relocating from Ward Avenue to a higher profile headquarters in SALT at Our Kaka‘ako, RevoluSun is even more visible for its holistic take on building healthier communities.

Education is still a crucial aspect of the business. Misconceptions abound, and solar providers are up against a neverending swarm of misinformation in the marketplace surrounding tax credits, grid capacity and solar PV costs, which now include energy-storage components under HECO’s customer self-supply program. “Solar is still one of the best investments you can make,” Carlson says. “Even with the additional cost of the battery, the cost of solar has come down so much that you can get a solar system for less than what you would’ve spent a few years ago.”

According to Carlson, modern solar technology is already designed to mitigate grid overload as a result of increased solar penetration, and customers can still take advantage of federal and state tax credits that offset the cost of new solar photovoltaic and hot water systems. Even after the federal solar investment tax credit begins stepping down in 2020, homeowners stand to benefit from financial savings down the line. The best time to go solar was yesterday, Carlson says—the next best time is today.

“Solar is a lot more technical today, which has played to our strengths,” says Carlson, who has spent the last few months launching a new construction division, RevoluSun Build, focused on green home building as well as preliminary construction for RevoluSun’s commercial solar clients.

“We have such a diverse group of guys in our wheelhouse, it was natural for us to self-perform more of that work ourselves,” Carlson says. “It feeds a niche for our clients, and it’s also a passion play for my partners and I to take what we’ve done at RevoluSun into the general contracting arena, which is educating people and delivering a quality product.”