Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Entrepreneur aims to expand solar energy
Advanced Roofing entrepreneur Rob Kornahrens has finally found a way to bring more solar energy to the world.
The South Florida entrepreneur has been on a quest for more than 30 years to expand solar use in the state and beyond, with his own Fort Lauderdale company, Advanced Green Technologies, taking major steps in solar in recent years.
Now, Kornahrens is betting on an outside company, Power Panel, as its major angel investor. The company exhibited this past week at SUP-X, the Fort Lauderdalebased startup business event, with CEO Garth Schultz and Kornahrens attending to introduce the Detroit-based company to potential investors.
Power Panel has started selling its two products and plans to reinvest profits to launch other products in the pipeline. The company has a robotics manufacturing plant in Detroit with plans for five more, including one potentially in Florida, the business partners say.
While still CEO of Advanced Roofing, Kornahrens in 2007 founded Advanced Green Technologies, which installs solar panels on roofs, designs solar farms, and builds solar carports. Carports have been installed for Florida International University in Miami, Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, and Lockheed Martin in Orlando. The
company was named the top commercial solar contractor in Florida in 2016 for the fifth year in a row and ranked 44th in the nation by Solar Power World magazine.
Clint Sockman, vice president at Advanced Green Technologies, said besides providing a shady place to park and energy through solar panels on top, solar carports are becoming popular on corporate campuses because they have visibility.
The carport “sends a message to employees and customers about environmental and sustainability responsibility — being an environmentally conscious energy producer,” Sockman said.
Advanced Roofing’s corporate campus is installing its third solar carport; when finished, 80 percent of its offices will be solarpowered, Kornahrens said. The carport also will have charging stations for Teslas and other electric cars.
Kornahrens made initial contact with Power Panel CEO Garth Schultz, an electrical engineer and inventor, when Advanced Green Technologies was seeking a certain solar product for distribution. Schultz has invented several solar products, winning patents both in the U.S. and internationally including China, South Korea, Canada, Algeria, France, Germany and Japan.
Kornahrens has invested about half of the $10 million raised by Power Panel so far. To develop and manufacture the entire pipeline of solar products planned by the inventor, it will take millions of dollars more.
“We have game-changing technology,” he said of Power Panel, which was founded in 2007.
Power Panel products being sold includes AquaGrove, an aquaponics system that uses thermal tank technology to maintain temperature controls for growing food. It sells for $3,900.
The other product, Gen-2-O, is a self-contained solar generator and hot water tank that can be deployed anywhere in the world to provide on-demand electricity and hot water. The system sells for $4,900.
“We build it in several formats to service emergency, off-grid, disaster relief for emerging nations and can build it to service more traditional commercial customers here in the U.S.,” Schultz said
The company’s systems in the field include both the Gen-2-O and large solar panel systems. “We have test systems in Algeria, Mali, South Africa, Japan, Korea and China, as well as in the U.S., in the Detroit area,” Schultz said.
One of Power Panel’s aquaponics systems has been installed at McArthur High School in Hollywood, where some 20 students are working to become certified horticulture growers. Currently, they’re growing lettuce in the AcquaGrove, said Vincent Newman, agriculture teacher at McArthur.
“It’s an outstanding product,” said Newman, who added that he applied for grants to purchase AquaGrove because it uses “one tenth of the normal space and one percent of the water” needed to grow plants.
And because it is powered by solar energy, “we’re not leaving a carbon footprint anywhere,” he said.