Clean Energy Spotlight: Dan Shugar
Our latest #cleanenergyspotlight has a patent for a solar-panel golf cart, helped comedian Robin Williams go solar in the 90s, and has been called “the King Midas of Solar.”
Dan Shugar is our spotlight this week. This #solar pioneer is the founder and CEO of Nextracker. The California solar tracking company sells hardware (mounts and motors) and software to rotate solar panels toward maximum sun to achieve lower costs, better performance and more flexibility.
Much like solar trackers, Dan has closely followed the sun – albeit across his career not the sky.
“I had this ‘aha’ moment [working with Pacific Gas and Electric in 1988] when I went out to the Altamont Pass, which at that time was the largest wind farm in the world,” he told the Mercury News in 2016. “I was like, wow…I want to do this in solar. I became completely fascinated by technology that had no moving parts and burned no fuel.”
It was at Pacific Gas and Electric that Dan helped comedian and actor Robin William go solar. “I was at PG&E in the early ’90s. We received a call from the ranch manager for Robin Williams’ estate in the North Bay….He said, I just want to put in one big solar system and generate all my power,” Dan told the Mercury News in 2016. “We ran into a lot of roadblocks [but] it did get built, and he was able to power his estate with solar.”
Williams was a star. Dan has focused on the sun.
After PG&E, he went on to be president of PowerLight, once the largest commercial solar installer in the U.S., then became a president at SunPower, then CEO of Solaria, an early innovator of next-generation solar panels and systems.
And now he leads Nextracker, which spun-off from Solaria, and they’re now one of the largest vendors for solar tracking, making up as much as 30% of the market by some metrics. “Our weekly capacity is 500 megawatts,” he told Nomura GreenTech in 2019. “It took us – the industry – 16 years to build out that kind of volume…Now we’re docking that out every week. It’s incredible how far solar has come.”
For Dan, dedicating his career to replacing fossil fuels has been more than a job, but a mission.
Growing up, his family “lived in Albany, New York, near the Hudson River…one of the most polluted waterways in America and now it’s one of the most productive waterways for fish and marine life,” he told Nomura GreenTech in 2019. “[When I was six], my dad told me that he was so angry about these polluters that he wanted to go down and blow up their pipes that were bringing pollution into the river. That had a really big impact on me.”
He’s done his part to help. He’s been on the boards of the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA), American Clean Power Association (ACP), Powerhouse, Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), and The Solar Foundation (TSF). In fact, as a board member for the Sierra Club, Dan helped "kill over 100 coal plants comprising 60 gigawatts of baseload coal.”
But Dan’s not done yet. There’s still work left toward his goal, which he explained to Catherine McLean on a podcast in 2020: “We want to make solar the largest source of energy generation in the world, and we want to contribute to clean air, clean water and leave you the planet in a better place.”
We wouldn’t expect anything lower than sky-high goals for this solar pioneer, our latest #cleanenergyspotlight.
