Sustainability Means Thinking inside the Box
As a solar energy company specializing in solar pool heating its always been very difficult to resist the lure of expansion into other solar markets like solar domestic hot water heating. Every summer just as the strong demand for pool heating subsides we start getting calls on solar dhw. We sold quite a few of these systems back in 1990 when the manufacturer had us tricked into thinking the payback period was about 5 years. Once we realized that was not the case our sales abruptly stopped. Still, we couldn't resist the temptation to develop low cost solar water heating solutions using our unglazed technology. It made sense on paper but every time we tested the market we discovered that we were beat by the more expensive, far less economically viable boxed and glazed and even evacuated tube technologies. The market wanted to spend 5 times more up front for a perceived perhaps 20% gain in output. We concluded that the market didn't know what it wanted. The market wanted what was sold to them and the sales game was all about leaving out the important facts like the fact that a solar domestic water preheating systems would take 20 years to return on investment and this made no economic sense whatsoever.
Then came the rebates. No rebates for anything that made economic sense on its own like solar pool heating, but rebates to foster the growth of "renewables". In other words PV and dhw where the economics of these technologies could never compete with subsidized fossil fuel. But that was the point of my last blog not this one. You see, the point is that as a sustainable company we have to think outside the box. By thinking outside the box we realize that we don't in fact want to have to grow or expand our business. Moving forward what we want to do is focus on solar pool heating technology. The demand is solid. The need for expertise is very real. I had an e-mail minutes ago from someone in Florida and this was his comment...
"I had two roof sides, 600sq ft done with the rubber tubing by Home Depot which heated great but never ran more than one month before fittings would blow from pressure. They did everyting, clamps, JB Weld, etc and finally refunded my purchase price because they could never get it to keep working. I do have a spa and pool caretaker system and push they say way too much pressure for a system to work. "
Here we have Home Depot of all retailers selling specialty equipment with no concept whatsoever of the issues that must be addressed when implementing this technology, namely you can't blast the solar panels with any pressure you feel like. This example illustrates that we are better served (Hot Sun and our major dealer network) by focusing on what we do best. Hope Depot would have been well served by focusing on what they do best and they do. They dropped solar as fast as the pool industry 20 years ago, Sears 18 years ago and Costco next year if they get tired of refunding customers. Oh wait Costco dumps all that responsibility on their suppliers so its the suppliers who will have to dump Costco. It'll happen and another will come along and we'll always have the right to buy a solar pool heater with zero support or knowledge base but over time people will realize that the only way to get it done right for the long term is with the expertise included. Our business is a small business. It is a niche and in order to be able to continue to design systems case by case we need to keep it small. Our focus is not to get larger. It shouldn't have to be. Our challenge is to stay small enough to do this right and make money in the process. Its a different way to approach business. Thinking inside the box is thinking outside the box.
Expand this notion to the world economy in general. Why should we expect the stock market to always go up? It did for 3 decades but that doesn't mean it can forever. I feel like the earth is already at full capacity. Cheap energy has allowed massive unsustainable population growth. We need to think about ways to survive in business without growth the same way we need to find ways to reduce population. If we are going to survive as a species on this planet we need to get sustainable and fast and the first step is to get off this idea that growth is an essential element in business and in everything else we do. A nasty fungus grows uncontrollably until it wipes out its host. The human race needs to be smarter than fungi.
Ken Wright is president of Hot Sun Industries Inc. and generally considered a complete nut case in the industry. What solar energy businessman is against free government money and growth? Hot Sun is on the customer's side, not the industry's.
Article Source: blogspot.com
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