Award Recipient
Clean Tech
When you sift through your bills each month, you will find invoices for your heat, water and natural gas, perhaps for your cable and your Internet, and for other odds and ends. But will you find an invoice for your solar energy? Probably not, unless you are among the several thousand people who have already called Edward Fenster and Lynn Jurich and asked for solar panels to be installed on your roof.
Fenster and Jurich want to provide affordable solar energy to every person, every household that wants to harness the power of the sun at home. And they have a plan to do just that.
Fenster is the CEO and Jurich is the president of SunRun, the reported leading residential solar financing company in the nation. Both have backgrounds in finance and, after they met and worked together at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, they set out to found the first Power Purchase Agreement for residential solar power. A PPA is, in essence, a contract between a power generator and a host that allows the host to dole out that power to individual customers at lower costs. Fenster and Jurich realized that the largest challenge for many potential residential solar customers is the initial installation cost. With a PPA in their back pocket, that challenge was gone.
Fenster and Jurich started to talk with regulators, attorneys, tax investors and solar installers in 2007 and persuaded them to work together. Less than two years later, SunRun had jumped to the front of the residential solar pack.
The company provides service in only five states today but is poised for growth. And because Fenster and Jurich invented the model for affordable residential solar, before much longer, you might be getting your power from them.
How to reach: SunRun, (415) 982-9000 or www.sunrunhome.com
