San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A.-based Holt emerges as solar leader
In April, CapMetro, the public transit authority for Austin and surrounding areas, revealed that it had hired a company to design and build a 12-acre solar charging station for its more than 200 electric buses.
The company was Holt Renewables, a division of San Antonio-based Holt, a family-owned business better known for leasing and repairing construction equipment and operating a chain of semitruck dealerships.
Holt Renewables was formed out of Austin-based PCI Solar, which Holt acquired in 2019 as part of an effort by its then newly appointed leaders, brother and sister Peter J. Holt and Corinna Holt Richter, to diversify the business. Peter J. Holt is CEO and general manager, while Corinna is president and chief administrator.
Kevin Chavez, now the sales operations manager for Holt Renewables, had joined PCI as commercial solar developer the year before. The company now has 28 employees — about twice as many as before the acquisition, he said.
“And we’re continuing to hire and grow,” he said.
Still based in Austin, the company designs and builds solar arrays across the nation, including on top of apartment complexes in Dallas, beside a wastewater treatment plant in Florida, and at a sausage preparation facility in California. It also acts as a consultant, helping customers find ways to meet their solar needs, Chavez said.
A native of Southern California, Chavez initially pursued a career in equity trading. He rethought his career path after learning of an investment fund focused on developing countries, he said.
“That kind of spun me into a thesis around triple bottom line investing — having some sort of positive impact associated with returns on investment, risk mitigation,” he said. “Then I spun into a renewable energy fund. That fund was responsible for bringing institutional-type assets, like wind and large-scale solar farms, to retail investors. That’s where my interest was piqued.”
Chavez recently met with the Express-News to discuss advancements in solar technology, the impact of Winter Storm Uri on Texas’s energy industry and the role of Holt Renewables in the Holt umbrella.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: I’m interested in how Renewables works with Holt’s other divisions. Does Holt foresee a future in which solar arrays power electric trucks?
A:
We actually built a project up in Illinois for a large electric truck manufacturer. That is the goal. We are deploying renewable assets to, in essence, energize the charging of the fleet. We’re also working on a project with Capital Metro in Austin; they’re electrifying their entire bus fleet. EV is part of Peter and Corinna’s vision — electrification, grand scale.
What we generally see is, it’s not just, “I want an EV charger.” It’s, “I want an EV charger; I want solar; I want resilience with energy storage.” What we see, especially here in Texas — Winter Storm Uri, an extreme weather event — that’s a safety issue. When you start looking at safety and value of human life, all of a sudden (the question is) “How do you build resiliency and have
sustainable attributes to it?” So microgrids are becoming a bigger conversation. They’re not quite there yet. Being able to “island” certain critical care facilities, you need kind of all components of that puzzle. And we can effectively offer that.
Q: What challenges do you see ahead in achieving that?
A:
A lot of people ask me, “Is solar it?” Is that the game changer? Bottom line, it’s not the silver bullet. It’s a very crucial piece of what is going to be our energy infrastructure in the future, but there also needs to be an evolution associated with it, which is, if we’re generating a great deal of energy from solar, how do we harness that when the sun isn’t shining? And that’s storage. Are you familiar with the duck curve?
Q: No. A:
In essence, it’s the generation ability of various assets — wind, solar, natural gas — and then the demand curve of when that energy is actually needed. And that doesn’t align. Because when you go home from work, you’re turning on your lights, turning on your TV, jumping on the computer. You’re using a great deal of energy once the sun’s gone down. So how do you elongate that access to energy? And that really comes with energy storage. We’ve installed a handful of energy storage projects, and we’re starting to see them far more frequently.
Q: Going back to microgrids, during an extreme event like Uri, it would be an isolated grid keeping the power on in critical areas?
A:
Absolutely. What it really boils down to is that we have the technology. What’s potentially missing is the belief in the investment to basically secure and/or deploy that technology. What’s challenging is when you look at resiliency, it’s standing by and not being utilized (when there isn’t an extreme event). The crucial piece of this is being able to find means to monetize those assets in the interim and still have them available in the event that something does occur — whether it be demand response, supporting the utility in general or simply providing green electrons to the grid. There are ways to do that. Some utilities have figured this out. Austin Energy is a huge proponent of renewable energy, and they have a fantastic program. And CPS (Energy) — very similar.
Q: Elon Musk recently said he’s concerned that our power grids aren’t capable of supporting our increasing number of electric vehicles. Will solar help solve that?
A:
Solar is not great at mitigating demand. Demand is a point in time that there’s stress or draw from the grid. Consumption over time is more where solar looks to replace that draw from the grid and replace it with generation at the actual solar array. With that in mind, batteries are really the
answer to what he’s speaking to. When there are big draws from the grid, the battery can then support the grid at that moment and help shave that peak aspect of it. What I’ll say is that solar is a big piece of that because it really is your lowest-cost form of energy, and it’s sustainable. It’s a whole different story to say, “I’m going to charge this battery from a diesel generator, and then deploy that battery as needed.” What you need is large sources of power that are pretty efficient, are renewable, and also delivering economic power.
Q: Texas must be a good state for solar, right?
A:
It is. It’s a leading state. Look out to West Texas — we have some massive solar farms. What we really focus on is what we call “behind the meter,” which is at the point of the load. So we’re installing on rooftops or adjacent land or on carports directly at the facility that’s consuming the energy. What that does is it limits the losses, increases efficiency and actual use on-site. Out in West Texas, where we have these massive, massive solar farms … producing a lot of energy, you need to get that energy toward where it’s actually being consumed. And that, in and of itself, is a challenge.
Q: Are there lots of government incentives for solar?
A:
More than ever. The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August of last year, reupped the investment tax credit back to 30 percent. It was stepping down year-over-year.
Q: How has solar tech changed during your time in the industry?
A:
When I first started, we were using 300-watt mono-facial panels, which means that they’re only producing on the front of the module. Now we’re using 550watt bifacial modules. So we’ve already seen almost 100% increase in the power output of the modules. As well, we’re now starting to deploy technologies that are not only producing on the front of the module, but also the back of the module — which, albeit the back of the module doesn’t produce nearly as much as the front, but why not capture that reflection from the ground to
further enhance the output?
We’ve now achieved a level of understanding. When I speak to a customer, they have someone very well-positioned to understand what solar is and understand the value proposition of what it’s going to do for them.
Q: So apart from being renewable, it makes financial sense.
A:
In a lot of cases. That’s driven by a handful of things. First being, how much are you paying for electricity? In certain markets, like California, their energy rates are exorbitant. Thereby, solar makes absolute sense. In markets like Texas, we’ve seen energy rates go up. It’s becoming more of a, I’d say, consideration. Texas has a right to choose your power; thereby, you have the ability to contract potentially lower rates. Maybe in the case of a customer in Houston, it’s not as attractive because they don’t have the same net metering policy or they’re in a contract that doesn’t offer any buyback program. Well, that might be different than a customer we have in Austin, where Austin has a performance-based incentive; they have a value of solar that’s public and denoted. Same with CPS (Energy).
Q: What other sources of power should we be embracing? Some people are rethinking nuclear, right?
A:
I would agree. Whenever we look at all of these various sources — hydro, wind, geothermal, nuclear, solar, natural gas, coal; not a proponent of coal — coal can go away. But as we look at all of these various technologies coming into play, some are able to be more accessible than others. My biggest holdup with nuclear is that historically we have seen budget overruns and schedule overruns to the extreme on nuclear infrastructure. I believe the fuel source itself is a great one. Disposal of it, not quite sure yet, right?
I think solar tends to be more of a cookie-cutter approach to being able to deploy it at scale, deploy it cost effectively. And the technology has continued to grow in a positive way that 10, 15, 50 years from now, I think solar is going to be a mainstay generation asset.